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Catalan cuisine

Location of Catalonia in Spain and Europe. The majority of the Catalan territory is part of the Mediterranean Basin, and its cuisine mainly belongs to the culinary tradition of this area.

Catalan cuisine is the cuisine from Catalonia. It may also refer to the shared cuisine of Roussillon and Andorra, the second of which has a similar cuisine to that of the neighbouring Alt Urgell and Cerdanya comarques and which is often referred to as "Catalan mountain cuisine". It is considered a part of western Mediterranean cuisine.

There are several Catalan language cookbooks from the Middle Ages that are known to modern scholars. The Llibre de Coch  (1520) was one of the most influential cookbooks of Renaissance Spain. It includes several sauce recipes made with ingredients such as ginger, mace powder (flor de macis), cinnamon, saffron, cloves (clauells de girofle), wine and honey. 

Salsa de pagó took its name from the peacock (Catalan: el paó) that it was intended to be served with, but could accompany any type of poultry, and was part of the medieval Christmas meal.

Salsa mirraust (or mirausto alla catalana as it's called in the Cuoco Napoletano) was half-roasted (mi-raust) poultry that was finished in a salsa thickened with egg yolks, toasted almonds and breadcrumbs. In the version of the recipe from the 14th-century Llibre de Sent Soví [ast], the sauce is thickened with mashed poultry liver instead of egg yolks.

Hippocras (pimentes de clareya) was spiced wine made with cinnamon, cloves, ginger, pepper, honey and wine pressed through a manega, a pastry bag shaped cloth that was originally designed by Hippocrates to filter water.

Basic ingredients

Catalan cuisine relies heavily on ingredients popular along the Mediterranean coast, including fresh vegetables (especially tomato, garlic, eggplant (aubergine), capsicum, and artichoke), wheat products (bread, pasta), Arbequina olive oils, wines, legumes (beans, chickpeas), mushrooms (particularly wild mushrooms), nuts (pine nuts, hazelnuts and almonds), all sorts of pork preparations (sausage from Vic, ham), sheep and goats' cheese, poultry, lamb, and many types of fish like sardine, anchovy, tuna, and cod.

Traditional Catalan cuisine is quite diverse, ranging from pork-intensive dishes cooked in the inland part of the region (Catalonia is one of the main producers of swine products in Spain) to fish-based recipes along the coast. These meat and seafood elements are frequently fused together in the Catalan version of surf and turf, known as mar i muntanya. Examples include chicken with lobster (pollastre amb llagosta), chicken with crayfish (pollastre amb escarmalans), and rice with meat and seafood (arròs mar i muntanya).

The cuisine includes many preparations that mix sweet and savoury and stews with sauces based upon botifarra (pork sausage) and the characteristic picada (ground almonds, hazelnuts, pine nuts, etc. sometimes with garlic, herbs, biscuits and as aways have a chilled day from the Viking