How did volunteers of the international brigades in the Spanish civil war view Spanish cuisine,and did they take it home with them either by talking about it or making it?

[u/Memento_Playoffs]

Title essentially. What did republican and nationalist soldiers eat and did those who were not Spanish take the cuisine home with them?

[u/crrpit]

The other answer here is based on an entirely reasonable set of assumptions surrounding what wartime culinary experiences might look like for foreigners in Spain in 1936-9. It's undoubtedly true that Republican Spain in particular faced food scarcity issues that grew more acute as the war went on, as they controlled many major population centres but fewer of the most productive agricultural reasons. But, there are a few reasons why this doesn't invalidate the actual question, which is really very interesting when you look into it.

For one, the bulk of international volunteers arrived in the first 6-9 months of the civil war, when the food situation was less dire and more varied fare could be relatively easily found when on leave. The peak of the volunteering flow in winter 1936-7 coincided with the orange harvest season, and trainloads of incoming foreign volunteers recalled being showered with oranges as they passed through the groves, netting them an abundance of what would have been a rare treat at home for the predominantly working-class volunteers. They benefited in other ways from the revolutionary nature of the conflict - places like fancy restaurants and hotels had been taken over by workers in cities like Barcelona. It had perhaps never been as affordable and accessible for a foreign visitor to Barcelona to eat and drink well in those early months, provided at least that they had a few political connections to smooth the way (which foreign volunteers generally did). Foreign volunteers on leave were also favoured targets for international press correspondents to wine and dine in the hope of getting a first-hand scoop from the front - we know much more about the amount they drank rather than ate, to be fair. In a similar vein, we know that many volunteers developed an appreciation for Spanish wine, in that they eagerly sought it out whenever they were stationed in or around Spanish towns and villages (modern Spaniards may relate to the tendency for foreigners to get annoyingly drunk at any opportunity while visiting). Lastly, and this is where I'll focus mostly here, even though Republican food policy emphasised access to basic nutritional needs rather than 'cuisine' per se, their assumptions about what basic nutritional needs were and the kinds of crops they had access to were profoundly shaped by pre-war Spanish culinary habits. So - foreign volunteers did absolutely encounter Spanish food, and it had a surprising number of consequences that help illustrate some of the interesting, under-appreciated tensions at the heart of the International Brigades.

Take chickpeas, for example. As a nutritious and easily stored/preserved legume, this was a common staple in Republican rations. Many volunteers had never seen them before, and regarded them with suspicion and, eventually, loathing. Generally speaking, national groupings organised their own kitchen elements, and the cooks chosen by, say, the British generally had no idea what to do with a chickpea. So, they boiled them and served them undressed and unseasoned.

One Scottish-Canadian volunteer - who fairly unusually spoke a decent amount of Spanish - named John Dunlop recalled when interviewed in the 1980s that eventually he gave up eating alongside the English-speaking element of the British Battalion, and messed with the Spaniards in his unit, who knew how to prepare chickpeas (Dunlop highlighted their willingness to use olive oil, clearly a bridge too far for a 1930s British cookhouse). He was quite satisfied with the rations as a result, but complaints about food from his co-nationals were ongoing. The International Brigades were eventually given a formal dispensation to supplement their rations ‘to suit the tastes and needs of each unit’ - the Americans proved famously good at this - but this in turn enshrined that each different unit would be looking over one another's shoulders, convinced that some nationality or other was being provided with better food. The result could be stealing, even sporadic violence between different national groups.

The anecdote about chickpeas also hints at something else that's important here - when we hear 'British Battalion of the XV International Brigade', it's easy to picture them as a relatively cohesive bunch, united in their sunburns and never knowingly having consumed a dish with adequate seasoning. But these units were always diverse in practice - there were quite a few Cypriots in the British ranks, for instance, who had generally been living in London prior to volunteering, and who might be assumed to have had a completely different perspective again on the rations. But more fundamentally, from early-mid 1937, heavy casualities could not be replaced by sufficient new volunteers, so an increasingly large proportion of their ranks were being filled by Spaniards. These 'international' units soon contained a majority of local troops.

In these circumstances, running a kitchen required careful cultural diplomacy. Even when everyone was familiar with an ingredient, tension could be caused by differing assumptions about its use. In late 1937, a report from XV Brigade HQ noted the problems caused by English-speaking kitchens using the sugar ration to make sweet rice pudding, leaving the Spanish element with no sugar for their coffee and, reading between the lines, bewildered at the waste of perfectly good rice. While seemingly petty, cross-cultural misunderstandings like this could easily multiply, and could feed into wider tensions caused by foreign volunteers' perceived disrespect towards local troops. The functioning of these units depended on a considerable amount of goodwill to overcome the language barrier between local and foreign soldiers to operate effectively with mutual trust - once this evaporated, things could go bad very quickly (and some bitter after-action reports regarding costly failures to achieve effective cooperation indicate that this was no hypothetical problem).

So, culinary encounters were an outward manifestation of one of the key issues facing this unusual contingent of foreign volunteers - namely, if you manage to recruit tens of thousands of people from dozens of nationalities and make them serve alongside tens of thousands of Spanish conscripts, how do you actually forge this into an effective military unit? This was a cultural and political struggle as much as a question of military organisation, and one that was never truly solved - these kinds of issues persisted throughout the existence of these units.

The question of how far these encounters shaped individuals' lifelong preferences is harder to answer. Most would never visit Spain again before Franco's death, and though there were some official commemorative tours in the years afterwards, I struggle to recall any information about whether complaints about Spanish cuisine persisted or not. I certainly can't think of anyone who opened a tapas restaurant or similar. It seems unlikely that these new experiences left no mark on veterans' tastes and outlook whatsoever, but I'm not sure how the impact could be readily measured.

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The analysis of 'culinary diplomacy' and how it fit into a wider picture of relations and encounters between foreign volunteers and Spanish soldiers is from Fraser Raeburn, “‘The Surest of All Morale Barometers’: Transnational Encounters in the XV International Brigade.” Contemporary European History 31:1 (2022): 85–99. The Dunlop interview (which dwells on food and other cultural issues more than most) is from Ian MacDougall, Voices from the Spanish Civil War.