Catalan marzipan sweets rolled in pine nuts and baked for All Saints' Day
Origin: Barcelona & Catalonia
From the journey of Almond.
Catalonia eats these on one night of the year, and it eats a great many of them. La Castanyada falls on the last night of October and the first of November, and it is the Catalan All Saints': roast chestnuts, sweet potatoes, moscatell, and trays of panellets. The name means little breads, and the older sense is closer to it than the modern one, since they began as small offerings baked to be blessed and eaten on the vigil of All Saints. What they are made of is marzipan, which is to say almond and sugar in something close to equal weight, and the Catalan version departs from the German and the Sicilian in one particular: a proportion of boiled potato or sweet potato is worked into the paste. That sounds like a bulking-out and is not. The starch holds moisture, which keeps the interior soft for days where a pure marzipan would set firm and dry, and it takes the edge off a sweetness that would otherwise be punishing at the quantities these are eaten. The classic is the pine nut panellet, rolled until the surface is entirely studded and glazed with egg before baking. Pine nuts are expensive enough that the price of panellets is a minor annual news story in Barcelona. The other varieties, coconut, coffee, quince, chocolate, and almond, exist mostly so that a tray can be varied. Almond runs through the whole of Catalan cooking rather than only its sweets, and it has done since the Middle Ages: the Llibre de Sent Soví of about 1324, the earliest surviving Catalan cookery book, thickens sauce after sauce with pounded almond and almond milk.
Ground almonds and sugar in equal weight is the marzipan ratio and the potato is additional. Do not reduce the sugar; it is structural as well as sweetening, and less of it gives a paste that will not hold. Sweet potato is the more traditional choice in much of Catalonia and gives a slightly deeper colour and flavour. Ordinary floury potato is entirely standard too. They keep for a week in an airtight tin and are better on the second day, once the almond has settled. Serve with moscatell or a sweet Catalan wine, alongside roast chestnuts and baked sweet potatoes, which is the full Castanyada table. For a firmer, more Sicilian marzipan, leave the potato out entirely and bind with an extra egg white. The result is closer to massapà and keeps much longer, but loses the softness that makes a panellet a panellet.
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