La Matriarca

Herminda Buezas Oubiña doesn’t have delicate hands to say the least. They are strong and skilled from years of hard work. She is also one of the best home cooks I have ever met. Her tortilla is stunning. It is made with eggs from the chickens that scratch about her garden in which she grows her onions and potatoes. With their eggs she cooks her tortilla until it is just set, with a dark golden liquid custard of egg yolks.

Her recipes are no more elaborate than ‘take your potatoes and onion, cook them in oil until soft, add salt, then mix them with eggs and fry the tortilla one side and then the other’. She offers no times, no weights or measures, no temperatures. She has never used these: everything she makes she measures in her hands.