Empanada

• 1. Introduction

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  The empanada turns up in a medieval Galician-Portuguese poem from around 1282, part of the Cantigas de Santa Maria. The poem describes the worst rascal in a band of robbers. He has pulled a cold chicken leg out of a pasty and hides it under his cape, hoping to eat it in secret. God, the poem says, will not allow it. That scrap of verse shows a folded pastry was already ordinary enough to appear in a story about thieves. An empanada is a turnover, baked or fried, made of pastry wrapped around a filling. People now eat it across Spain, Portugal and other parts of Southern Europe, in North and West Africa, in South Asia, throughout Latin America and in the Philippines. How did one folded pastry spread across so much of the world? Who first wrote it down, and who first baked it? And why does a pastry with the same basic idea taste so different from one town to the next?

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• 2. Galician Roots

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  The word empanada comes from the Spanish verb empanar, which means to coat with bread. The name therefore means breaded, and it describes the method well. A cook folds dough over a filling of meat, cheese, tomato, corn or something else, then bakes or fries the result.

  Nobody knows for certain where the empanada began. The usual guess points to Galicia, a region in the northwest of Spain, in the 7th century. Galician accounts say that rules for preparing empanadas were decreed in the Visigothic era of that same century. The first filling on record was either mushroom or chicken.

  Travelers had good reason to like the dish. The dough sealed the filling inside, so the road dust could not reach it. Stone carvers seem to have known the pastry too. Empanadas appear sculpted on the Portico of Glory in Santiago de Compostela, a work dated to the 12th century.

  The empanada galega is still one of the best-loved dishes in Galicia, and towns serve it at festivals and pilgrimages. Cooks fill it with tuna, cod, shellfish, meat or chicken, along with poached onion and sometimes red pepper or raisins. It can be eaten hot or cold. Its round shape is said to come from the old practice of baking cakes in embers, which later moved into clay pots. Most are still made at home in ovens, though bakeries and street stalls now sell them as well.

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• 3. Medieval Witnesses

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  Four rabbinic scholars, whose lives together stretch from about 1250 to 1340, left some of the earliest written traces of the pastry outside Galicia. Asher ben Jehiel wrote the Novellae. Yom Tov of Seville wrote his own Novellae. Aaron ben Jacob wrote the Orchot Chayyim, and Jacob ben Asher wrote the Arba'ah Turim. Each of these books mentions inpanada and panada, which they describe as bread products with fat, meat or fish inside.

  A cookbook published in Catalan in 1520 gives a fuller picture. The author was Robert de Nola, and the book was called Llibre del Coch. It includes empanadas filled with seafood, and they appear in the recipes for Catalan, Italian, French and Arabian food. Seafood is still a favored filling in places such as the coast of Patagonia.

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• 4. Argentine Provinces

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  Salta, in the north of Argentina, gives its name to the salteña, a small, juicy and spicy empanada filled with potatoes, peppers and ground chili. Neighboring Bolivia loves them too. In Argentina as a whole, empanadas are served at parties and festivals as either a starter or a main course, and some shops sell nothing else.

  Every province has its own version, and the differences can be traced one by one. Jujuy adds peas and garlic. Its filling is called recado, and its method of crimping the edge shut is called simbado. La Rioja puts in hard-boiled egg, red bell pepper, olives and raisins. Santiago is known for especially juicy empanadas, and Catamarca makes similar ones that are smaller.

  Tucumán holds an annual National Empanada festival in Famaillá. There, empanadas made with matambre and fried in good fat compete against the entreveradas, which mix matambre with chicken breast, garlic, ground chili, hard-boiled egg and cumin. Farther south, Mendoza makes them large, with olives and garlic. San Juan uses extra onion, which makes the filling juicier and slightly sweet. San Luis seasons its large empanadas with oregano and hot pepper and kneads pork fat into the dough.

  Córdoba has a sweeter story. Its Pastel Federal, also called the empanada of Misia Manuelita, became famous for a filling of pears boiled in wine with cloves. Today it is less sweet, but tradition still calls for a sprinkle of sugar. In Traslasierra, cooks add carrots and potatoes.

  The Litoral region drew immigrants from many parts of the world. Santa Fe, Entre Ríos and Corrientes fill their empanadas with river fish such as surubí, a catfish, or dorado, or with white sauce and Goya cheese. In the Patagonian Cordillera the filling is lamb. Along the coast it is seafood. The Argentine Ministry of Culture has gone as far as declaring the Creole empanada of Buenos Aires a Cultural Heritage of Food and Gastronomy.

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• 5. Corn Dough Country

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  In Mexico, an empanada is made from fried corn masa rather than wheat flour, and it resembles a gordita or a huarache. Cooks fill it with the ingredients of a taco, such as refried beans, boiled chicken, chopped potato with white cheese, pork belly or ground beef. Pickled cabbage salad, queso fresco, cream and spicy tomato sauce go on top. Because it cooks so quickly, it is a cheap appetizer at fair stands, often served beside flautas.

  Belize calls its version a panade. The corn masa is stuffed with fish, chicken or beans, deep-fried, and topped with cabbage or salsa. Panades are frequently sold as street food.

  Colombian empanadas also rely on a cornmeal dough, and that is what sets them apart from the wheat-flour pastries of some neighboring countries. The fillings include seasoned beef, pork or chicken, potatoes, rice and vegetables. They are fried until golden and eaten with lime wedges and ají, a sauce of chili peppers, herbs and vinegar. In the Andean region the fillings tend toward potatoes and meat, while coastal areas favor seafood.

