Seemingly trivial culinary puzzles (Catalan canelons) and why they matter
Shortly after my last post, Jeff Koehler, long-time Barcelona resident, now part of a Catalan family, and author of the compelling Rice, Pasta, Couscous: The Heart of the Mediterranean Kitchen (Chronicle, 2009), wrote me. I had, if anything, underestimated the centrality of canelons to Catalan cuisine.
Dec 25 and Dec 26 are the big holidays in Catalunya [the northern Mediterranean part of Spain, Barcelona and Girona where I am now staying]. They are a St Esteban staple — Dec 26th. Dec 25th is escudella i de carn d’olla, the soup. Traditionally, the leftovers of the meat from making Christmas soup are ground and stuffed into the canelons. So it goes with my wife’s family here.
OK, you might ask. Why do you get all excited about canelons in Catalonia, Spain? Who gives a damn?
Perfectly good question.
Answer. They are a clue that may help sort out the history of Catalan cuisine. Thanks to the success of El Bulli and the rest of the high end Catalan restaurant scene, the cuisine of the region is hard to see straight. And because I think history of cuisine reveals as much about the history and culture of a region as the form of the cities or the pattern of the landscape, I want to figure it out. The question is where to begin.
And often a seemingly trivial issue, such as the fact that canelons are one of the celebratory Christmas dishes, can be a good starting point, particularly if it stands out as an anomaly in the official story. Here are some of the oddities.
- The traditional pasta of the region is dried, mainly short, thin fideos. Why does an egg pasta pop up? That’s a luxury pasta.
- The dish is baked. Enclosed ovens for home baking don’t appear until the late nineteenth century. Even then they would have been restricted to the better off city dwellers. Traditional Catalan cuisine, like traditional cuisines in most places, is a boiling and stewing cuisine, not a baking one.
- They are topped (not always now but in older recipes) with bechamel. For sure, not one of the four preparations-sofregeit, picada, allioli, romesco–that occur in the introduction to every book on Catalan cooking as the bases of the cuisine.
- And the ingredients. Butter? milk? white flour? The last is a household ingredient only in the late nineteenth century. Butter? It’s available here, usually French or Danish, but the traditional fats are lard and olive oil. Milk? This is not a dairying region. Even now the milk available in the grocery stores is all UHT, except for the odd bottle of organic.
So this is why I think canelons are a clue. They are the kind of oddity that invites detective work.
What twists and turns of history could have turned a dish made with ingredients alien to the region, techniques alien to the region, a sauce alien to the region into the celebrated Christmas delicacy, made just as grandmother made it?
The Catalans have a longer story about that than I related in my last post, which I now know thanks to Jeff. It’s an anecdote though, still not connected to broader historical changes. So besides rehearsing the story, I’d like to annotate it as well. That’s coming soon.
Under the same name they appear to be popular in Uruguay and Argentina, both places have a large Italian element.
Worth knowing that “Canelons” exists in Spain pre-19th century, these are long cinnamon confits (shown here: http://www.historicfood.com/Comfits.htm).
“Canelons” also exist as a cooking term (things that are made to look like small cylinders) in 18th and 19th century French texts, and found there way into English texts:
“Poularde en Canelons.—Pullet en Canelons.
Cut a fine fowl in two, take out the bones, and put upon each half a good forcemeat, made of poultry; roll it up, having previously covered the inside with thin rashers of bacon; tie it with packthread, and stew it an hour, with half a glass of white wine, some good stock, a bunch of parsley, salt, and pepper; when done, strain off the sauce, skim it, and add two spoonfuls of culis; reduce over the fire to a proper consistence; take off the bacon and packthread, and serve with the sauce.”
I should think that the Catalan “Canelons” comes directly from the Italian term, along with the recipe thought.
Interesting that it has become such a definatively Catalan food item now. Like Jewish fried fish in the UK I guess.
Thanks, as always, Adam. Yes, I ran in to them everywhere when I was in Buenos Aires but they are neither so iconic nor do they dominate the pasta scene as they do here in Catalonia.
And tubular words, as you point out, are everywhere in cooking. The canelons of early nineteenth century upper class British and French cooking of breaded cones of left over meat, the canutillos de chocolate on my table from Belgium, even cinnamon, canela in Spanish.
So the key question is how do the bechamel-type jump to iconic status in twentieth century Catalonia. I think there is a story.