Manuel María Puga y Parga

Manuel María Puga y Parga, aka "Picadillo" (1874 – September 30, 1918), was a culinary writer and gastronome who popularized and updated traditional Galician cooking methods.

According to writer Luis Anton de Olmert, a circus visited Picadillo's native A Coruña showing a German man as the fattest one in the world, but people got disappointed saying: "Manolo Puga is fatter and you can see him down the street".

His father, Luciano Puga Blanco, was a professor at Faculty of Law and also mayor of Santiago de Compostela, as well as dean of College of Lawyers of A Coruña, governor of Bank of Spain in Cuba, Congressman, senator and supreme court attorney.

In 1891, due to the appointment of his father as Governor of Bank of Spain on the island,[3] he travelled to La Havana by the steamboat Alfonso XIII; so he included in his autobiography the status of "First Class Transatlantic Passenger ".

Taking into account Picadillo's obesity that severely limited his agility as a swordsman, it could have been fatal, had it not been for the seconds that suspended the challenge faced with the evident inequality of contenders.

[4] He began writing under the pseudonym "Picadillo" in "El Noroeste", a local newspaper, becoming so popular that in 1913 he wrote an article entitled "I want to be a councilman" and he launched a campaign to be elected.

On October 14 that year, he released his speech "Address to sellers of food market" within which we can read: "You do not vote (women), but you have husbands, children... ask them, command them ... if required use the slipper; that in privacy, coercion have nothing to do with electoral law.

This document said: "Labour unions of resistance of A Coruña, bear witness of gratitude and sympathy to Mr. Manuel María Puga and Parga, for his noble attitude from City Hall to municipal workers, due to the general strike in Spain August 13 of the current year.

And at one chorizos and lacón are placed in a plate, potatoes and turnip greens in another, and everything on the table, which must be previously surrounded by hungry citizens and plenty of Ribeiro wine stock".