Emparedados á la Rosarina (Rosario-Style Fried Chicken-and-Ham Sandwiches)

History

An empanada is a portion of filling sealed inside a folded round of dough and then baked or fried, its defining gesture the crimped, pinched seam — the *repulgo* — that locks the edge shut. The name states the method plainly: it comes from the Castilian verb *empanar*, whose first sense is to enclose something in dough or bread to cook it in the oven, and the English word is simply the Spanish past participle of that verb, "to wrap in bread."

The form is Iberian and old. The word is attested early in Old Galician-Portuguese: it appears in the Cantigas de Santa María, the great thirteenth-century songbook of Alfonso X, where a hungry man chokes on a chicken leg he has pulled from an *enpanada*. Robert de Nola's Llibre del Coch, the cookbook that carried the Catalan and then Castilian kitchen into print, already records empanadas filled with seafood — a general receipt for meat or fish, and a whole salmon spiced, sealed in pastry and sent to the oven.

Across the peninsula the idea took local shapes — Mallorca's *cocarrois*, folded around chard, spinach, raisins and pine nuts, among them. In the Americas it naturalized region by region, and in Argentina the pastry splintered into so many local forms that every region came to claim its own — still closed, as in Spain, with that same *repulgo* seam.

Gorriti's 1890 compilation, assembled from recipes mailed in across Spanish America, catches that spread mid-stream in three contributed entries. From Arequipa, Jesús Bustamante's Empanada Fiambre is an empanada in the fullest sense: a yeasted, lard-worked dough rolled thin, folded over ham and pitted black olives and sealed with a *repulgo*, prized because it keeps fresh and pleasant for many days and so rides along as a traveler's cold provision — which is what *fiambre* means here. From Buenos Aires, Sílvia Sagasta's Empanaditas á la Coquetuela turn instead to a *hojaldre*, a layered puff pastry of six leaves, filled with a seasoned *picadillo* and — in the sweet-and-savory register long typical of Argentine empanadas — almonds and raisins, then baked on paper or fried in lard. The third entry sits apart: the Emparedados á la Rosarina of Carolina Z. de Escalera are, for all their placement here, not empanadas at all but fried sandwiches — milk-soaked bread slices, egg-dipped and toasted, clasped around a chicken-and-ham hash. The Spanish word *emparedado*, a thing "walled in," shares the enclosing logic, and the dish keeps cold as a *fiambre* like its neighbors, but no dough is folded and no edge is crimped.

What the recipes and the sources withhold is the connective tissue. The pages do not say how each contributor came by her particular version, nor why the compiler set a bread sandwich among the empanadas — whether by kitchen habit, by their shared life as cold *fiambre*, or by an editor's loose hand. Those joins the record does not make, and none is invented here. Several dates we once gave are in the same position: that the songbook entry can be pinned to around 1282, that the Llibre del Coch is specifically the Catalan edition of 1520, that the pastry originated in Galicia, and that it crossed the Atlantic by way of Andalusia. Those we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• cold bread loaf (day-old bread)
• milk
• 1 gallina (stewing hen)
• ham
• black pepper
• flour
• 1 clove garlic
• butter
• egg yolks

Instructions

1. Scrape the crust from a loaf of cold bread, cut it into slices, and soak them in milk.
2. Boil a stewing hen, joint it, and chop the meat very finely with a piece of ham.
3. Season the meat with pepper, flour, and a ground clove of garlic; stir to combine and fry in butter.
4. Beat egg yolks, coat the soaked bread slices, and fry them until well toasted.
5. Sandwich the chicken-and-ham filling between two fried slices, dip again in egg, and fry.
6. Serve hot at lunch, or enjoy cold as a fiambre.