Author: Álvarez Rabo.
Prologue of Ferrán Adrià.

Four human desires: sweetness, beauty, poisoning and control. Four plants which are capable of satisfying them: the apple, the tulip, the marihuana and the potato.

At 'The Botany of Desire', Michael Pollan tells the story of the relationship among the human being and those four vegetables, and the way to domesticate them until getting to adapt their characteristics to some of the most basic human instincts.

The herbs and everything around a stem, a flower or the most delicate shoot that one can find in a forest, a stream or a gentle hill are some of the scenes where the Mugaritz cooking is devised. We have spent many years in touch with that vegetable universe and we have learned to respect it without making excesses, without taking more field than the strictly necessary and valuable, always looking for the culinary result to be worth as much or more than its contemplation in the open air. The green nature in the dish causes emotion. That is why Andoni Luis Aduriz, in close collaboration with botanist François-Luc Gauthier, will suggest us a journey across the vegetable world in this work, described with the meticulousness of those who observe and study it during its life cycle.

75 years after his death, we pay homage to Gyula Madarâsz by reproducing graphically his beasts and by taking them to the last consequences; in other words, to the place where every real animal that boasts about existing ends: the casserole. José Belmonte has been in charge of interpreting the writings by Madarâsz and giving them life and graphic validity, and Andoni Luis Adúriz has done the same, providing the beasts with a gastronomic interpretation, photographed by Usagi Enoki. Among the more than one hundred and fifty beasts he described in his notebooks, we have selected thirty as a sample. It has not been an easy election. But we hope it is just the beginning.

Magnificently illustrated, 'Txikichef' presents cooking as culture and entertainment, alchemy and magic. Andoni has worked as a fisherman: he has cast his nets and, in his first throw, he has caught a group of apprentices, small fishes (which, in this case, are very trustworthy) which will help him cast new haunted and charming nets, where everyone of us, big and small, will be inevitably trapped.

There was a time when our elders did not distinguish among gastronomy, pharmacopeia and magic. They named everything and, among others, the plants which, due to their qualities, were curative, terrible poison or simply delicious. The domestication of the plants by means of agriculture has destroyed, in part, this close relationship between men and nature.

The book reproduces an original by French Jacques Saint Germain, the pseudonym of a talented unknown gourmet writer. Its complete title is revealing: 'Foie gras, followed by the art of serving and preparing it, published in Paris at the expense of the Company of the Gastronome Bibliophiles'.