Rachel Laudan » ensaimada

Contra a Moorish Origin for Ensaimadas

Rachel Laudan — Sat, 23 May 2009 21:03:34 +0000

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?

Ensaimadas Again. More Moorish?

Rachel Laudan — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:57:21 +0000

Here’s another comment, this time on ensaimadas, a topic that we have touched on here and here. Thanks to Michael Raffael.

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?

The Ensaimada Trail: Pedro Ballester’s Ensaimada Recipe

Rachel Laudan — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 01:16:40 +0000

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?

The Ensaimada Trail

Rachel Laudan — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:49:59 +0000

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.

The Acapulco-Manila Culinary Connection

Rachel Laudan — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 01:42:11 +0000

I’ve just been reading Memories of Philippine Kitchens by Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan. It’s a simply wonderful book, heartfelt, informative and provocative.

Since I’ve been chatting with Amy on and off for years about the Acapulco-Manila connection, one of the things I was looking out for as I worked my way through the book were signs of this connection.

Three things leapt out at me.

(1) The sheer extent of the connection. Whether breads or bread-based dishes (pan de sal, ensaimada, empanadas), pork products (butifarras, chicharron, longaniza), sweets (leche flan, tocino del cielo, buñuelos de viento), or a miscellany of prepared main dishes (pochero or puchero, escabeche) the Spanish influence on Filipino cuisine is enormous.

(2) The transformation of many dishes to Filipino tastes (or sometimes the vestiges of earlier tastes from other parts of the Spanish-speaking world). The ensaimada more like a brioche than a contemporary Minorcan ensaimada, the chicharron of whole pig’s feet, the empanadas with new fillings.

(3) The near-total absence of specifically Mexican dishes. If we take two of the key Mexican techniques to be the nixtamalization of maize and the drying and rehydrating of chiles, we don’t seem to find either in the Philippines, at least not commonly. Food for thought.

This book is so full of hitherto-unavailable information, that I will be working through it in a number of posts.