Paying the premium

When I went to the hole in the wall to get some cash there was a turrón stall in my way. Turrón is a sweet confectionery, associated with the Spanish Christmas, made with almonds, oil, and sugar. In the average supermarket a 250g bar of turrón will cost about 2.50€, most supermarkets carry something slightly better at, maybe 10€ a bar, but most steer away from the handcrafted product because it is breathtakingly expensive. There are all sorts of varieties of turrón, but the traditional ones are the hard and brittle Alicante variety and the soft, oozing oil Jijona style. The varieties of turrón, with chocolate or fruit are really for people who don't like turrón; they aren't much to do with turrón and are trading on the name.

The chances are that if you have some turrón this Christmas, it will be ordinary production line stuff. You might like it; you might not; but it's unlikely to send you into paroxysms of delight. The same is probably true of the majority of foodstuffs that Spaniards tend to rave about and which they buy in truckloads at this time of year. 

For instance angulas, or baby eels, are another Christmas delicacy. I had a quick Google and you can get fresh ones at 118€ per 100g. If that's a little steep the alternative is something called gulas which are made from ground fish reconstituted to look like elvers. A packet of gulas costs a bit less than 3€. This is lumpfish roe as against caviar territory. 

Miguel Angel Revilla, four times president of Cantabria, and well known character, used to always present quality, expensive, anchovies from Cantabria on his official visits. The anchovies I buy for my sandwiches come in triple packs for less than 3€.

It's similar with prawns—what we Britons call prawns. I don't think I'll ever understand the differences in quality when buying the right and wrong type of prawns. Whether gambas blancas, gambas rojas, gambones, carabineros or langostinos are the best and whether the ones from Denia are better than those from Huelva or Garrucha. Not knowing can cost you dear. Six of the better variety in an ordinary restaurant cost me 48€. It still smarts and that was six or seven years ago now.

Faced with such price variations the majority of us tend to plump for something with an everyday cost or, maybe, we push out the boat and buy the next step up. Then, when we taste it, we wonder what all the fuss was about. The problem is that we've bought run-of-the-mill. Spaniards wax lyrical about their air-cured ham. It can be spectacular but you have to be willing to pay for the quality, acorn fed, variety and eat it sliced wafer thin. The ham that most of us get most of the time—in a ham sandwich or as a slice of ham on our breakfast toast—can be anything between average and chewing bacon.

The point I'm trying, so long windedly, to make is that Spaniards often enthuse about certain food products that you may find uninspirational. There are lots of classic dishes, firm Spanish favourites, that often seem very commonplace. Croquetas are a good example; lots have the consistency of wallpaper paste, are served semi heated and taste of nothing much but, if you strike lucky or know where to go they are exceedingly good. Paella is another dish where the difference between a made to order paella cooked with care and the proper ingredients has nothing in common with the bright yellow rice served as part of a set meal in a tourist restaurant. 

Lots of these foods are rolled out at Christmas - mantecados and polvorones, peladillas, roscones, turrón, angulas, gooseneck barnacles (percebes) while other, all-year-round favourites, get a special outing at Christmas—prawns, croquetas, ham, roast lamb, and around here even broth with meatballs (variously named pelotas, relleno or even faseguras). If you get the opportunity go for the quality stuff - it's usually worth the stretch.

Five in the morning or Mantecados and Polvorones

I often wake up around 5 am. Anyone of a certain age will know why. Usually, I find that I don't go back to sleep properly; I doze, and I turn things over in my mind. Typically, the things are of no importance - I remember a job to do, I wonder why my knee is aching, things like that. This morning it was mantecados and polvorones.

Mantecados and polvorones are typical Spanish Christmas biscuit-like cakes. They're supposed to taste different to each other, though I can never remember which is which. A website I just consulted tells me that polvorones tend to crumble more than mantecados and that polvorones have ground almonds in them, while mantecados (which get their name from their high content of manteca or lard) don't. The website says the shapes are different too and then goes on to say that both can be round (!) but that polvorones are square and mantecados are rectangular. On other websites I've read that mantecados have various flavourings while polvorones don't or that the almonds in one are toasted and in the other not - oh, and that polvorones are oval. Trust me, whatever the websites say, they're more or less the same.

