A feast fit for Oscar, cineastes, and gourmands

If there were an Oscar for "best use of food in a film," Pedro Almodóvar's "Volver" would surely win at the awards ceremony Sunday. In "Volver," Penelope Cruz, who has been nominated for an Oscar for best actress, plays Raimunda, a resilient young mother with no luck but enough culinary talent to turn adversity into accomplishment. Almodóvar shot the film, named for the Spanish verb "to return," in his native region of La Mancha, and in it he revisits the customs and superstitions he grew up with.

The women of his childhood were obsessed with food and feeding people, Almodóvar has written. Certainly, there's a prodigious amount of colorful Spanish, and particularly Manchegan , fare in "Volver," both as sustenance and symbol. Almodóvar travels between reality and fantasy, and the film's living and dead comfortably co-exist. In the kitchen of her senile aunt, Raimunda finds jars of newly preserved pork in olive oil and containers of freshly baked wafers with her name scribbled on them -- does she suspect they were prepared by her own dead mother, come back to nourish the ailing aunt? Is the apparition trying to communicate with her daughter through reminders of her cooking?

"I grew up hearing stories of apparitions appearing to people," writes Almodóvar. "I don't believe in them. Only when they happen to others, or when they appear in fiction."

But surely, if she could, a mother would come back to nurture her daughter, particularly if there is unfinished business between them. And Raimunda might welcome the opportunity to thank her mother for teaching her how to cook. When her restaurateur neighbor asks the resourceful Raimunda to look after his shuttered cafe in his absence, she seizes the opportunity and unflappably prepares a three-course lunch for 30, served to a film crew on a shoot.

Their only complaint is that the portions aren't large enough. Promising that they will have "food coming out their eyes" after she is hired to cook for the rest of the shoot, she enlists the help of her women neighbors -- and the very food they have purchased at the market.

The Oscar judges might also fete Almodóvar for "best presentation of a family" -- onscreen and off. For Raimunda accomplishes her culinary endeavors with help not only from friends but also from her daughter, her sister, and of course her late mother. And Almodóvar was aided by his own sisters, Antonia and María Jesús Almodóvar, whom he hired to make sure the food in the film was authentic. The dishes included the director's favorite , pisto manchego, which enhances the tortilla española he remembers his mother making. Almodóvar also insisted that Raimunda unmold a luscious flan with caramel sauce at the fictional crew's wrap party.

And as soon as each scene was finished, the real film crew eagerly ate the leftovers.