THE TASTE OF THE FESTIVITIES…

Surely we have never stopped to think about the value, the history, the heritage that all those recipes that we prepare at these holidays or sometimes even on a day-to-day basis suppose.

Think a little and you will see that you make that mojo as your grandmother taught you and probably her mother or grandmother. It is these recipes that preserve the gastronomic identity of the Canary Islands, the food pattern, the reasons for its crops, its recipe books and the role of women in the legacy of the customs and gastronomy of the islands.

From what is cooking? to the strategic shipping value that the islands had and therefore the wealth that came to them. Becoming a tricontinental meeting point for comings and goings of ships loaded with products and knowledge.

All that pantry that talks about history. Like the one we can find behind the beautiful potatoes, where they are only grown in the Canary Islands and Peru. Or all those English or Portuguese roots that we find in our customs and recipes. Those that talk about butter cookies or that in the Canary Islands we say cake that comes from “cake”.

For all this I ask you, what is the menu these days? What recipes are inherited? Do you know their why?

Those meat pies and their history, those homemade sausages, those lambs, goat meat, baifo… recipes or products that are prepared at those festivals and that remind us of their origins.

The meatloaf, wrapped in puff pastry, is a sample of the use of meat as an ingredient for a sweet recipe, this culinary custom that is very common on the peninsula and if we search, we find many references that speak of the same recipes but with nuances, examples are the “Alcoyano” cake or the Murcian cake.

In the book Christmas in Gran Canaria, he refers to one of these recipes from the manuscript of Doña María del Pino González-Corvo, in which he describes the preparation of the filling:

«Take a pound (460 grams) of pork meat, after cleaning the gualdrapas it is finely chopped with plenty of parsley (from which the stems are removed) and make some balls. In a saucepan with warm water, add a head of garlic, peeled and mashed with salt; the water is tested and more salt will be added if necessary. Put on the fire and when it is boiling add the meat balls. Once cooked, the meat is removed and pounded in a mortar. Once this is done, strain the broth, melt the meat in it, color it with saffron and add crushed cloves. Return to the heat and add, little by little, a pound of ground biscuit bread, stirring the content until it begins to boil and thicken; then butter and a pound and a quarter of sugar are added…»