215 x 155mm; pbk; colour illus; 200 pp; 

ISBN 0907325 971; £15.00

A taste of paradise

Sun, sea, sand, sex and sangria: that was the siren call that first drew British package holiday tourists to Spain some 40 years ago - the Balearics especially, and Ibiza and Majorca in particularly. Not a word about the region's traditional cuisine.

Few of Majorca's four million annual visitors are even aware of the island's long tradition of indigenous cooking. They are, for the most part, quite satisfied to consume fish 'n' chips, burgers, steak, pizza and pasta - hardly local dishes. They'll try the ensaimada, perhaps, a deliciously sweet, coiled yeasty but that is the local equivalent of a croissant. But they remain obstinately ignorant of Majorca's other delicacies.

It's not that the island's cooking is a well-kept secret, it's simply that British holiday-makers are terrified of trying anything new, according to native-born Tomás Graves.

Tomás, 47, has decided to put this to rights. He has written a book called Bread and Oil (Pa amb Oli) which is published here next month in an attempt to reclaim Majorca's cultural identity. Translated from Catalan (closely related to Mallorquin, Graves's first language), it explores local traditions - the cooks and the restaurants, the bakers and sausage-makers, wine-growers - and the provenance of its produce - flour and bread, olives and olive oil, and the sensational vegetables and fruits. It's not a recipe book exactly, more a chunk of foodie culture, and a work of some scholarship. Reading it feels like stumbling on a nugget of gold among the empty lager cans on Magaluf beach.

Tomás is the youngest son of the island's most famous resident, poet and classicist Robert Graves (I, Claudius, Goodbye to All That, The White Goddess). He would prefer to play down his paternity, but that's impossible given that he lives in Deya, the village on the rugged north coast that Graves made his own. It has been the secret hideaway of poets and painters for half a century. No longer: Richard Branson owns the top hotel here, La Residencia, and renowned PR Lynne Franks (as satirised in Absolutely Fabulous) has a home here.

A graphic designer, printer and musician, Tomás, with his brother Juan, runs a well-known local band called, appropriately, Pamboli. His book, he says, is 'a portrait of the island disguised as a food book' (its subtitle is Majorcan Culture's Last Stand).

When Majorcans, imprisoned by Franco during the civil war, went on hunger strike to protest against conditions, their chant went: volem pa amb oli (we want bread and oil). Pa amb oli is a native dish which to Majorcans symbolises a very old culture, now all but squashed under the heavy tread of generations of holidaymakers - first the British, but now increasingly, the Germans, who buy second or retirement homes on the island.

While replacing lager louts with colonisers may not seem like progress, Tomás has to admit that at least the Germans are not afraid of trying Majorcan food. This may just have the effect of reviving the island's native food, and by extension, its culture.

It's always been hard to induce the type of Brit who holidays on Majorca to try anything new, reports Tomás. They'll order sole, knowing it is frozen, rather than try a fish just pulled out of the bay but whose name they don't know. They see a delicious tart at the bakers - such as coco, a delicate, thin pastry with sweet onion or vegetable topping which is to pizza as Sevres china is to a Woolworths mug - but wouldn't dream of buying it. And the local pork sausage, sobrasada, a paprika-flavoured patatas in a skin, terrifies them. They won't even try it.

The Germans, on the other hand, tend to appreciate good home cooking. 'Germany is overrun by French and Italian chefs,' explains Tomás. 'They are sick to the back teeth with all that nouvelle cuisine stuff. They go crazy when they try our alioli de patata [baked potato slices with garlic] which is real Majorcan village food. They love the frit [a fry-up of lamb's liver and kidneys].' Even sombrasada.

It's embarrassing to admit, but since British patronage has declined, all sorts of traditional island dishes are appearing in restaurants. You find sopes mallorquinas on most menus now, stewed vegetables poured over thin slices of day-old country bread.

