Barcelona 'grandmas' dish out cooking wisdom. And find nourishment themselves

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Once the potatoes are cooked and the eggs half set, Sonia Castel places a plate over the sauté pan and instructs one of her students to grab the handle. Castel, 63, thrums on the counter for a drumroll as Mason Kauffman, one of a group of American exchange students in the cooking workshop, holds the plate steady and steels himself to flip the pan. After a countdown of 3, 2, 1, cheers erupt as he makes the flip, sliding the eggs back into the pan to finish cooking a Spanish tortilla, or omelet.

“I was so nervous,” says Kaufmann, a junior at New Hampshire’s Plymouth State University, smiling broadly. After each student has a turn, Castel pulls them into a hug and practically demands a kiss on the cheek. “You have to pay for the lesson!” The workshop at Grandmas Cooking Barcelona offers tourists, schools and other visitors “authentic Barcelona cooking classes with local grandmas and grandpas.” It aims to share traditional Spanish and Catalan dishes and techniques that have become harder to find in the city’s restaurants.

The program helps provide purpose to older people who might be struggling with loneliness, says its founder, Veronica Baena. Visitors can learn to cook the way grandma might “Yes, it’s a gastronomic experience, but above all it’s about the empowerment of older people,” says Baena. “The idea was to try to recover their own personality, their own selves and integrate them into the international Barcelona.” Baena founded Grandmas Cooking Barcelona in 2017 after seeing grandparents dropping off and picking up grandchildren at her son’s school.

She learned some didn’t have much else going on in their lives anymore, so she invited a couple of them to cook at her house. Now, there are 20 older women — and one man — who share cooking tips, life lessons and more than a few jokes at civic centers, social service organizations and other locations in the city. Passing down kitchen wisdom helps the ‘grandparents,’ too Early on, Baena recruited a friend’s neighbor, Nuria Isanda, because of the irresistible aromas wafting from her kitchen window.

Isanda, 75, said her recipes are rarely found these days in a city whose restaurants increasingly cater to tourists. Such dishes cooked by older people might not even be appreciated by their own families, who may visit on weekends and “don’t even thank them for the…