Despite having pioneered pig trotter carpaccio and ice-cream flavoured with cigar smoke, when the Michelin-starred Roca brother chefs were asked by their ageing mother to recreate the food of her childhood, they were stumped.

What followed was an epic mission that took them as far as the Arctic Circle to source the ingredients.

“Some of the ingredients she told us about weren’t on the market anymore. In fact, they don’t exist,” said Joan Roca, founder and head chef at El Celler de Can Roca, twice named the best restaurant in the world.

The mission started when Joan Roca, and his younger brothers Josep and Jordi, heard Montserrat Fontané, 86, tell an interviewer how she wanted to revisit her family’s old country home and revisit the dishes she grew up on in Catalonia’s La Garrotxa mountain region.

The brothers bought the property, a dilapidated old farmhouse called Can Batista, and embarked on detective work that made them realise the extent of the world’s loss of agrobiodiversity.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 75 per cent of crop varieties were lost in the 20th century.