Pa amb tomaquet in Barcelona. From tomato-rubbed pa amb tomà quet to crisp-topped crema catalana When it comes to food, Barcelona isn’t so much a Spanish city as a Catalan one. An ancient, triangular-shaped region with 7.5 million inhabitants, the autonomous region of Catalunya has had its own language, history, culture, and traditions for close to a thousand years. While today, language might be the thing that most defines Catalan identity, its distinctive food follows closely behind. And the capital of Catalunya itself is also the undisputed capital of la cuina catalana — Barcelona. From the 12th century, the principality of Catalunya had been in a union with the medieval kingdom of Aragon, and together they controlled a giant swath of the western Mediterranean, including what’s now southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, the Balearic Islands, and parts of Greece. Even then, la cuina catalana — rooted in elements of its Greek, Roman, and Arab past — was highly regar...