Recipe for “corn balls”

This handwritten recipe for “corn balls” dates from 14 July 1939, just a few months after the end of the Civil War. 

Although recipes have often been seen as innocuous, apolitical documents, they are excellent reflections of the socio-cultural contexts in which they are created. These eminently female documents also tell us about the daily lives of the women who created them, as well as about the well-to-do class of these literate women in a society in which a scandalously high percentage of women were unable to read and write. The authors of these recipes also enjoyed having more or less well equipped kitchens in their homes, access to paper and ink, and the time to write out their recipes, something they found to be of use. Women of the lower classes, most of whom were illiterate, transmitted their recipes orally.

The ingredients used in these recipes is another indicator of their authors’ socio-economic position. They are not the subsistence recipes used by the lower classes, but expensive and extremely nutritious ones. Many called for ingredients that were prohibitively expensive and considered luxuries at the time. Even in these rich people’s récipes, however, one can find traces of the context of misery in which they were written.

This one dates from the start of the “years of hunger”, 1939 to 1952. Those years brought many changes to the diet of of the popular classes, who had to use por people’s recopes to deal with the privation brought by the autarky policies of early Francoism. Many ordinary men and women, especially in hunger-stricken regions like Extremadura and Andalucia, werereduced to expanding the borders of what was edible by consuming thistles, grasses, and domestic animals not traditionally considered culturally acceptable food.

Recipes like the one shown here demonstrate that even in those years there were people who continued to cook the dishes they always had. Many made sweets like these “corn balls” which required large quantities of corn flour, oil, sugar, and eggs. These were hard to acquire through the official rationing system, and the most likely way to get them was through paying very high prices on the black market. As a result, many women were forced to use substitute ingredients in their traditional recipes or eliminate them entirely, as in the eggless omelettes that became popular at the time. The “if possible” that the women who wrote this recipe noted for the use of ground almonds takes us to the period of scarcity in which she lived. Even this well-off woman knew that it would not be easy to get them. 

GRR