The succulent [literally juicy from the Latin succus] food of the West, rich and full of flavour, is eaten with a closed mouth, while appreciative lips, palate, and tongue relieve the teeth from hard labour.

But the Indian peasant’s dry thick cake of millet or wheaten meal must be steadily chewed, completely milled and masticated before it can be swallowed, and it is only when it is touched with ghi or dipped in stewed vegetables or pulse that the lips close on a morsel with any semblance of gourmandise. 

Beast and Man in India, first published in 1891, 137.

I think it is easy to forget how much chewing had to be done with traditional whole meal dishes and, if they were baked, how dry they were. Most societies have something to help it down, in this case ghee, or to soften it, soup in the case of French peasant breads.  And what Kipling does not mention is that this unpalatability was true of many European breads until pretty shortly before he wrote.  Sheila Hamilton (thanks) sent along this comment about The Long Affray, a history of poaching in Britain by Harry Hopkins.

It includes this note on the diet in Berkshire in 1795 (the information was gathered by a local vicar who was concerned about the poverty of his parishioners):

“Bread and potatoes – ‘tatters and shake’ (ie salt) – was now the basic diet, and in some areas that bread was heavy barley bread, bannocks, baked over the fire. Meat, butter and cheese, which the labourer had enjoyed earlier in the century, before he had been banished from the farmer’s board, had all but disappeared. Even milk could be hard to come by now that farmers were sending it in bulk into the towns. Tea – an extravagance much reprobated by the labourers’ mentors- was all too often boiling water poured on burned bread crusts.”

For a perspective on maize in South Africa here is an extract from White Food by the interesting blogger Tangerine and Cinnamon.  Worth clicking on the link to read the whole thing.

A recent article published by the magnificent Mail and Guardian explores South Africa’s taste for whiter, finer maize meal:

“In the poorest communities a bag of maize meal is often the only way of satisfying a family’s hunger, and the cost factor plays a role too. An 80kg bag of maize meal is about R400: on a 500g portion a person a day, an extended family of 10 people would consume an 80kg bag in about 16 days. The daily total consumption of maize meal in South Africa is about 10 000 tonnes.

But these maize-meal consumers demand a product that is white – stripped of roughage and nutrients – and manufacturers have remodelled their businesses to serve this demand.

South Africa’s best-selling brand of maize meal is White Star, produced by Pioneer Foods. White Star is whiter and finer than other brands. Premier Foods and Tiger Brands, the country’s other two big producers of maize meal, have also invested in technology which produces this whiter maize meal.”

For me the bottom line is this.

Either you assume that those who lived largely on grains were deluded or driven by an irrational desire for status to prefer white.  This seems an act of enormous condescension since neither I nor, I suspect, the readers of this blog have ever lived largely on grains.

Or you assume that they had good reasons.

Edit.  I did not intend to suggest that Tangerine and Cinnamon was being condescending.  Apologies to her for phrasing the last three sentences poorly.   I have now changed the wording.

Answer One. Whole grains are hard on the system.

Today we don’t eat many grains or grain dishes. They are just one element in the diet along with fats, sugars, vegetables, fruits, meats and fish. The recommended amount in the US is six ounces for a 2000 calorie a day diet.

In the past people ate huge amounts of grains.  Wheat bread provided 40% of the calories of Americans, almost certainly the most lavishly fed population ever in the history of the world, as late as World War II.  Through most of history, farm laborers and their wives (and that’s what most of us would have been) probably consumed between  70% and 90% of  their calories in the form of bread, porridge, or other grain dishes.

That means between one and two pounds of bread a day, or one to two average loaves of sliced white bread, between three and six times as much as we eat.

One pound of white bread

Except that these were whole grains. Only half the British could afford white bread in 1800.  It was 1900 before the whole population could afford it. And Britain was the earliest European country to go over to white bread.  They were chewing or swallowing their way through one to two pounds of oatmeal, oatcakes, barley bannocks, rye bread, or some mixture of grains and beans every day.

Without a bit of butter, jam, olive oil, or lard to lubricate the grains, chewing and swallowing are laborious.

Worse, digesting such a lot of whole grains is a difficult, energy-consuming business ( we spend about 10% of our energy intake on digesting).  Because of this whole grains  pass through the system quickly.  The laxative effect of a small serving of whole grains is great for us sedentary modern urbanites. For manual workers the laxative effect of a couple of pounds of whole grains was a pain.

