Journalistic Communication of Gastronomy in Spain During the First Third of the Twentieth Century (1900-1936)

Abstract

During the first third of the twentieth century, gastronomy was a topic of interest in the Spanish press, which compiled news and articles from prominent chefs such as Ignacio Domenech and Teodoro Bardaji, but also from renowned journalists and writers, such as Dionisio Perez Pardo Bazan, Carmen de Burgos, who vindicated the defense of the national cuisine, interceded to improve and expand the domestic and professional culinary education and disseminated issues of gastronomic history and innovations and technical advances. In this paper, the analysis of gastronomy in pictorials, weeklies and newspapers of the time is presented through the online catalogue of the National Library. The results show, on the one hand, the value of the press as a primary source to know the history of gastronomy in Spain in a little researched and, paradoxically, quite reprobate period; on the other hand, the abundance  of documents found, many of them unpublished, confirms the important gastronomic movement that took place in Spain during those years.