Flour, sugar and salt
We explain how to prepare gubellitos de picada at home
PalmWe generally associate baking with a festive event, be it religious or family. Flour, butter, sugar, and eggs come together and are transformed into a wide range of sweet treats. Also united are essential ingredients such as almonds, cinnamon, and preserves that bring together the most delicious fruits of each season. We also enjoy savory pastries, cakes, spinach, and small pieces that encase treasures in a heart surrounded by pastry. Our gatherings take place around the table, and our sweet and savory pastries are often present. Our recipe books also showcase a whole tradition of sweet pasta with savory fillings, a seemingly contradictory combination but deeply rooted in our cuisine, especially of noble and convent origins.
The greatest exponent is found in the sweet pastry panadas, heirs of the panadas that we find described in the Sent Soví's Book (early 14th century). Although the Catalan book is not very explicit about the preparation of the pastry, it does include sugar as one of the usual ingredients of the dish. Sweet pastry panadas are linked to the cuisine of stately homes, where the sugared pastry provided distinction and was a way of differentiating from the more common pastries that could be made the rest of the year. In the Llabrés Recipe Book (19th century), we read a curious note in the recipe called 'Panadas that we make every year', of the plagueta E from this compilation, where he distinguishes three different types: those for the gentlemen (with sugar), those for the person writing the recipe (sour) and those for the servants, which vary only in the quantity of flour that was used for the service.
Another example to mention are the sweet cocarrois and the pastries. The recipes for cocarrois only list the ingredients for the pasta, even though they are filled with seasonal vegetables. The few times vegetables are described, they are spinach, chard, wedges, cauliflower, raisins, and pine nuts. cake It represents a more sophisticated cuisine, not only because of the use of sugar, but because they were larger cakes, lavishly decorated and with multiple fillings that combined meat or fish with fruits and candied fruits and were very suitable for offering many guests on holidays.
Pastel de picada
In Menorca the relative of the cake It will be the minced pie or, in its individual version, the gubellito de picada. For the pie, a portion of pastry is thinned (the same one used for the sweet pie), filled with sautéed and spiced minced meat, and covered with another portion of pastry. It is shaped with a mold and decorated. In one version of Friar Roger's book, the pie is filled with minced mutton, boiled chicken, fruit, and spices, covered, and decorated to resemble the leaves of an artichoke, undoubtedly a pie worthy of a grand table. The cubetos or gubellitos owe their name to the mold that gives them their shape and refers us to a French origin derived from beaker ('cup'). In Menorca, their importance extended from the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century, and they were one of the most popular sweets on the island. In the savory version, they are prepared by lining individual molds with the same pastry as the cake, filling them with minced meat sautéed with sugar, butter, and grated lemon, among other ingredients, and covering them with a frosting.
Pastries that combine sweet and savory, heir to a medieval past, are rare and, in some cases, limited to certain very limited areas. Changes in tastes and customs and the move towards a more balanced diet free from sugar have contributed to their disappearance or to a very localized production.
For today's recipe, I have adapted the gubellitos de picada from the book The kitchen of ca n'Squella, by Bep Alès. I hope you like it.
First, we'll make the filling. Cut the onion into julienne strips and sauté it until golden brown. Set it aside.
Fry the minced meat with the diced pork chop. Grind the toasted almonds and add them to the meat with the spices to taste.
We'll make the dough by mixing the egg whites with the sugar, butter, lemon peel, and cinnamon. Add the flour and knead until it sticks to your hands.
We'll thin out portions of the dough and line the molds (in my case, they were silicone muffin molds). We'll fill them with a tablespoon of meat and another of onion and cover them with a piece of dough. We'll seal them tightly and bake at 180°C for about 30 minutes. We'll remove the gubellitos from the mold and bake them for 10 minutes at 170°C so that the dough cooks evenly.
For the pasta
l 275 g of flour
l 4 red eggs
l 100 g of brown sugar
l 66 g of butter
l 1 grated lemon peel
l 1 pinch of cinnamon a lot
For the filling
l 300 g of minced meat
l 150 g belly cutlet
l 100 g of toasted almonds
l 4 onions
l clove, cinnamon
