Tender almonds for an image

PalmaThen the street was flanked by plots of land. The almond trees leaned over our path, offering such green almonds that we could still eat the skin. We opened them with our teeth and took out the kernel that burst in our mouths like a small gulp of acidic water. We filled our pockets with them and ran off in fours for fear that some neighbor might give us away. In the month of September, when it was time to harvest the almonds, I always ate some of those we shelled outside the cloths. The pulp broke crunchily in the mouth, milky and sweet, braving such a wonderful transformation, just like a chrysalis waiting for its final state.

Nature is always in a state of metamorphosis. We also change. The almond alley is no longer that alley, the plots have taken other forms, and the trees that bent their branches have ceased to be a daily presence to become a memory. It is then that memory needs another skin to survive. Photography accomplishes this marvel by stopping all this movement in a precise instant that allows us to capture the butterfly before it disappears from the garden. The image ends up being the only landscape we can inhabit without time altering it.

Today, most of the old almond trees adorn the landscape as if they were negative images, and it is inevitable to think of the photographs that Joan Fontcuberta presents at the Fundació Toni Catany. In this project, the dying or dead trees are portrayed as if they were figures, sculptures in the middle of the field that retain a suggested human form and are treated as if they were in the artist's studio. While the Llucmajorer photographer preserves the daily life of objects, fruits, and flowers in the intimate stillness of still life, Fontcuberta contemplates the trees and turns them into a landscape that can now only persist as visual memory. Between the two, the same gesture is established: to give shape to what is about to disappear or has already disappeared.

The recipe for aubergines with tender almonds that they prepared at Toni Catany's to take to the beach becomes a third piece of the same system. I cook thinking that it is a privilege to be able to make and offer it, because it is born from the hand of a photographer who amazes me and because cooking it is also a way of getting closer to his gaze, of continuing it in another language. A recipe is also a form of photography, because it allows us to delve into a time, into a precise moment, and to give shape to a landscape. For this reason, the aubergines to go to sea with tender almonds that they prepared at Toni Catany's not only preserve a taste, but also an exact moment of the year, when the almonds have not yet finished their process and the summer fruits are blooming.

Perhaps cooking and photography are nothing more than two ways of offering silent resistance to time. One fixes the light; the other, the taste. Between the two, they manage that, many years later, we can still feel that milky and sweet bite explode in our mouths, hiding a tender almond.

I take the opportunity to thank Toni Garau for transmitting the recipe to me – it has been a pleasure for me to be able to make it – and Xesca Riera for providing me with the tender almonds.