Stop and inn

PalmaInns played an essential role in the daily life of the villages of Mallorca. Beyond providing accommodation for travelers, merchants, and workers moving from one place to another, they were establishments where hospitality was also demonstrated at the stove. Food was part of the guest's experience, and the cook's skill could turn an inn into a landmark. In Alaró, the history of the Fonda Alaronense, later Can Cames Seques, allows us to recover a part of this gastronomic culture.

When the construction works for the Alaró power plant began, the village's communications were limited to carts and the horse-drawn tram that connected it to the Consell railway station. The arrival of workers from outside, mostly Catalans, raised the need for an establishment to accommodate them. Gabriel Rosselló, known as Cames Seques, adapted his house to turn it into an inn, with spacious rooms and a kitchen service that benefited from his experience as a cook. He remained at the head of the business until 1938, when his daughter took over the management. The inn remained open until 1970, the year it closed its doors due to her retirement. In 1977, it reopened under the name Can Cames Seques, coinciding with the publication of the Llibre de cuina de Can Cames Seques (traditional Majorcan cuisine), a recipe book that preserves a good part of the recipes compiled in 1934.

A valuable testimony

This book constitutes a valuable testimony to the cuisine that was prepared at the inn and to the gastronomic repertoire that was considered worthy of being preserved. Traditional Majorcan recipes have a prominent place in it, with preparations such as cod borrida, stuffed red mullet, pork loin with cabbage, and 'pa d'en Pou'. In addition to the traditional recipe book, it incorporates dishes of foreign origin, such as roast beef, Astorga mantecadas, and English cream. Its presence broadens the perspective on inn cuisine, which was not limited to reproducing the domestic repertoire of the surroundings, but also incorporated preparations known through travel, personal contacts, and the circulation of recipes. The coexistence of these proposals with Majorcan dishes reveals an open cuisine, capable of welcoming influences without renouncing its identity.

Also of special interest are the chapters dedicated to mushrooms and snails, a specific attention that shows the importance they had within the culinary repertoire of the house and allows us to glimpse a cuisine attentive to the seasonality of the ingredients.

The recipes typical of Can Cames Seques complete this gastronomic universe and constitute one of the most suggestive parts of the book. These dishes distinguish the recipe book and link it to the daily practice of its stoves and the know-how of the people who took care of them.

The Can Cames Seques Cookbook thus transcends the function of a recipe book. It is a document of gastronomic memory that allows us to approach the cuisine of a Majorcan inn from the beginning of the 20th century, where traditional dishes, foreign elaborations, seasonal products, and the house specialties coexisted. Recovering it is also recovering the history of an establishment that, born from the needs of a town in full transformation, turned hospitality and cooking into an essential part of its identity.

For today's publication, I have chosen two representative recipes of a daily cuisine that knew how to find, in the simplicity of the ingredients, the way to distinguish itself and be valued.