![]() ![]() ![]() It is not entirely clear why Mestayer adopted her pen-name of Marques de Parabere. She wrote for a varied range of publications, including the Bilbao sports paper Excelsior, the daily El Diario Vasco, or the Argentine newspaper La Nación, and in specialised magazines such as El Gorro Blanco, La Revista Culinaria and Menage. The climate of revolution at the beginning of the century made it possible for a woman like María Mestayer to break the limits attributed to her sex and social class and begin to write about cooking professionally.Īs her reputation as a gastronome grew, she started writing for local newspapers, first under the pseudonym of Maritxu, and from 1929 onwards under the pen name of the Marchioness of Parabere (sp. ![]() She began to give cooking and baking courses in Bilbao to the women of Catholic Action in the neighbouring parish of San Vicente de Abando, in the school of El Sagrado Corazón and in organisations promoting female education such as the Emakume Abertzale Batza, a women's association of the Basque Nationalist Party. ![]() Gradually she went from being an amateur to an expert in gastronomy thanks to her readings and the correspondence she maintained with some of the most famous chefs of her time: Henri-Paul Pellaprat, José Rondissoni and especially with Teodoro Bardají, head chef of the Duke of Infantado, whom she met through her husband. Spurred on by this and by her own inclination for good food, she began to read voraciously gastronomic publications such as " Le Pot-au-feu" (1893-1956) and to experiment in the kitchen. Culinary vocation Ĭultured and refined but inexperienced in managing a household, Mestayer realised shortly after getting married that her husband preferred to eat at his club in the Sociedad Bilbaína rather than at home. Back in Bilbao, she met the lawyer and member of Donostia high society Ramón Echagüe Churruca, whom she married on 12 October 1901 in the Basilica of Begoña. A keen reader and history buff, she travelled with her parents all over Europe, visiting the great capitals and the best restaurants of the time, such as that of Auguste Escoffier. Thanks to her family's good social and economic position, she enjoyed a careful cosmopolitan education. Her parents were the French businessman and diplomat Eugenio Mestayer Demelier and the Bilbao-born María Jacquet la Salle (or Delasalle), also of french origin, daughter of a famous Bilbao banker, Carlos Jacquet.Ī few years after her birth, her father was appointed to the French consulate in Seville, where Maria spent part of her childhood and adolescence. María Mestayer was born on 20 December 1877 in Bilbao, and was baptised on 7 January 1878 in the parish church of San Vicente Mártir de Abando as María Manuela Eugenia Carolina Mestayer Jacquet. ![]()
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