Those who could afford them, therefore preferred processed grains with more of the bran removed. It’s even possible that they yielded more calories, perhaps even more nutrition, per unit weight because they were easier to digest.

Answer Two: Our Ancestors Thought Processed Food was More Natural and More Healthful

We tend to think of cooking as messing up.  We want fresh, natural foods that taste of themselves.  We like lightly cooked green beans, rare steaks, and the US government tells us whole grains are better for us than white bread, cakes, and pie crusts.

For most of history, the majority view was the exact opposite.  Raw meat, vegetables, whole grains were just the raw materials.  they had to be processed and cooked to get at their natural, healthful essence.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but eating whole grains was regarded a bit as we might regard eating oysters, shell and all.  We just don’t do that. We process the oyster (shell it) to get at its real briny oysteriness inside. Our ancestors thought about grains the same way.  They had to be processed to get rid of the husks, hulls, and bran and get at the pure white inside part.  The outside parts, like oyster shells, were impossible to chew, caught in the throat, and were thus not natural (in the sense of being the grain itself) and not healthful either.  And of course we still don’t eat the husks either. Or put another way. There is not a sharp distinction between processed and whole grain. It’s a question of where you stop taking off the inedible layers or the germ.

In short, in the past most people thought of processing and cooking as perfecting the rough and contaminated raw materials that were harvested or slaughtered.  Only in the past century have we done a complete about-face, coming to believe that processed grains (or sugar, for example) are neither natural nor healthful.

___________

Thanks to Maria Speck for the question that prompted this post. There are still things about grains that Maria can’t figure out.  A couple of weeks ago she sent me an email.  “What about the ‘white food’ preference of earlier humans?  After years of researching whole grains, that’s the  one question that I can only partially answer to this day,” adding that she didn’t think it could be just status or the power of big corporations.  What’s above is my answer to her question.

The first time I met Maria Speck she was already on a whole grain mission. “They’re delicious,” she said, waving her cup perilously to emphasize her point. “It’s just a lucky coincidence that they’re healthy as well.”

Now several years after our chat in the coffee shop in the cavernous atrium of a New Orleans hotel, she’s published her Ancient Grains for Modern Meals to great acclaim, as you will see if you follow the link.  I’ve been reading it, thoroughly enjoying Maria’s essays about her appealing philosophy of cooking and eating, and thoroughly frustrated that so few whole grains are available in Mexico.  Roll on January and a trip to the States so that I can get my hands on some grains.

The very possibility that we brewed beer before we baked bread sounds–well–it sounds sexy.  How titillating to think that people rushed to make something intoxicating.  How mind bending to think that farming was all in aid of a bit of tipple.

When I first heard the idea, I was as titillated and mind bent as could be.  Over the years, though, I’ve come to think it’s actually the wrong way to go about the early history of cereals.  It’s a barrier to asking the kinds of questions that will yield interesting answers.

One of the truisms of the history of technology, a field I labored in for many years, was that asking who invented something, or when something first appeared was asking the wrong question.

Let me take a modern example from food. “Who invented the pineapple upside down cake?” It’s the kind of question food editors in newspapers get asked all the time.  The immediate response is to scurry around searching through magazines and cookbooks for the first pineapple upside down cake recipe and then annoint Mrs. X of Cakeville the inventor of the cake.

What have we learned?  Zilch.  Well, more likely we’ve learned that Mrs. X has staked her fame on a dubious priority claim.

Now suppose we ask different questions.  Why were people interested in cakes?  What were the preconditions for these kinds of cakes? What problems did pineapple upside down cakes solve?

Now we can begin to talk.  Oversimplifying a bit, the preconditions for cakes are molds, enclosed ovens, chemical leaveners, fine white sugar, and fine white flour.  When did these become available?  At the tail end of the nineteenth century.

Why does anyone want to make cakes?  The housewife wants to look cool, modern and sophisticated, her family like the treat, the  big millers in Minnesota want to sell more flour. Cake hits all those notes.  There’s a nice alliance of interests between the housewife and industry.

