Pa pagès, the haiku of flour

Certain loaves dazzle with their attractive appearance, intricate decoration, or luxurious finish. Others are irresistible due to the abundance of costly ingredients in their dough, whilst the Pitiusan pa pagès possesses a quiet allure of its own. This traditional method transforms bread into a sort of haiku of flour that captivates through its absolute purity.

Pitiusan baking is characterised by the simplicity of its creations: honest loaves that make no pretence of being anything more than they are, whose essence has been shaped over the centuries by necessity (the need for preservation in the case of crostes or galleta forta) or the scarcity of certain ingredients. When it comes to pa pages – the everyday bread of the rural folk – scarcity has come from many quarters, as this is a land accustomed to frugality and where deprivation and hardship have, depending on the era, been more the rule than the exception.

A harsh land for a pure bread

If we read the words that the researchers Paula and George Demerson devoted to the bread of Ibiza in 18th-century, we see that the very existence of bread was a complicated matter: flours of very varying quality were used, and it was not uncommon for some to be defective. In fact, the habitual scarcity of wheat meant that the ‘king of cereals’ was routinely mixed with humble barley (which sometimes made up a significant proportion of the dough). n Ibiza, conditions have not always been ideal for growing wheat, due to the climate and the quality of the soil. Added to this situation are the frequent droughts and, as if that were not enough, the lack of labour to till the land, as the town councillors explained in a petition to the King in 1755: ‘Most of the land belonging to these inhabitants lies fallow due to a lack of labourers… and all the more so as the island is so frequently raided by Moorish pirates and its farmers spend most of the year defending it in its harbours and along its coastlines.’

Added to this austere landscape is another absence: the absence of salt that characterises the rustic breads of the Balearic Islands. The age-old custom of making bread without salt means that the ‘pa pagès’ catches the visitor’s eye because of what is missing, whilst personally it amazes me because of what it offers: a pure bread, made without cutting corners. If we think about it, a large part of the mainland’s baking industry is obsessed with the volume, fluffiness and whiteness of bread, which is why it is very common (and has even become the norm) to use additives in the dough to achieve these aims (ascorbic acid – vitamin C – to strengthen the gluten, emulsifiers to make the dough fluffier, etc.). However, bakers in the Balearic Islands are free from this burden, as such standards are not so important here; the traditional customer does not mind if the bread is not snow-white, nor do they want it to be extremely light and impossibly fluffy (like the typical loaves that resemble cork and lack both flavour and aroma). This means that Balearic bakers need use nothing but flour and water; they therefore approach bread ‘unadorned,’ armed only with flavourful flour and their own expertise. It is a purity that moves me deeply.

Grains and changing tastes: dreaming of bread from the past

For millennia, the culture of grain has shaped the landscape, just as the presence of elements so characteristic of the Pitiusas – such as fig trees, olive trees, almond trees, and vineyards – has done. However, there is an interesting nuance here, as the climate and the soil shape the grain-growing landscape. Although nowadays most of the bread we eat is made from soft wheat producing fine white flour, in reality the wheat that has predominantly grown along the shores of the Mediterranean – from the Maghreb to the Middle East, through southern Italy and Spain, and, of course, the Balearic Islands – has been durum wheat, which yields a darker, grainier flour, like fine sand, sometimes yellowish, sometimes more brown. For centuries, this was the most widely grown cereal on our islands. In fact, one of the things that makes xeixa exceptional is its fine, white flour. As a point of interest, here is an anecdote: in the early 20th century, Peter Rokseth, a Norwegian philologist, came to the Balearic Islands with the intention of documenting cereal-related terminology. Rokseth left us an incredible snapshot of rural life over a century ago, including the names of the wheat varieties grown in Mallorca at the time, the vast majority of which were durum wheat. In fact, after describing the wheats (mostly durum varieties), he explains that there was something else which the farmers called ‘xeixa’ and which was not classified as ‘wheat’ (blat). Without going that far back, one of the pioneers of wheat cultivation in Spain, Manuel Gadea, in his seminal work *Trigos españoles* (Spanish Wheats), documented a total of 27 wheat varieties in the Balearic Islands in 1954, 21 of which were durum wheat. This gives us an idea of how deeply rooted durum wheat is on these islands. Unfortunately, although durum wheat varieties such as ‘mollar roig’ are being revived, they are rarely cultivated today, making it rather difficult to taste an archaic ‘pa pagès’ made from durum wheat. Nevertheless, this opens the door to imagining what the flavour and texture of a ‘pa pagès’ from days gone by might have been like.

Ibán Yarza, is a journalist, writer, and populariser of bread culture