Empanada Fiambre (Cold-Keeping Ham-and-Olive Empanadas)

Origin: Arequipa

Source: Jesús Bustamante, 1890

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

Instructions

  1. Heap the flour on a table and make a hollow in the center.
  2. Dissolve a small piece of bread yeast in warm, lightly salted water.
  3. Pour the yeast water little by little into the hollow, stirring, and form a stiff dough; knead until it gathers together.
  4. Knead in grasa de chancho (pork lard rendered from fried salt pork) until the dough turns soft and supple.
  5. Cover with a folded cloth and let rest one hour.
  6. Divide into equal portions and roll out, dusted with flour, into thin rounds of the desired size.
  7. Cut ham crosswise into large, very thin slices.
  8. Place two ham slices with a layer of pitted black olives between them on half of each round, fold over, and seal the edges with a repulgo (crimped edge).
  9. Bake on tins; remove quickly once golden.

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