Just a little later,  Jim Dole began an advertizing blitz for a cool new ingredients, canned Hawaiian pineapple, that combined  cosmopolitan sophistication and tropical exoticism. Bingo.  Lots of people were going to simultaneously invent some kind of pineapple cake.

So back to bread and beer.  If I were tackling the question of why we turned to grains or cereals, I be asking questions like these:

What problems did grains solve, what tools did humans have?

The problem they solved was one of how to get enough fuel (calories) in the human body. Because as food for young plants grains are dense little packets of calories with a wide range of nutrients.  Provided you can process them using fewer calories than you use digesting the processed product, they are some of the best sources of fuel to be found.

Breads had other advantages too that we might not think about if we think of bread as being like our puffy white loaves. Breads  were probably more like the bannock in the photograph, something that Gilgamesh or Plato might have called bread. They were baked pastes which can be produced in a  variety of ways.  They are are portable, dividable into equal portions, act as spoons or plates, keep you satisfied for a long time, great for people on the move.

Beers, too, have lots of calories, as well as that appealing buzz. They are as unlike our beer as early breads are unlike our bread. They were probably thickish soupy slightly alcoholic things that again can be produced in a variety of ways.  They can be stretched with water to serve lots of people. The downside is that they are not easy to move around, to take when hunting or traveling or foraging at a distance.

If people wanted a high, there were other options. There are many psychotropic plants from mushrooms to datura.  Alcohol can be prepared from honey where there are bees, from saps from palms, agaves, and perhaps teosinte (palm wine, pulque, etc), and from sweet wild fruits (though many wild fruits weren’t sweet).

Why, though, was the choice one of beer or bread?  If people were going to all the trouble of tackling tiny, fiddly seeds weren’t they going to try everything they could? Gruels, porridges thick enough to scoop up with the fingers, pottages cooked with roots, greens, and perhaps a bit of meat, toasted grains, powdered toasted grains, soaked grains, sprouted grains, chewed grains, grains with molds?

By about 20,000 years ago when humans began tackling grains, one of the most difficult of food resources to turn into something edible, they were  smart experimenters.  They had been surveying the earth for things to eat for thousands and thousands of years.

They had all kinds of  techniques at their fingertips–different kinds of hearth cookery; pit cookery;  probably treating with mud, water, weak acids, and strong alkalis; probably various kinds of rotting and molds.  They knew about pounding for sure.  They had been grinding rocks for pigments (and like rocks, grains are hard).  They had super sharp stone knives and a wide variety of containers. They came to the grains with lots of technical baggage.

So I assume people were going to boil grains, toast grains, pound grains, grind grains, sprout grains, rot grains, dunk grains in acids and alkalis to see what were the best ways of making them digestible.

They were going to be satisfied only if the results were reproducible (another lesson I gleaned from the history of technology).  Making an alcoholic brew (which can be done in at least three radically different ways) or a bread, both fairly tricky operations, is only worth it if you can do it on a regular basis.  Sitting around remembering that lovely thing you produced that made you feel so good isn’t much use if you can’t pull the trick off again.  Most ways of making bread and beer are multistage operations and from earliest records were done by professionals.

So instead of asking bread or beer, I’d rather ask: What can you do to grains with grindstones, mortars, acids, molds, rots, alkalis, and so on?

Which is why I like to fiddle around with grindstones and mortars.  Until we get a grip on what you can and can’t do with them, it’s all just idle speculation.

___

“Symposium: Did Man Once Live By Bread Alone,” American Anthropologist 55 (1953), 15-526;

Solomon H. Katz and Mary M. Voigt, “Bread and Beer: The Early Use of Cereals in the Human Diet,” Expedition 28, 23-34.

Solomon H. Katz and Fritz Maytag, “Brewing an Ancient Beer,” Archaeology    (1991), 24-33.

Thomas W. Kavanagh, “Archaeological Parameters for the Beginnings of Beer,” Brewing Techniques (1994);

Delwen Samuel, “Rediscovering Ancient Egyptian Beer,” Brewers’ Guardian 124 (1995), 26-31.

For those coming late to this discussion, we’ve been kicking around possible origins for the Mallorcan and Menorcan ensaimada here, as well as the puzzles of its spread (why did it get to Argentina, Puerto Rica, and the Philippines but skip Mexico) here.

