Catalan cuisine through history - Telegraph as 'barroc i saboròs" (baroque and tasty). Many begin with a 'sofregit" of fried onion, garlic and just a little tomato. A picada - a garlic, parsley and almond or hazelnut paste - is often stirred in at the end of cooking to thicken stews and give another layer of flavour. A nutty sauce called romesco, made with garlic, tomatoes and sweet dried red peppers, accompanies all kinds of dishes. In Catalonia, a mix of olive oil and pork fat is the traditional cooking medium (or sometimes goose and duck fat), but now most people have dropped lard - both for health reasons and because commercial lard is not as good as the one once produced by rural families for their own use. Catalonia's extra-virgin olive oils, in which arbequino is the predominant olive, are among the finest of Spain. The frutado oil, made with green olives, has a hint of apple and a slight bitter almond flavour; the dulce, made with black olives, is yellow, sweet and mild. Some of the olive trees in Catalonia are the oldest in Spain. One is said to be more than 1,000 years old. Apart from a narrow coastal plain and the wide valley of the River Ebro, where the produce and the cooking is Mediterranean, the Catalan interior is all high mountains with a gastronomic culture of the Pyrenees. Cows and goats are raised for butter and cheese, and intensive pig farming provides for a huge variety of sausages and salamis. But it took until the late 20th century, after General Franco's 40-year crushing of their culture and the expansion of industrialised food products, for Catalans to begin to value their own rural and popular home-cooking. The writer and gastronome Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was one of the first to begin chronicling 'the signs of resistance of Catalonia's gastronomic identity. If it was a priority to save the language, it was also, he believed, important to save the cuisine. In 1977 he published L'art del menjar a Catalunya (The Art of Eating in Catalonia). But by 1994 it was clear that it was nueva cocina that was threatening Catalan cooking traditions. Although proud that the most innovative cuisine in the history of cooking was by their own superstar chef Ferran Adrià, Catalans also saw it as a tragedy because chefs in thrall to Adrià wanted to make only mousses and terrines of everything and to be on television. A group of food historians, gastronomes, nutritionists and others got together with chefs to form the Fundació Institut Català de la Cuina (the Catalan Culinary Institute) in 1996, dedicated to researching the roots of Catalan cooking and to collecting recipes from professionals and home cooks before they disappeared. Many Catalan dishes go back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when there was a court cuisine and Catalans were rich from trading. For a long time their cooks were the most highly regarded and influential in Europe. Collections of recipes written in Catalan meant that medieval Catalan cuisine achieved wide fame in the 14th and 15th centuries. I had a taste of that medieval cuisine many years ago at the home of the late Rudolf Grewe, who was translating from ancient Catalan and researching the background of a now famous anonymous Catalan cookbook, the Llibre de Sent Soví, presumed to have been written in the early 14th century. When I was in New York, where he lived, he invited me to eat dishes cooked from it. A giant crucifix brought from an old church hung on a big white wall over the table. He made a sofregit of slowly fried onions with garlic, an almond sauce, baby aubergines stuffed with a herby goat's cheese and fried fish escabeche, followed by chicken with the almond sauce. For dessert we ate fresh cheese flavoured with rosewater and honey. Another medieval Catalan cookbook, the Llibre de Coch, was written by Ruperto de Nola, the head cook to Alfonso V, the count of Barcelona and King of Aragon, who became King of Naples in 1443. His sumptuous dishes symbolise the cultural apogee of the empire of the old Catalan lands. Some of his recipes claim to be in the styles of Genoa, Lombardy or France. Some are recognisably Arab, mixing sweet with sour, savoury with sweet, and meat with fruits such as quinces. They use almonds, rose- and orange-blossom waters and pomegranate juice, and are garnished with raisins and pine nuts. Almond pastries with sprinklings of sugar and cinnamon are among the sweets. The book contains a version of crema Catalana. Many chefs today cite the Llibre de Sent Soví and the Llibre de Coch as their inspiration. A few have even based their menus on them. The Food of Spain by Claudia Roden (Michael Joseph, rrp £25) is available from Telegraph Books for £23 plus £1.25 p&p (0844-871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk)