| Abstract | This article examines the role of culinary nostalgia and the possibility it allows for a critique of the prevailing gender ideology of the Franco era in the television seriesCuéntame cómo pasóand El Cuaderno de Mercedes (2004), the show’s accompanying cookery book. Now in its twelfth year,Cuéntame— set in the late 1960s and through the Transition — has achieved strong critical and popular success.Cuéntame’s connection to debates about historical memory in Spain has generated a series of expectations about its political content, which for many of its detractors have not been met; instead, they argue, it offers nothing short of a feast of sentimental nostalgia. As I contend, however, nostalgia is not simply escapist or apolitical. It in fact allows for a critical mediation between past and present, which in the case of contemporary Spanish cultural production is also significant for the alternative it provides to the ‘historical amnesia’ of the Transition.Cuéntame’s culinary nostalgia is particularly significant, I argue, for the visibility it gives to women’s histories and memories, which have often been excluded from male-dominated accounts of Francoism and the Transition. Far from precluding social critique, therefore,Cuéntame’s food memories allow for a reflection of aspects of Spain’s past which have to now remained relatively invisible. (English)
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