Tumbet too, the islands devastatingly good version of ratatouille, which always contains potatoes. Sliced potato, onions, aubergine (and sometimes green pepper or courgettes) are each fried separately, then combined in layers and baked in a fresh tomato sauce. It's as lovely eaten cold as it is warm.

Other classic Majorcan dishes include calderata de pescado (fish stew), pescado al horno (fish such as sea bream baked on a moist bed of onions, tomatoes and raisins) and conelo con cebollas (succulent farmed rabbit braised with sweet onions).

And, of course, pa amb oli, with its bite of raw garlic. While Brits recoil, the Germans love raw garlic, believing that it thins the blood. The Mallorquins have a saying: 'All cuinat, all perdut.' Garlic cooked, garlic lost.

Hence the growing presence in island bars of pa amb oli, formerly only seen in the locals' homes. For Tomás it's more than just a dish, it's the very heartbeat of Majorcan (and Catalan) culture. It's eaten constantly, as a morning or late-night snack, or sometimes as a first course at lunch, dressed up with a slice of cheese, or mountain ham, or flaked tuna or a anchovy.

Bread and oil is a common enough combination all around the Mediterranean, as Tomás points out; Nice has pain bagna, Italy bruschetta and mendutta. In Tunisia they eat a soft brioche-like bread dipped in oil and rubbed with the hot condiment harissa. In Lebanon unleavened flat bread is spread with olive oil and sesame seed paste (zaatar).

But how to explain the magic of bread and oil to inhabitants of the UK, where bread usually means white sliced, where much olive oil is bland and deodorised (sewing-machine oil, says Tomás), where raw garlic is anathema and tomatoes (as used in pa amb oli's popular cousin, pa amb oli i tomatiga) are of the hard, bland, greenhouse variety.

In a Majorcan restaurant you are brought a basket of toasted bread - country bread made with unrefined flour, a sourdough starter, not yeast, and without salt. It might even have been toasted over the embers of a glowing wood fire. You are offered a cruet of strongly flavoured local oil, probably from the north coast town of Soller. A cut clove of garlic. Sea salt. If it's the tomatiga version, you'll get a ripe tomato too.

Rub the sandpapery surface of the bread with a cut clove of garlic. Then 'scrub' it with the face of the halved tomato, squelching in the sweet, acidic juice. Impregnate it with a thin thread of oil from your setrill (glass cruet). Sprinkle with sea salt. And preferably leave it a short time to let the flavours soak in. You can imagine the harmony of sweet, sour, salty and peppery flavours, the contrasting textures, the glistening colour and the pungent aroma.

The order in which you carry out this operation is a matter of animated debate. You can treat both sides with garlic, with tomato, with oil; or only one side. You could start with oil and end with oil (likewise with tomato) if you like. There are enough permutations to fill a book, as indeed Tomás has done.

There are infinite refinements. The pouring of the oil can be as personal as your own signature; you see spirals, cross-hatches, figures-of-eight, zig-zags. However, 'a steady flow is fundamental,' warns Tomás. 'It's so simple that few people know how to do it properly.' The experienced pa amb oli maker is as uncomfortable with an unfamiliar setrill as he might be with a borrowed fountain pen.

'The perfect pa amb oli has two secret ingredients,' Tomás adds. 'Honesty and appetite. Neither of which are easy to find in the Balearics since we've become a society of abundance, indifference and cynicism, treating our islands as a tourist destination rather than the place in which we live.'

It is one of the Mediterranean's key dishes. Elsewhere you may know it as pantumacca. bruschetta or khoriatico, but on Majorca it is pa amb oli. bread and oil. Sprinkled with sea salt and rubbed with garlic, sometimes with tomato. accompanied at times by a hunk of cheese, a slice of black pig ham, or a glass of red wine, it is Majorca’s all-day fast food. Tomas Graves admits that some people expressed incredulity at his writing a book about it, 'as if the subject warranted no more than a paragraph'. His justification is that pa amb oli is where Majorca is making its stand against barbarian culture.

