Polvorones - A History!

Now, I know I've already touched on these biscuits in my Mince Pies post, but as I said the history behind them is so fascinating that I had to give them their own little post. So this will be a little break from tradition for this blog, as I'll be focusing a lot more on the history than I will be on the method!

Even though these biscuits look
quite thick, I've still rolled the 
dough out too thinly!

That being said, I'll start with a short piece about the method. These biscuits are made by combining butter, sugar, flour, ground almonds, and cinnamon in a bowl until a stiff dough forms. Some recipes call for the use of milk too, though it wasn't necessary in this case. The resulting texture is very short and delicate, which is where the name polvorone comes from. Polvo in Spanish means powder or dust, and they really do crumble into a powder in your mouth. This doesn't sound pleasant, but the texture is rather heavenly! 

Polvorones are a variety of mantecados, shortbreads that take their name from the lard (or manteca) of pigs, from with which they were traditionally made. This recipe, and many more these days, substitute lard for butter, making them vegetarian friendly. The use of lard had some very sinister implications hundreds of years ago though...

Keep in mind that polvorones 
traditionally contained lard...

Perhaps the most fascinating, and certainly the most haunting, part of the history of polvorones is the role they are believed to have played during the Spanish Inquisition. For those who don't know, as I certainly didn't before I began writing this post, the Inquisition was an office set up within the Catholic Church to seek out and punish heresy across Europe and America. The Inquisition was at its most dominant in Spain, where Muslims and Jews were tortured and executed, often under false accusations, and some 32,000 people were executed over the course of 200 years or so.

By the end of the 15th century, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain believed that the Catholic Church in Spain was corrupted by Jews who had converted to Christianity in order to escape centuries of anti-Semitism. Known as Conversos, these individuals were blamed for plague, for the abduction of young children, and for poisoning water supplies. Prominent Christian families also viewed Conversos with suspicion and demanded harsher punishments against such individuals. Ferdinand and Isabella complied, as they were concerned about angering these prominent families, especially when Chrisitan support was required for an upcoming crusade against Islam within Spain.  

Eating polvorones therefore became a method through which an individual could prove their devotion to the Catholic faith. Judaism and Islam teaches its followers not to consume pork, which meant the Inquisitors General could identify "heretics" based on who would refuse to eat the biscuits, given that they contained lard from pigs. 

I can't find anything online that explains how crucial a part these biscuits played in the routing out and persecution of these so-called "heretics", nor can I find much information about how these biscuits went from being the tools of the Inquisitors General to a Christmas holiday tradition in Spain. Nonetheless, these biscuits played an important role in an infamous period of European history, and I hope at least one person finds this just as fascinating as I do!   

I feel like here is a good place to end it, right on the border between informative pamphlet and third year dissertation style piece. Who knows, if I come across a bake with a history as intriguing as polvorones I might do something like this again in the future! 

Gibby x