Adam Balic isn’t happy with a Moorish origin for ensaimadas

I think that to prove a link with the Iberian Moors, then the first thing that needs to be demonstrated is that the origin of the pastry goes back that far in this location. By the early/mid 16th century the Papal court kitchen were producing pastries identical to ensaimadas in all important respects, so the technique was widespread at an early date, with no direct Arabic influence. Which isn’t to say that both the Balearic and Italian pastries don’t have Arabic connections, but I don’t see the evidence for this yet.

He continues

I also have this etymological bombshell. This is the OED entry for “Seam” (a name for a type of fat, used in England for cooking).

Forms: 2-3 seime, 3 seim, 4-5 saym, (5 sayme, 5 sem), 5-6 seme, 6-7 saime, same, 6, 9 Sc. seyme, 7 seame, 8-9 dial. and Sc. saim, 7- seam. [a. OF. saim (also saime fem.), later sain, mod.Fr. only in saindoux lard; a Com. Rom. word, = Pr. sagin-s, saïns, Catal. sagin, sagi, Sp. sain, It. saime:{em}popular L. *sag{imac}men, related to classical L. sag{imac}na fattening, fatness.]

So the derivation of “ensaimidas” could easily be from Latin (or even French for that matter), as easily as Arabic.

My thoughts.  Nice find in the OED.  Can’t wait to get back to Guanajuato and check it as I’m not prepared to shell out for the on-line OED.  Does the OED give any uses?  And what type of fat?  And what about common Latin o or Greek origins for both Arabic and European uses of “saim” or related word as there are common roots for “semita” or “cemita?”

And what about the possibility that both the Papal recipes and the ensaimada (fat raised pastries) both have had Arabic origins, the one through (say) Sicily, the other through al-Andalus?

I probably missed earlier postings, but it seems likely that ensaimadas evolved on Mallorca during its Moorish occupation. The argument against this is that the Moors didn’t use lard (saim in Catalan), but the word probably has an Arabic root, and in any case, the pastry skills of the moors were far more advanced than those of Medieval European cooks. Think baclavas and kadaifs. Think also croissants whose texture correlates with that of an ensaimada. The Moors turned a blind eye to wine making in the Balearics, so I think this pastry is another link in your Hispano-Arabic chain.

I am always happy to have more links in the Hispano-Arabic chain so I am happy with this theory.  Any more objective folk out there who want to raise doubts?

]]> http://www.rachellaudan.com/2009/05/ensaimadas-again-more-moorish.html/feed 0 http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/09/pedro-ballesters-ensaimada-recipe.html http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/09/pedro-ballesters-ensaimada-recipe.html#comments Mon, 22 Sep 2008 01:16:40 +0000 Rachel Laudan http://www.rachellaudan.com/?p=534 Back to ensaimadas. I’m fainnly getting around to posting a translation of Pedro Ballester’s recipe for Minorcan ensaimadas. It was first published in 1923.  It is therefore probably one of the first published recipes.  Recipes for breads, always in the realm of professionals, are relatively scarce.  I’m translating it  because the book is not widely available outside Minorca.

Pedro Ballester was one of those many Europeans who in the early twentieth century recorded folkways that they believed to be disappearing.  A native of the island of Minorca in the Mediterranean,  Ballester worked as a lawyer. In his spare time he recorded the customs of the island. He published De re cibaria: Cocina, pastelería y reposterìa menorquinas in 1923. I have the sixth edition that appeared in 1995. It is a quite wonderful compilation full of detail about the island’s cooking.

Under pastas (that is doughs) he begins with ensaimadas. He praises those of Mallorca as perhaps more succulent than those of Minorca but also more indigestible.

Then he goes on to the recipe. This is a free translation. To make it more comprehensible I’ve divided sentences into smaller units and added paragraphing.

Before you start trying it read my notes at the end.

Proportions. One almud of flour, ten ounces of sugar, 4 ounces of fat (suet and lard), six or seven eggs and the leavening.

You make this as follows. You take one ounce of bread yeast (levadura de pan) and you put it to soak in cold water for a while to get rid of the bitterness (el agrio), you throw out the water, you dilute the yeast in warm water ( about one coffee cup full). If the dilution does not end up smooth, you pass it through a sieve, and then you ad a little flour, and you let it rest, with a cover, so that it can rise.

