The book is the first to analyse the textual construction of a national Spanish cuisine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This book looks at the textual attempts to construct a national cuisine made in Spain at the turn of the last century. At the same time that attempts to unify the country were being made in law and narrated in fiction, Mariano Pardo de Figueroa (1828-1918) and Jose Castro y Serrano (1829-96), Angel Muro Goiri (1839 - 1897), Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1921) and Dionisio Perez (1872-1935) all tried to find ways of bringing Spaniards together through a common language about food. In line with this nationalist goal, all of the texts examined in this book contain strategies and rhetoric typical of nineteenth-century nation-building projects. The nationalist agenda of these culinary textscomes as little surprise when we consider the importance of nation building to Spanish cultural and political life at the time of their publication. At this time Spaniards were forced to confront many questions relating to their national identity, such as the state's lackluster nationalizing policies, the loss of empire, national degeneration and regeneration and their country's cultural dependence on France. In their discussions about how to nationalize Spanish food, all of the authors under consideration here tap into these wider political and cultural issues about what it meant to be Spanish at this time. Lara Anderson is Lecturer in Spanish Studies at the Universityof Melbourne.

Control and Resistance reveals the various ways in which food writing of the early Franco era was a potent political tool, producing ways of eating and thinking about food that privileged patriotism over personal desire. The author examines a diverse range of official and non-official food texts to highlight how discourse helped construct and contest identities in line with the three ideological pillars of the regime: autarky, prescriptive gender roles, and monolithic nationalism. Official food discourse produced an audience with a taste for local foodstuffs, and also created a unified gastronomic space in which regional cuisines were co-opted for the purposes of culinary nationalism. The author discusses a genre of official texts directed solely at women, which demanded women's compliance and exclusive dedication to domesticity. Alongside such examples, Control and Resistance includes texts that offered resistance to the Franco hegemony. Food texts have traditionally been viewed as apolitical because of their connections with domesticity, so they were not subject to the same degree of censorship as other published works. Accordingly, food writing was at times more capable of offering disruptive or resistant textual spaces than other forms of discourse.