Every year these Spanish Christmas sweets cause just a little friction when Maggie and I go to do our joint Christmas food shop - I think we should and Maggie thinks we shouldn't. She has no problem with turrón, she likes the two local versions - turrón is often translated as nougat in English because, like the French inspired pink and white confection, it's made from almonds and honey. It doesn't look the same or taste the same but that's something else for another day. The two traditional Alicantino turrones are the soft one, the one that drips with almond oil, often called Turrón de Jijona and the brittle one or Turrón de Alicante. If you're in Consum or Mercadona you'll find tens of flavours of turrón, most of which seem to me to be more like chocolate bars than traditional turrón. I thought that it might be that they merited the name because they had a high content of almonds but the one bar we have left in the cupboard has a warning that it may contain traces of nuts so bang goes that theory! I did have a quick Google but the few websites I looked at ignored the bastardised versions of turrón and only talked about the traditional varieties.
Anyway, enough about turrón, because what I meant to write about were mantecados and polvorones. If Maggie is ambivalent about turrón she is definitely hostile towards mantecados and polvorones. Polvo, amongst other things, and stop sniggering those who know other definitions, means dust. Maggie refers to polvorones as dust cakes. Actually we use the same description for the perusas, those melt in the mouth cakes that you get with a glass of mistela around here after eating your rabbit and snail paella. But that's another post. Now, I have to be honest and say that polvorones and mantecados taste pretty similar to me and, whilst they're alright, I'm not that enamoured of them. Spaniards have told me that's because I buy the industrial versions from the big supermarkets and I should go for the more expensive, traditionally made ones to get the authentic experience. Being meek and mild I have done as I was told and bought hand crafted versions but, having done so, I still don't know which is which and I'm still not bowled over by them. They taste fine but I wonder if they continue to be popular more through tradition than for any other reason. After all, for years and years my mum bought Eat Me Dates at Christmas and nobody ever did.
I asked Wikipedia for the difference between mantecados and polvorones and the definition that I found, at least in the English language version, said that they were, more or less, the same thing. "Often both names are synonymous, but not all mantecados are polvorones. The name mantecado comes from manteca (lard), usually the fat of Iberian pig with which they are made, while the name polvorón is based on the fact that these cakes crumble easily into a kind of dust in the hand or the mouth". To add a bit of detail the Wikipedia entry goes on to say that mantecado is a name for a variety of Spanish shortbreads, which includes the polvorón, and that both are a type of heavy, soft, and very crumbly shortbread made of flour, sugar, milk and nuts (especially almonds). In the Spanish entry (my translation) it says "And what's the difference between a polvorón and a mantecado? The mantecado can have almonds, or not, and it's made with ordinary sugar and flour (actually it says raw meal but I have no idea what that is) and sometimes egg whites, whereas the polvorón is made with toasted flour and icing sugar with all those ingredients being ground down to a very fine or dust-like consistency. Hence the name".
And, as you know if you're in Spain, Christmas is still in full swing so you still have the opportunity to do a bit of market research if you haven't already.
