Marzipan, Halvah, and the Uses of Meal
When was the last time you thought about comminution—reducing solid materials to a smaller size—in the kitchen? Perhaps you occasionally cut up a chicken or a large piece of meat. Probably you chop vegetables. Grains, seeds, nuts, or dried beans probably almost never.
I was thinking about this when I was reading Miranda Brown’s posts about Chinese sweets in her wonderful blog chinesefoodhistory.org as well as her posts on Twitter (@Dong_Muda) and (in this case) on Facebook. (It’s a little hard to keep up!)
She commented:
“My student Katie Dimmery found a halva product in Lijiang (W Yunnan). The crumbly texture is a dead ringer for Mexican marzipan, but the flavor is different (mung bean and sesame).”
I won’t reproduce her photograph but instead show the Mexican marzipan she refers to. It comes as crumbly little cakes of peanuts and sugar.
In the comments, Sean Chen weighed in on Macau ‘almond’ cookies made with mung beans, new to me. Then Miranda Brown was back with sesame, pine nuts, and peanuts.
Which takes us back to those grains, seeds, nuts, and dried beans. These filled the storage rooms of households around the globe in pre-modern times. Sometimes they could be eaten without further preparation (shelled almonds or hazelnuts); sometimes they could be softened by boiling (rice, peanuts).
Most often though grains, seeds, nuts, and beans were ground or pounded into smaller pieces to make meal (cornmeal, oatmeal, almond meal) or flour.
Meals were used to make a huge, overlapping range of products (toasted instant foods, or with water, gruels, porridges, ‘milks’, pastes (doughs). If a sweetener or a fat (either from the seeds themselves, or from another source) were added, the range became even more complex and extensive. The fact that many of these nuts, seeds, and beans (almonds, sesame, peanuts which are a legume) ‘oil’ when ground is an important part of the story.
Moreover, meals were frequently used in combination (ground beans with cereal flour in bread) or used interchangeably.
That’s what’s happening with the sugar-meal family (halvas) that Miranda Brown is experimenting with, and that are found across Eurasia and in the last few hundred years echoed in Latin America.
A detailed discussion of the range of halvas just in Turkey can be found in Mary Isin’s lovely Sherbet and Spice: The Complete Story of Turkish Sweets and Desserts (2013). They range from ones made at home from flour, starch, semolina or rice flour with butter and and sugar or honey to commercial ones with sesame, egg whites, nuts and all kinds of other ingredients. One variant, keten halva, made by repeated stretching and folding until it resembles fine strands of hair, is found from Greece to China.
To me, what is exciting is less exactly what is going when and where because that is going to be incredibly tricky to figure out. It’s that the world has been a small and interconnected place for a long time and that meal-based sweets are evidence of that.
With nut meal (almonds), you can create almond paste or marzipan, depending on the technique, or polvorones (shortbread cookies) if flour is added, all common in Spain. In Mexico, peanuts were substituted in the almond paste. In the Philippines, pili nuts. In Macao, as Sean Chen says, mung beans. I’d guess in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Polvorones are found across Latin America and in the Philippines. There they are made with powdered milk, toasted flour, sugar and butter, and are dead ringers for marzapan, at least in texture.
One last thought. When cacao is introduced to Europe, the most natural way to think of it is as another seed or bean, something that I have been playing around with for several years.
And when sunflowers were introduced to Europe, Russians started using those seeds for halva. Thinking about foods from the New World, I recently bought some Russian halva, to see how it compared. Different flavor, of course, but otherwise very similar to other forms of halva. One thing that did amuse me was that, unlike in most foods in the U.S., they didn’t offer a serving size that would make the calorie count “work” — they just listed how much they thought you’d eat and then gave those calories — 1/4 package, 592 calories. Made me smile. But both surprising and fun to learn about the tremendous range of other seed and bean pastes out there. As always, thank you for sharing. Cynthia
I love the line “I recently bought some Russian halva.” Where? In Chicago? I didn’t even know there was sunflower seed Russian halva. The calorie story is great too.
There are very large Russian and Eastern European populations in Chicago’s northern suburbs. The importance of sunflower seeds to these groups is much in evidence in many of the large grocery stories that cater to the tremendously varied population here. Makes shopping a lot of fun.
I envy you the access to all those neighborhoods. Neither Austin nor Lexington are much good for that kind of prowling.
Yes — I do feel fortunate here.
So, is Mexican marzipan a combination of peanuts and almonds? I was just in Mexico and now I wish I had tried some!
No, it’s just ground peanuts and sugar. It’s a very everyday sweet that children can buy for just a penny or two. There is another confection that is used to model fruits like European marzipan but it’s not almond-based either but milk-based if I remember correctly.
had some last year when I stayed in mexico city for 2 months. Street lady looked a little surprised when I walked up and pointed, but typically mexican we just both smiled at each other! – they are delicious.
Glad you enjoyed them.
Happy new year, Rachel! This post makes me hungry!
My favorite place for a wide selection of high-quality traditional Mexican sweets, and which I warmly recommend to anyone visiting Mexico City, is the Dulcería Celaya downtown (Col. Centro), just off the Zocalo. On another note, once I bought one of those peanut candies from a street vendor and found that batch was made with aspartame (ick). By the way, these peanut candies (I mean the ones made with sugar, not aspartame) make great snacks when hiking in hot or cold weather.
I’d be curious to know more about the origin of these Mexican peanut candies.
I second your recommendation of the Dulcería de Celaya. Odd that a vendor would use aspartame but I guess it was for the dieters. I´ll bear that in mind about a hiking snack. I would guess the origin is an attempt to emulate Old World marzipan before almonds were established in New Spain but that´s just a guess based largely on the name. And names and dishes often go their separate ways.
Rachel, maybe you’re thinking of the tiny, soft fruit-shaped sweets that are so popular here in Mexico. They’re made of azúcar glass (powdered sugar), egg, jugo de limón (lemon juice, usually the key lime), and honey–plus vegetable coloring to create fruit colors. The thick mixture of ingredients is shaped into beautiful wee fruits, usually with a clove stuck into the top to simulate the stem end. Until I tasted one, I always thought they were marzipan, made of almonds. What a surprise!
Like these? https://www.flickr.com/photos/mayavilla/6284847495
Thank you, thank you Cristina. Like you I was so surprised when I first tasted one. I can remember exactly when and where. A doorway in central Guanajuato. The lady who made them invited me to her house to see them being made but that was one of the many things I never managed to do in Mexico.
Now I’m wondering about the relationship between Halva (I grew up eating the half-chocolate versions popular with NY Jews) and Indian Halwa (a chopped/minced/ground sweet carrot stew popular with some buffets we’ve encountered). The carrot halwa tasted a LOT like the carrot candy recipe that has come down in my family (though that is cooked down until it’s stiff enough to roll into balls, and served cool).
Jack Santa Maria’s 1980 Indian Sweet Cookery has a whole chapter on halvas. Carrot, banana, orange, marrow, potato, green gram, gram, peanut, cashewnut, beetroot, semolina, rice flour, semolina and coconut, Bombay (semolina with sultanas and almonds), Karachi (cornflour, like Turkish delight), Madras (semolina, poppy seeds and grated coconut), Sohan (rice flour, mixed nuts). I hazard that they are naming for the texture and the ingredients are extended to vegetables that can be cooked down to that texture. All of them have more dairy/milk and more spicing than the ones to the north. Your family carrot candy sounds delicious.