Ensaimadas are a pastry associated chiefly with Mallorca and to a lesser extent with Minorca, two Mediterranean islands to the south of Spain with very interesting histories. Pastries called ensaimadas also crop up in Argentina, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

Ensaimadas today in the Balearics (the joint name for Mallorca and Minorca) are a delicious coiled flaky pastry. They come in large (like a couple of feet across) and small (individual) sizes. Today you can buy them plain or stuffed with a rich conserve or with the sausage of the islands. The large ones are tourist haul from the islands, the small ones are widely available now in Spanish bakeries.

Here’s the official line from Mallorca with a photo.

Adam Balic has kindly provided the proportions he uses for making ensaimadas.

“I should say that the ingredients are:

500gm strong flour
75 gm sugar
2 eggs
250 ml milk
2 Tbspn melted lard
salt
15 gm of fresh yeast or equivalent

Make the dough (mix it very well) allow it to raise once, knock it down and roll out into a long sausage. Roll the sausage out to give a long ribbon. Spread lard on this (about 200 gm), then carefully stretch the dough to paper thinness on a table (if you have a special floured table cloth for this, so much the better). Roll it up like a jelly roll, cut into lengths then coil these into the typical shape. Let raise overnight. Cook.”

A video of ensaimada making in Palma, Mallorca.

I’m interested in them because

1) Presumably given the name (ensaimada or en-larded) the fat traditionally used is lard not butter (though I would bet many today are made with hydrogenated vegetable fats).

2) The modern ensaimadas have a flaky texture made by treating the dough as shown above.

3) They have a curious world wide distribution cropping up in Puerto Rico, Argentina and the Philippines.

So the destination of this winding ensaimada trail is to get clearer about the history of these pastries: when they took the shape and flaky texture they now have, why lard is used, and how we explain their global distribution.

And why would I want to do that? Because the history of wheat products is at the heart of European food history. And because therefore it is tangled up with histories of imports of ingredients and ideas, with the movements of people, and with the class structure.

So needless to say, I have some hypotheses coming up in a future post.

To begin with, I agree that carnitas are a special meal. To add to the stories, the first time I had them was when I was invited to the rancho (village) of a maestro albañil. To translate his title as head bricklayer or stone mason doesn’t quite do it justice. These guys work with architects (and often without) to build houses and have a team who are pretty skilled at working with stone, concrete, and brick. It was May 3rd, the feast of the Sacred Cross and the Day of the Albañil.

To celebrate the maestro had killed a pig and polished up the big copper cauldron. He didn’t use a gas tank to supply fuel. He had a trench in his yard in which he lit a fire and then put the cauldron on two small bricks walls that ran along either side of the trench. When I asked him how often he killed a pig, he said twice a year. I imagine, as Bob mentioned in his comment, that the other time was Christmas–or perhaps a wedding or a quincena (15th birthday).

The maestro also volunteered that he killed one of his goats every couple of months. That was meat for the family. Otherwise it was beans, salsas and tortillas. His was a sad rancho, the soil bleached and white and useless for crops. Hence the men sought work elsewhere.

So, for campesinos (poor country people) carnitas are a special dish. And I think they really are a campesino dish. You never ever see recipes for them in the many Mexican cookbooks produced from the eighteenth century on. The well-to-do eat go to carnitas stands and find them delicious but (correct me if I wrong anyone out there who knows more about this than me) with a slight sense of slumming, just the attitude the the well-to-do in England had to fish and chip shops.

But then that raises the question once more that Adam and I are debating in the comments. Why this very unusual method of preparing a special dish? This is not pork baked in an oven (Europe) nor is it spitted pork (the Philippines). Usually special dishes, at whatever social level, have a special presentation. They are large or gussied up.

Nor is the meat preserved but eaten all at once. Carnitas do not last until the second day. They are horrid warmed up (though I do it for just a hint of that original taste). And this raises, tangentially why the Spanish in Mexico (or New Spain as it was in the colonial period) did not go in for the range of pig preserving that one assumes was already common in Spain. Most of the salting and sausage making of Spain just never made it here. When Roberto Santibañez and I were chatting about this a month or so ago, he suggested that the winters were not cold enough for hams and sausages.

I also think that part of the reason was the abundance of meat in New Spain. At least for the well-to-do, beef and mutton and pork were available in quantities unheard of in Europe. Why preserve for the winter when you can have fresh meat whenever you want? (Though against that, the preserved meats have a new taste and texture so why did they not want this, I say, arguing with myself).

Here’s a photo of tiles (sorry, I don’t have notes one where I got this) showing how blood sausage was made in eighteenth-century Spain. There’s that cauldron but presumably filled with water (as it would be presumably for making blood sausage here in Mexico).

So here’s the suggestion. Spain, like many other parts of the world, does have methods not just of salting pork but of preserving it in lard. Now suppose you are in New Spain. Suppose you are a poor person. You begin on the rendering of lard to make preserved pork. The meat that is cooked in the fat is delicious. You throw a feast. Any lard left over livens up beans.

Or does it? I ask, arguing with myself again. My impression is that refried beans (mashed beans enriched with lard) that are emblematic of Mexican food in the United States are rarely eaten even now in the Mexican countryside. There just isn’t the fat so they are a real luxury. I am always slightly horrified when the girls who work for me ask if they can take the frying fat that I am discarding.

So I’m not sure we are farther along. Perhaps, though, some of the outlines of the puzzle are becoming clearer. And I do find in general there is a logic to the way food is prepared. So any help ferreting this out would be welcome.

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.

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?