  Venezuelan dough is ground corn, or precooked corn in modern versions, and annatto can tint it yellow as it toasts. The half-moon pastries are fried in oil. On Margarita Island the traditional filling is cazón, a school shark. Other fillings include cheese, shredded beef, chicken, ham and even combinations of mollusks. A filling of black beans and cheese is called dominó. The empanada de pabellón combines shredded beef, black beans, fried plantain slices and white cheese in a single pastry.

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• 6. Wind, Plantain, and Flour

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  Ecuador has an empanada de viento, which means wind empanada. Cooks roll thin flour dough around cheese, sometimes mixed with onion, and deep-fry it. As it fries, the pastry fills with air and turns hollow, leaving the cheese coating the inside. Some people eat it sweet with sugar, and others eat it savory with salsa de ají.

  El Salvador is one of the few countries that wrap their empanadas in plantain instead of a flour dough. The sweet empanadas de plátano are torpedo-shaped dumplings made from very ripe plantain. They hold vanilla custard, are fried, and are rolled in sugar. Refried beans can replace the custard, but the flavor stays sweet.

  Chile bakes its empanada de pino, which is filled with seasoned ground beef, onions, olives, raisins and hard-boiled eggs. The cheese-filled kind has crimped edges and is deep-fried.

  In Puerto Rico the pastry is called an empanadilla. It has a flour base, is fried, and takes whatever the local kitchen offers, such as picadillo of ground beef, pork, chicken, guava and cheese, or even a pizza-style filling of marinara and cheese. The list also reaches jueyes, which are crabs, as well as chapín, conch, rabbit and octopus.

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• 7. Far From Spain

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  In Modica, a town in the province of Ragusa in Sicily, bakers make 'mpanatigghi. These half-moon panzerotti hold almonds, walnuts, chocolate, sugar, cinnamon, cloves and minced beef. They are also known as impanatiglie or dolce di carne, meaning pasty of meat. The Spaniards probably brought them during their rule of Sicily in the sixteenth century, and the name echoes the Spanish empanadas and empanadillas. Game meat went into them in earlier centuries, and beef does today.

  In Manado, in North Sulawesi in Indonesia, the pastry is called panada. Portuguese influence is credited with bringing it there. The crust is thick and made of fried bread. The filling is spicy cakalang, a skipjack tuna, with chili, or else curry, potatoes or quail eggs. Its relatives, the karipap and the pastel, have a thinner crust.

  In the Philippines the usual filling is picadillo-style ground beef, pork or chicken with potatoes, chopped onions and raisins, wrapped in a somewhat sweet wheat-flour bread. It is baked or fried until flaky. Potatoes are often added to stretch the meat and lower the cost. Another filling is kutsay, or garlic chives.

  Ilocos in the north has its own style, the Empanada de Ilocos. Its fillings include green papaya, mung beans, cabbage, Vigan longganisa sausage and egg yolk. The dough is made from glutinous rice paste called galapong or from rice flour with annatto, which gives it an orange color and a crunchier bite. A version stuffed with mashed eggplant, scrambled eggs and cabbage is called poqui poqui.

  Other Philippine regions go their own way. The empanada de kaliskis of Bulacan has a flaky, multilayered crust that looks like fish scales. Cebu's empanada Danao is filled with chopped chorizo and chayote, deep-fried and dusted in white sugar. Zamboanga's version holds sweet potato and garbanzo beans and comes with a sweet vinegar dip. Dessert empanaditas can be filled with latik, a coconut caramel, or with honey and nuts, or with peanut butter. Kapampangan cooks use yema custard and cashew nuts, and in Cebu the sinudlan empanada is a small fried pastry of bukayo, sweetened coconut meat.

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• 8. Cousins and Look-Alikes

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  In Nigeria the same idea is called a meatpie. Such names show how freely the turnover has moved from kitchen to kitchen. French bakers make the chausson from puff pastry, with a stew such as daube or confit inside, or a béchamel sauce with ham or cheese. It is shaped like a half-moon, and a rectangular version is called a friand. The sweet chausson aux pommes is one of its forms, and the pâté lorrain is stuffed with pork cooked in wine and onions. All of these are baked. The fried relatives, made of puff pastry or shortcrust, are the rissoles.

  Brazil's pastel is a half-circle or rectangle of thin crust, fried in vegetable oil until crisp and brownish. Fillings include ground meat, mozzarella, Catupiry, heart of palm, codfish, cream cheese, chicken and small shrimp. Sweet ones can contain guava paste with Minas cheese, banana or chocolate. In Portugal, fried treats called Pasteis de Bacalhau are made with codfish, while rissois are made with shrimp.

  In the United States, empanadas based mostly on South American recipes are sold from food carts, food trucks and restaurants in New York City, New Jersey, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and Miami. They also turn up in places with large Hispanic populations, such as San Antonio, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

  The family resemblance reaches much farther. The molote, pirozhki, chebureki, calzone, samosa, gujhia, knish, kreatopitakia, khuushuur, Natchitoches meat pie, Jamaican patty and pasty are all savory pastries of the same kind. Most Malay-speaking countries in Southeast Asia call the pastry epok-epok or karipap, which means curry puff in English. Chinese cooks fry a dumpling called yau gok, and in Vietnam the fried dumpling is called bánh gối.

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