Blue crab on a market in Piraeus. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Activity
Saturday November 9, 2024
Samak tahini hack, for blue crab samak soup with tahini
Soups from Here and There. Festival de Cultura Raval(s)
MACBA's Kitchen
The MACBA’s Kitchen participates yet again in the Festival de Cultura Raval(s), which every year is brought to life by Fundació Tot Raval, in collaboration with other organisations in the neighbourhood.
The Kitchen group joins the 10th Soups from Here and There, an initiative of the Associació Intercultural Diàlegs de Dona, cooking a Palestinian recipe for the second year in a row. This year, we prepare a version of samak tahini, a recipe obtained by Laila El-Haddad during a 2013 visit to Beach Camp, a refugee enclave in Gaza.
We will cook the soup with blue crab from the Ebro Delta, using spices from our local shops, ecological lemons from the Delta region bought at the Bubub grocery, and parsley from the Jardin Ambulante garden project.
According to Shareef Sarhan, a visual artist, photographer and photojournalist from Gaza, both blue and red crab are popular foods in the Gaza Strip. Only a small part of the population can afford to eat fish, in a context where fishing infrastructures have been bombed, as well as strategic marine areas where various fish species of culinary interest are found. The blue crab is considered an invasive species in many parts of the Mediterranean, although for the MACBA’s Kitchen this very concept is seriously questioned. The species is thermophilic, that is, it adapts to rising water temperatures due to climate change.
The Kitchen has always sought ways to engage with local cuisine, in the context of an eco-social crisis. For this reason, we obtain Ebro Delta blue crab from fish stands in our nearest public market, La Boqueria. This soup will articulate transoceanic flavours and knowledge. We invite you to join us to try this dish, along with a great diversity of soups offered by our colleagues at the event.
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participant
Marina Monsonís
Marina Monsonís is a visual artist who works with hybrid and heterogeneous processes of social transformation rooted in territories, in collective, community and pedagogical projects that relate marine sciences, place-based design, gastronomy, graffiti, radical geography, ethnography and critical, oral and gestural memory. She works on projects that connect the kitchen with political, critical, social and transgenerational aspects to create debates and transmit knowledge about the complexities and conflicts that inhabit km 0. She is interested in the coexistence of radical spaces where people become constellated in research, techniques, local and global knowledge, old and emerging, maintaining a generous and enriching ecosystem, where joy, exchange and harmony dominate the table. She has directed The Kitchen at MACBA since it began in November 2018.
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artists
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Recipe
Recipe
Samak tahini hack, for blue crab samak soup with tahiniIngredients for 3-4 servings
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1 kg of Ebro Delta blue crab
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2 onions
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2 bay leaves
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6 cardamon pods
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60 ml tahini
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60 ml lemon juice
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6 garlic cloves
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2-3 chili peppers
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2 teaspoons cumin
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Black pepper
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Parsley
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Salt
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Olive oil
Boil a litre of water in a pot. Add the bay leaf, the cardamon pods and the other onion, cut into quarters. Cook for 5 minutes. Carefully place the crab, clean and chopped, in the broth and leave it for 5 minutes. Add the cumin, pepper and salt, as well as the onion, pepper and garlic previously goldened. Add the tajin gradually. Cook for 5 min. Add one and a half litres of boiling water and slowly keep heating to a boil. Taste the soup and turn off the burner when it is to your liking.
Serve in individual bowls, sprinkled with finely chopped parsley.
