Life in Culebrón

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 th...

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...

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 ...

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...