The Ensaimada Trail
Published March 25, 2008 by Rachel Laudan
For a couple of years, I’ve been interested in the ensaimada (the en-larded), a sweet bread associated with Mallorca and Minorca in Spain that also crops up in the Philippines.
This afternoon, trotting into a confitería in Buenos Aires, in search of sweet things for my husband, I spotted, lo and behold, a shelf of ensaimadas. They looked like those old-fashioned coiled beehives with a confectioner’s sugar (icing sugar) dusting over them. Ah ha.
So of course I bought one and carted it home.
When I cut into it, I discovered that the dough was an ordinary sweet bread dough. It had none of the paper thin flakiness of the Minorcan and Mallorcan ensaimadas. When I tasted it, it left a slightly greasy taste in the mouth. The omnipresent vegetable shortening, I suppose.
But its structure was quite different from the Spanish style. A little excavation revealed that it consisted of a dough base and a conical top with pastry cream inside. So what is this?
Well, whatever it is it is not some ensaimada going w-a-y back in history. A search on the web reveals the claim that Jose Puig, a Catalán immigrant, produced ensaimadas in Argentina in the 1880s. AndMajorca and Mallorca have long been part of Catalonia.
I view such claims with the deepest, darkest suspicion in general. This may make sense though. Four million Spanish emigrated to Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, three quarters of them not Castilians, but Galicians, Basques and Cataláns, most of whom, if they spoke Spanish, spoke it as a second language.
So my guess is that the ensaimada did arrive then. It would be just the thing for these newly fashionable confiterias, a kind of combination high class sweet shop, cake shop, and bakery, often with coffee available. And of course with the enthusiasm of the period for all things English and French, it would just be the finishing touch to add a filling of pastry cream.
But, if the ensaimada that arrived is anything like what was available in Catalonia in the early twentieth century, then it was not the flaky pastry that we find there today but a straightforward sweet bread. I’ve long had the suspicion that perhaps the highly flaky pastry is recent. Perhaps this is evidence for that.
Filed under Food History, Globalization Then and Now
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I can give some practical information. When you are making these pastry, the flaky texture depends a lot in the amount of lard/fat spread on the pastry. I’ve found that even when you make ultra-thin pastry by stretching the dough, when rolled and coiled and left to raise over-night, there is very little seperation of the layers unless you use quite a bit of lard.
I may be wrong but I think the key to making really good ensaimadas besides using a high quality, high protein flour is that after the dough is stretched butter is lightly applied to the layers even though the dough already contains lard.
OK, what both of you are saying sounds to the point, namely that to get layers you have to use a lot of fat between the layers.
Bob, could you just fill me in on what ensaimadas you are talking about. Are these Spanish, Mallorcan, or some you have found elsewhere? I’m just a bit unclear on that.
Rachel,
I am talking about Mallorcan ensaimadas and Spanish variations. It seems to me that the techniques for making them and the ingredients were and perhaps still are too sophisticated (and hence too expensive) for the progeny of “New Spain” in general, including the Philippines.
Thanks Bob, that clarifies things. Hmm. Baked goods. Clearly sweets in Mexico were developed to an extraordinary level in the convents. But sweet breads? Perhaps you are right.
One experiment I want to try when I get home is the recipe for ensaimadas from De Re Cibaria which is the first and classic cookbook for Minorca–1930s I think. It’s a bit complicated with lots of long risings but I don’t think it would end up like a contemporary Mallorcan ensaimada. We’ll see.
To Bob Mrotek:
How wrong you are when you say that “the techniques for making them and the ingredients were and perhaps still are too sophisticated (and hence too expensive) for the progeny of “New Spain” in general, including the Philippines.” Obviously you have neither been to the Philippines nor have you tried our ensaimada (spelled ensaymada). You’d be surprised at the sophisticated techniques and expensive ingredients used to produce our version of the Mallorcan pastry.