The cloudy origin of buñuelos

With the arrival of autumn days and prompted by the first hints of cold weather, warm sweet desserts begin to appeal. Among them, and at this time of year, pan-fried fruits are a common feature of our gastronomic tradition.

Contemporary Mallorcan cuisine has some well-known and typical examples of this type of fried food. One example is oreianes, known in Spanish as ‘tostones’, which are usually eaten as desserts during the pig slaughter. Another example is buñuelos (sweet fritters) which are especially associated with the Virgins´ Day, to which we will now turn our attention.

Thanks to the latter, in the days leading up to that date, our streets are once again filled with the spectacle of the buñoleras, the traditional and regular suppliers of buñuelos to consumers. Although their preparation at home is neither difficult nor exceptionally laborious, it does require a certain amount of manual dexterity. For this reason, it is customary to buy buñuelos on the street, made by buñoleras, which is one of the most suggestive features of their belonging to a type of preparation that is, in its final stage, part of the Arab culinary legacy. Their image is remarkably like that of the Arab sellers of buñuelos or alfinges (from isfany, sponge) who sold and still sell their fried treats in the souks. We thus rediscover the ancient tradition of making and selling a tasty and popular dish on the street.

Bunyols de les Verges

A tradition that has not been around for very long, they have become the customary and almost obligatory sweet offered on the island on the date mentioned. Those in charge of making them are young girls who are delighted by their friends, or at least they try to be, with some romantic songs.

Originally, it was young girls who, on that date, would visit the homes of their relatives and friends, singing a song or simply visiting them, to receive a simple gift in return. They were usually treated to apenjoi of raisins, but later these began to be replaced by different fruits and even other gifts, among which, especially in the island’s capital, fritters became common. The success of these fritters, which until then had been more common at the Tots Sants festival, made them the gastronomic emblem of the island.

Probable origins

Their beginnings in the history of gastronomic culture are unclear. Fried dough is one of the oldest culinary preparations and is common to practically all cuisines from the moment they incorporated frying into their culinary techniques. When the gastronomic possibilities of this method of cooking food were realised, one of its logical and inevitable applications was to use it to cook dough made from various types of flour. One of the forms of this type of preparation is what we now know as fritters.

Greek and Roman classics

Their origin is often attributed to Arabic cuisine and, erroneously, to Moorish cuisine, which would have merely passed on its culinary heritage. This mistaken attribution may be because in that gastronomic culture, fried dough is part of their usual preparations and the custom has remained alive to this day. The truth is that the beginnings of fried dough can be traced back to classical Greece, although its eventual origins are unclear.

As far as we know, they are not an overly common preparation in Greek cuisine, but they are somewhat more so in Roman cuisine. However, we can find similarities in both, as among their few sweet preparations there are some that can be taken as early beginnings of the techniques of frying dough, which would then be suitably sweetened.

One of the earliest references is that of Chrysippus of Tyana, author of a treatise on baking, now lost but quoted in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists. His text included the recipe for a dish called catillus ornatus by the Romans. It consisted of dough, conveniently rolled out and cut into small portions, which were then fried in boiling oil. The result does not seem to have been what we now understand as a fritter, but something more like Castilian or Andalusian tostones or Mallorcan oreianes. It was a dish like laganum, fried pasta very similar to today’s crêpes, which were usually eaten sprinkled with pepper and dipped in the ever-present fish garum, so inexplicably appreciated by Roman cuisine.

For a recipe more like today’s fritters, we have to wait until Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 BC) wrote his essay entitled De Agri Cultura, also known as De agri cultura, around 160 BC. In the text, this Roman politician, writer and military man, also known as the Censor or the Elder, among other nicknames that distinguish him from his great-grandson known as Cato the Younger, provides instructions for running a large agricultural enterprise. In 194 AD, Cato was appointed proconsul in charge of the province of Hispania Citerior (Catalonia and Valencia). It is believed that he wrote much of the text during those years, whose pages include ways of preparing preserves, wines and culinary recipes suitable for rural celebrations. One of these recipes is called Globi because it involves making globular or rounded shapes like balls. The recipe combines flour or semolina and cheese, which are mixed together to form balls that are fried in fat and served with honey and poppy seeds. The description of how to prepare and serve them makes them seem similar to our bunyols de vent.

All the manuscripts of Cato’s mentioned treatise also include a copy of a similar text written by Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC), Pompey’s lieutenant and another of the Latin authors who also provides interesting information about the food of that period. Among them we find some about sweet fritters identifiable with the buñuelos described by Cato. His manuscripts sometimes bear the same title as that of the latter author or are called De re rustica. The existing copies of this second text are directly or indirectly descended from a long-lost text called Marcianus, as it was once held in the Marciana Library in Venice. This remarkable copy, now considered lost, was described at the time by Petrus Victorinus as liber antiquissimus et fidelissimus (‘a very ancient and faithful book’). The oldest manuscript of Varro’s manual preserved today is Codex Parisinus 6842, written in Italy sometime before the end of the 12th century. Its editio princeps was printed in Venice in 1472. To ensure the accuracy of the printed text, its editor, the humanist Angelo Politiano, compared the version selected for this first printing with the Marcianus codex, achieving a result considered an extraordinary and rigorous testimony to the work.

The ancestors of the fritters featured in these two ancient writings are very similar to those considered to be the precursors of today’s Neapolitan Struffoli, typical of the Christmas period. Their name is believed to be derived from the Greek ‘strongulos’, meaning “round in shape”, and their origins date back to the time of the founding of Naples as a Greek colony under the name of Partenopea. Tradition identifies them as a sweet of good luck and abundance. For a long time, they were made in convents, where they were one of the usual gifts given to benefactors to thank them for their donations and charity.

Others were lucuns, mentioned by Marcus Terentius Varro. The latter, also known as lucums, seem to derive from lucunculus, a kind of honey cake fried in oil. Their recipe and name were passed on to Arabic confectionery, later designating lukums, almond and sugar cakes, which are among the probable origins of today’s nougat.

After Cato’s, the first known recipe for a dough for fritters seems to be the one collected by Apicius in his work De re coquinaria in the first century AD. His recipe consists of a dough made from flour and hot water or milk, which is fried in the best quality oil and served spread with honey.

This same fried variety appears in the writings of Isidore of Seville in the 7th century, as a wide, flat bread fried in oil. It seems to have been a pan-fried fruit like fritters, although it bears unmistakable similarities to certain fried bread dough cakes called sopaipas, which are still eaten in some villages on the peninsula during Holy Week, spread with cane or honey.

Antoni Contreras Mas is a researcher and promoter of Mallorcan gastronomy.