So, I was thinking about buying some. My partner is not a fan. She says they are dry and tasteless. I remembered what a Spanish language teacher told me years ago when I was saying how tedious they were. She said the problem was that I bought poor-quality industrial polvorones. I always think that the word 'industrial,' to describe mass-produced cakes and biscuits, is such a good word - it brings to mind Jerusalem's Dark Satanic Mills. I need to find some decent, traditionally made ones.

Now, if you want a roscón for Reyes/Kings, you can buy an industrial one from any supermarket for a few euros, or you can take out a bank loan to order one from a cake shop. It's the same for turrón. All the supermarkets have their own brand, they also sell some varieties which bear no relation whatsoever to real turrón. But, if you want tradition and quality, you pay for it. It's a balance between the stress on your credit card and the list of ingredients on the label. The more natural it is, the better it will taste, and the more it will cost. I wondered, for this is the fevered state of my mind at 5 am, where you might get decent mantecados or polvorones. It's like the questions on the Facebook community pages, the ones about where you can buy a hammer or bread, the ones that cause a smirk.

As soon as I was up, I dashed off a WhatsApp message to a Spanish pal. Her response was, "The original polvorones are from Estepa in Seville. If you get them in a supermarket, look where they were made. And take a look at some online reviews because all that glitters is not gold."

So I did, and this is what I got as the creme de la creme: Mantecados de Felipe II from Vitoria in the Basque Country, Estepa from Estepa in Seville, El Toro from Tordesillas in Valladolid, D. Sancho Melero from Antequera in Málaga, Dos Hermanos from Castuera in Badajoz, and San Telesforo from Toledo in Castilla la Mancha.

I know that I'm going to have to go to a traditional grocer's to get any one of those. It's pretty obvious they are not supermarket fodder.

Dust and lard and no Joseph Beuys

I think Quality Street are yummy. Not that good for the waistline perhaps and a bit of a type 2 diabetes problem but, hey ho. Both they and I come from West Yorkshire. When I was a lad, I went on a school trip around the Mackintosh's factory where Quality Street were made. They gave us hundreds of free samples and I'm still grateful. Not that I have a problem with Celebrations or Heroes but, if I were forced to plump for just one, it would still be the Halifax product. I live in Spain though and here the Christmas habits don't include Quality Street. There are no mince pies either. Instead the customary sweet things are turrón, polvorones and mantecados. 

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.

Tales of turrón

Turrón is made from almonds, honey, egg whites and sugar. It's an Alicante speciality which is now produced all over Spain. Turrón, has no specific English equivalent, though for shorthand I often describe it as nougat. It's not much like the pink and white chewy nougat I knew as a youngster though. Turrón is associated with the town of Jijona which is about 70 km up the road from us. I wrote about it ages ago in a blog.

So we were going back to the UK for Christmas. I'd made a pact with my family about not exchanging gifts. We did, nonetheless, take a few Spanish Christmas goodies - mantecados, polvorones and of course turrón. I'd forgotten that I hadn't made the same pact with Maggie's family who showered me with expensive gifts whilst I had neither socks nor bubble bath in trade - it was terribly embarrassing.

The make of turrón that Maggie bought was called Pico which is a good quality if everyday brand - she bought the hard stuff and the soft one. It's maybe a bit less than half the price of the best brands which can cost as much as 9€ for a 300g bar. It was traditional enough though for me to notice something that I've missed in ten years of wolfing it down. I realised they had different names. The crunchy stuff was called Turrón de Alicante and the sort that oozes almond oil was Turrón de Jijona. Nowadays there are tens of flavours of "turrón" most of which have nothing to do with the original concept. So we have chocolate flavour, milk flavour, crema catalana flavour, strawberry flavour etcetera - the list is nearly endless. It was seeing the two traditional types side by side in matcing packets that made me realise the simple difference.

For some now forgotten reason turrón came up in the conversation with our builders. They sang the praises of a turrón produced by a local factory which processes nuts. It's obvious enough when you think about it. They work with almonds, there is lots of local honey and chickens live everywhere so the raw materials were to hand.

Intrigued I bought some when I went to pick up a gas cylinder (excellent isn't it? - nuts and butane in the same shop) and I notice that it has the quality mark to say that it's made to the standards of some regulatory body. That was news to me too and it explains why some of the most famous brands are made in places like Santander and Gijón which are miles from Alicante.

The trouble is I can't eat it. I gained two and a half kilos in the four days in the UK. It's time for penance - the hair shirt and flagellation of portion control. Mind you Christmas is far from over in Spain and just a little each day couldn't do much harm could it?