When you have the leavening (levadura) ready, you put the eggs in a basin (lebrillo), you beat them for a while, and you add the sugar, mixing the two substances really well.

You break up (desmenuza) with your fingers the leavening in little bits and you mix it, also carefully (esmeradamente), with the eggs and sugar. Then you add the flour, but not all at once, so that you don’t end up with too hard a dough, not worrying (perjudicando) if some of the flour is not mixed in.

Once you’ve made the mixture, you grease the lebrillo and hour hands, and you continue kneading and adding fat until you have incorporated half (five ounces en la proporcion fijada). The other half will be needed in the other operations of kneading and to grease the sheets of tin on which you place the ensaimadas to be baked.

When the dough is well kneaded you form it into a ball and you put in in the greased bowl in such a way that the dough (masa) stays bien finita and not squashed down. Grease its surface and leave it to rise covering the bowl with with another upside down and over both of them a cloth.

I will explain–said the person who gave me the recipe–how and how many times the dough has to rise (fermentar). Let’s suppose that I had it kneaded and covered one night. As a general rule, the next day, you will find it’s risen a lot and I will knead it, leaving it well covered again. At midday I will find that it has risen again and I knead it again. By nighttime it has risen again, and I knead it again.

And the next day I make ensaimadas without kneading and put them on the baking sheets (planchas) placing them in boxes (cajones, cajas) or other containers so that they rise againand I put them in the oven.

If when you go to knead the dough the last time, you notice that it has risen a lot, you knead it and instead of letting it rest, you make the ensaimadas and you put them on the baking sheets so as to put them in the oven the next day.

There are two ways to make the ensaimadas. One consists in simply making a ball, squashing only a bit, because it will expand by itself. The other consists in taking a piece of dough, lengthening to form a cylinder, and rolling it then forming a torta (cake, presumably round cake-like shape).

Whichever system, the hand must be spread with lard. In the second, before putting the ensaimadas the the oven, you take a spoon and with it you raise the cracks which have formed rolling out the piece of dough, so that when it cooks they are not stuck together and the turns you have given it separate well.

There are another couple of paragraphs devoted to trouble shooting in cold weather and other methods of fermentation.

Some tentative conclusions.

1. Historic measurements are a bit tricky but an almud was apparently a volume measurement of about 4-!/2 liters. Using standard web sources, an almud here would have probably been about 4 pounds of flour. So 4 lbs flour, 10 ounces of sugar, 6-7 eggs and 4 ounces of fat.

2. The honorable Pedro never actually tried this recipe. The fat proportions don’t make sense as you work through the recipe. And the dough is extraordinarily heavy. I think the sugar is on the high side.

Here’s my dough after first mixing.

This was a very heavy dough indeed. Here it is after 24 hours.

I gave up at this point. Help please from better bakers among my readers.

3. This is an egg-enriched dough but with very little fat on any interpretation. More like a regular European celebration bread than the current ensaimada.

4. There is little sign of the flaky pastry with fat-separated layers that we now associate with Minorca and Mallorca. The nearest is the second way of making the pastry by making a cylinder into a cake which I take to mean a coiled pastry such as is now made.

5. In short, if Ballester’s recipe makes sense at all, in the 1920s in Minorca, ensaimada was a fairly standard enriched bread for special occasions or for breakfast for the well to do. It had little to do with the flaky pastries that are now sold in the islands and all over Spain as ensaimadas.

What am I missing?

]]> http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/09/pedro-ballesters-ensaimada-recipe.html/feed 31 http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/03/the-ensaimada-trail.html http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/03/the-ensaimada-trail.html#comments Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:49:59 +0000 Rachel Laudan http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/03/the-ensaimada-trail.html 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.

Under the title, Bakers Unite, Layne Mosler (author of a nifty blog that recounts her pioneering survey of taxi drivers’ favorite places to eat in Buenos Aires) starts off with a fairly bald statement. “Anti-military, anti-clergy and anti-establishment, the Italian anarchist and baker Enrico Malatesta arrived in Argentina in 1885 and promptly organized the country’s first union . . . publishing the radical newspaper El Obrero Panadero (The Bread Laborer).”

The mind starts flying. Yes, the international anarchist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Yes, the Italian immigration to Argentina. Yes, the position of the baker in the front line, as provider of the most important item of food, as small employer, as intermediary between the millers and the public, as always subject to government regulation.

