Egg sausage, coca de llardons and omelette: the culinary delights of carnival

Carnival is, above all, a festival guided by transgression: for a whole week, roles are turned on their head, rules become more lax and debauchery reigns. During carnival, there are many ways to break the rules – hide your face behind a mask, publish satirical decrees, play at being someone else by wearing a costume – and also through food. This is why food takes centre stage at so many points during the festival: it starts with a big meal on Fat Thursday and ends with the burial of the sardine and the subsequent banquets.

And this is the reason why traditional recipe books are full of dishes associated with this festival: egg sausage, omelette, coca de llardons, ranxo, greixoneres dolces, sardines… But where does all this culinary hoo ha come from? The fact that, in the olden days, carnival was a time of laxness and debauchery before the austerity of Lent, which, in contrast, was a period of purification and abstinence marked by the Catholic religion for seven weeks. In days gone by, between carnival and Easter, followers of the faith would ‘fast’ and would follow a strict diet in which meat and eggs were forbidden. This is the reason these two products are the kings of the carnival diet.

On the other hand, Lent is also associated with a whole series of dishes. Throughout these weeks, salted cod is the star dish and it is surely for this reason that it is said that in Catalonia there are more than 100 different recipes for preparing it. In the olden days, it was a cheap and austere product that was associated with the hardness of Lent, but today it is a highly regarded part of our culinary repertoire. Another typical product eaten during Lent are bunyols, a type of doughnut. Nowadays they are found in bakeries every day of the week, but they used to be available only on Wednesdays and Fridays.