When it comes to food, I identify with optimism. In the pickle, for instance, I see a cool, electrolyte-charged customer and not an out-of-date cucumber masquerading as Frankenstein’s big toe. Spanish pastries, however, have proved to be tricky territory for this mindset.
The reason lies in the fact that they’re very dry, perhaps to the point of being hydrophobic. Stubborn in their aversion to all things moisture, eating one is often akin to submitting my mouth to a pre-bout weight cut. Every Sunday across a two-month period, I’d come home from a different bakery feeling emotionally spent; so much affective investment, dashed each time against a cold (or dry) shoulder of indifference. Even a trip to Segovia, part culture binge, part quest to taste a ponche seviano, which a friend had described as a lemon drizzle cake (her emphasis), ended in bitter teeth-grinding.
Yesterday, however, things changed. Tempted into a bakery by muscle memory, I bought a rosquilla, which can only be described as a deep-fried cake in the shape of a donut. I’d had them many times before and hadn’t been impressed, to the point that I was cutting my losses before doing so much as opening the wrapping. Then came the revelation, though perhaps not as you might’ve expected.
The rosquilla was many things, but it couldn’t be described as moist. The beauty, however, lay in the variation in crumb consistency. The pastry’s periphery, faintly percolated with frying oil and therefore more bulbous of crumb, yielded to a finer-crumbed, delicate interior. To my mind, this was a mind-blowing goalpost shift: the pastry, rejecting the dry/moist binary, had instead opted to riff on a gradation of dryness expressed through texture, comparable to Rothko’s varied saturations of a single colour. Genius.
I’m aware that it’s a marmite conclusion. I was bemused too. In any case, whichever side of the argument you find yourself on, and provided you’re in Spain, buy yourself a rosquilla. It’s an adventure.
Image Credit: “Rosquillas de la abuela” by Daquella manera is marked with CC0 1.0.