It is commonplace these days to conceptualize Spanish cuisine as the sum of its regional cuisines, to regard autochthonous Spanish cuisine as, at the very least, on a par with other leading world cuisines and to view the country's gastronomic offerings as a compelling reason to travel to Spain. However, when Dr Thebussem, the King's Chef, Muro, Pardo Bazán and Post-Thebussem began looking for ways to imagine and write about Spanish cuisine just over a century ago, the dominant image of their nation's cuisine could not have been more different to the image we are familiar with in the twenty-first century. Most descriptions of Spanish food, which had been penned by foreigners, presented Spanish cuisine as ‘venomously bad’ (Hillgarth 47) and its inedible food was given as one of the main reasons not to travel through Spain.

These foreign accounts of Spanish cuisine belonged, as we have seen, to a much wider trend to orientalize Spain, which had its origins in the seventeenth century. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, however, increasing numbers of Spaniards realized the importance of gaining control of the images of their country that had been put into circulation by foreigners. Significantly, at the same time that Spain was trying to achieve some degree of autonomy over these cultural and political representations, Dr Thebussem and the King's Chef started to write about the need to assert culinary autonomy in the face of France's culinary stronghold over Spain.