Empanaditas á la Coquetuela (Little Layered Empanadas with Almonds and Raisins)

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 pastry is generally thought to have originated in Galicia, in Spain's northwest, and the word itself is attested early — as enpãada in Old Galician-Portuguese by the thirteenth century, and named in the Cantigas de Santa María around 1282. A Catalan cookbook of 1520, the Llibre del Coch of Robert de Nola, already records empanadas filled with seafood. Across the peninsula the idea took local shapes — Mallorca's cocarrois, folded around chard, spinach, raisins and pine nuts, among them — and it was largely by way of southern Spain, Andalusia, that the empanada crossed the Atlantic with the Spanish conquest.

In the Americas it naturalized region by region. The Peruvian empanada has been eaten since the earliest days of the Viceroyalty of Peru, 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 establish the empanada's Galician descent and its colonial passage through Andalusia into the Americas, but not 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.

Ingredients

• 1 pound flour
• 2 ounces grasa de chancho (pork lard)
• picadillo (finely minced/hashed meat)
• black pepper
• cumin
• white onion
• 1 clove garlic
• almonds
• raisins
• water

Instructions

1. Knead a pound of flour into a soft, supple dough, working in two ounces of grasa de chancho (pork lard) little by little.
2. Form the dough into a hojaldra (layered puff pastry) of six leaves, roll it thin, and cut into small squares laid on a cloth.
3. Make a picadillo (finely minced meat) well seasoned with pepper, a little cumin, fried white onion, and a ground, fried clove of garlic; add almonds and raisins.
4. Wet the rim of the lower dough with a water-moistened finger, place the filling, and lay the top over so the edges stick and seal.
5. Bake on tins set on paper, or alternatively fry them in grasa de chancho (pork lard).