So bakers as radicals. A quick google and bakers were radicals in Peru as well. In Italy? perhaps. I want my books. I want to check Stephen Kaplan on the bakers of Paris, Peter Laslett on bakers in England, perhaps Edward Thompson on bread riots. Another quick google and I discover that Born, of Bunge and Born the international grain merchants, did not establish the first steel roller mill for flour in Argentina until 1897. Until then, wheat went to Belgium for processing. And did the bonarenses, people of Buenos Aires, eat white bread in the 1880s? or were they still eating maiz pisado, pounded maize?

So I need too to check out the details on Malatesta. And even if he and his followers did name some breads to ridicule the institutions of Argentine society (cañoncitos or little cannons, or vigilantes), other of their names came straight from centuries of tradition in Europe such as nun’s sighs (often known as nun’s farts). But perhaps that too is points to some kind of resistance to authority.

Lots to think about here. I bet some of you know more about this than I do.

Source

It’s in Dan Strehl’s lovely translation of Encarnación Pinedo’s El Cocinero Español which was originally published in California in 1898, a celebration of the upper class Mexican kitchen of California. It’s now in the superb University of California Press Series on Food and Culture, Encarnación’s Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-century California (University of California Press, 2003). As an aside, Dan Strehl, who worked for years for the Los Angeles Public Library has been a real mover and shaker, serving for seven years as Director of the Hollywood Farmers’ Market and, with Charles Perry, founding the Culinary Historians of Southern California.

But back to pan de acemite or acemitas. Strehl translates this as semolina bread which is how acemite is usually translated in modern dictionaries. Just look at this recipe though.

Recipe

“Add a good piece of raw lard, a teaspoon of salt, and a teaspoon of soda dissolved in a little milk to a quart of flour sifted with two teaspoons of cream of tartar.

Then roll out the dough on the table with a rolling pin. Cut the rolls with a mold or knife as big as you need. When rolling the dough, make it a quarter inch thick.”

From Semita to Biscuit

Now what is that? No mention of semolina or of whole wheat flour. We have to assume that flour in California at this date meant fine white flour. Soda, cream or tartar. Modern raising agents. Lard to make the dough softer and flakier. Rolled out and cut into pieces.

No doubt, this is a good old American biscuit. For non-US readers, an American biscuit is a small bread raised with soda or other chemical leavener.

Commentary

Well, if ever there were a cautionary tale about assuming that recipes with the same name produce the same dishes, this is it. Semitas morph from the bread of the poor, to breads raised with all kinds of unusual sources of yeast, to breads flavored with raw sugar and pecans, to white rolls stuffed with meats in Puebla, to breads claimed to be Jewish on the Mexico/US border, and now to good old American biscuits.

Aside: Capirotada and Semita

And on the side. Here’s a discussion of possible links between capirotada, the Mexican Lenten bread-based dessert, and semitas by Bob Mrotek. I’ll need to think about this one. In any case, his recipe for capirotada is lovely.

So if there’s anyone out there with other kinds of semitas, I’d just love to know.

Lardy cake was a great treat at tea time when I was growing up in its home area of Wiltshire, England. It’s sticky and a bit chewy and utterly delicious. And no it doesn’t taste of (oh yuk!) lard, if by that you mean horrid. I still make it from time to time but usually when I have friends over because it’s best the same day. I do not roll out the dough paper thin as Adam does, something to follow up. (Incidentally the wikipedia article I’ve linked to is pretty inadequate. Dough cake, for example, is quite distinct from lardy cake).

Ensaimadas are all over Spain but their home base is in Mallorca and Minorca where they are now a huge tourist item, gussied up with lots of different fillings. The British owned Minorca for much of the eighteenth century. It was their big naval base in the Mediterranean. They left lots of traces, non-culinary (sash windows) and culinary (gin). So some kind of Balearic-British connection is certain possible. On the other hand putting lard and bread dough together is not exactly rocket science in places that love the pig. Today ensaimadas are made with dough rolled paper thin.

But then there are other questions.

Were ensaimadas always made with dough rolled paper thin? Why don’t ensaimadas show up in Mexico? Or in other parts of Latin America? Or do they under some other name? And why do ensaimadas show up in the Philippines? And why are they more like brioche there?