The Ensaimada Trail: Backing up for Review
All this discussion of ensaimadas (links to previous postings here and here) and I realize that I’ve never really explained what they are.
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.
Found some interesting 16th century Italian recipes which are either the same thing as ensaimada or closely related. In Bartolomeo Scappi’s “Opera” there are numerous recipes for “Tortiglione”, these are made in the same way (leaven dough rolled out thinly, greased with butter or lard, rolled, then twisted) as ensaimada, with various fillings (currants, dates raisins, spice, sygar; sausage meat/force meat; hard boiled egg yolks, pinenuts, raisins, bone marrow/butter).
They were either cooked alone in a tort pan (often on a sheet of pastry) or smaller versions were used to garnish the edge of pies (many pies recipes used this garnish).
The other place where these recipes crops up are in Messisbugo’s Neapolitan recipe collection. So a possible Spanish connection there.
My guess would be that part of the story is similar to that of churro’s, a widely made upperclass recipe became very localised, then relatively recently it became more widely recognised and popular and seen as a traditional regional dish.
Hmm. Really interesting. Opens up all kinds of new perspectives. I wonder if there is anything in the 17th century Spanish cookbooks. Motiño is more north east Spain. Catalan cookbooks.
Maybe, I will look into it (although my Spanish is non existent). There are some Catalan recipes in the Italian cookbooks of this period, which is thought to be due to the influence of the Aragonese kingdom of Naples.
Scappi also gives recipes for syringed fritters, which have a similar layout to the Spanish recipes, so I wonder if there was quite a bit of direct exchange going on.