The cultivation, preparation and consumption of bread and olive oil lie at the heart of Mediterranean culture. Graves investigates their production by traditionalists such as a baker called Margalida Fiola and her son Joan, who prepare their dough for two-kilo loaves by hand, use no additives or preservatives, and bake in wood-fired ovens. Here. too, are specialist olive growers. Spain produces 40% of the world's olive oil, but Majorca's olive groves are both too small and too difficult to get at mechanically to be of interest to big business. As a result, many Majorcan farmers still produce their oil the old-fashioned, time-consuming way. Then there are the tomatoes, the best for pa amb oli being a native variety which you can buy in September, hang in your larder and still bring out and enjoy in May. There is enough local lore here to give even the most hardened urbanite bucolic dreams. So far so good, but establishing Majorca's cultural/culinary identity is only part of Graves's intention.

A son of the poet Robert Graves, Tomas was born and brought up on Majorca, where he continues to live as a printer, author and musician, one of the founder members of a band called, yes, Pa Amb Oli. Fortified by the reports of nutritionalists, he attacks contemporary Majorcan eating habits and decries the disappearance of traditional island cuisine. There are some big issues here, including the influence of tourism, television and the EU on local eating habits, but Graves is unconvincing as a cultural warrior; at times he sounds like one of those regulars nobody listens to at Speakers' Comer.

The genesis of this book explains both its strengths and weaknesses. Originally the five members of the band thought of creating "a scrapbook . . . with posters, song-lists, anecdotes and some favourite bread & oil recipes to fill the page". The others backed out, but Graves continued, writing in Catalan, to speak to "his" people. But something more than translation was required to make this work in English: I had the feeling that this really wasn't intended for my eyes. Graves's own position further confuses matters: at times he speaks of "we the Majorcans", yet he is clearly regarded as a foreigner by some of the people he quotes. Happily, none of this takes away from the fact that Majorca's youth seem to agree with Graves and are choosing pa amb oli instead of foreign imports. Nor does it dampen the happiness I feel that a book born out of obsession and filled like a scrapbook with wit and wisdom, recipes and lists, still has a place in the publishing world.

Translated from the original Catalan into English by the author, a son of the poet Robert Graves, the original title Volem pa amb oli carries a complex resonance: it was the cry of political prisoners, raised in their forbidden language, during protest from gaols in the Franco years; it is the symbol of autochthonous cultural resistance in today's Mallorca against the immense cultural, physical and gastronomic invasion of Northern Europeans; and it is also the name of the rock band in which the author and a number of his friends have played for years.

"The Spains" is how much of Iberia was once known, and Catalonia has long held pretensions to independence beyond even its present autonomy. But within Catalonia itself the various divisions are almost as great as between Catalonia and the other Spanish "nations". Graves wanted to write this erudite, stimulating and witty cultural-gastronomic treatise in his own native Mallorquin; but this island variant is, he tells us, as remote from that of the Catalanoparlant in Barcelona as Jamaican or Glaswegian English would be in London. So he wrote it in "standard" Catalan instead, so that it would be more widely read.

Part cultural history, part cookbook, part autobiography, this is a fascinating and well-written debut showing a rare combination of passion and irony. Graves knows the rest of the Mediterranean world as well as Northern Europe, and his bias in favour of Mallorca is balanced by a sage understanding of historical cross-currents and inevitable forces worthy of his illustrious father. Tomás Graves is that very rare thing, a genuinely, unforced "European" writer - it would be impossible to render down his various English, Spanish, Catalan and Mallorquin identities. He has written an admirable and informative guide not only to his own island, but also on a little-remarked-on cultural transition - the immense exchange of people, ideas and foods between Northern and Mediterranean Europe which started in the 1950s (Tomes Graves was born in 1953) and continues apace to this day.

The traditional Balearic peasant's snack or lunch of bread smeared with olive oil, garlic, salt and tomato has today become the trendy regional-identity restaurant food for the Palma twenty-something smart set, as a reaction against fast food. As homogenization and globalization continue to erode local identities in the near future, we shall see more of these "bread-and-oil" throwbacks.