Galicia's flourless almond cake, fragrant with lemon and cinnamon and stamped with the cross of Saint James in icing sugar
Origin: Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain
From the journey of Almond.
The Tarta de Santiago is the almond cake of Galicia and the sweet of the great pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, where for more than a thousand years pilgrims have walked the Camino to the supposed tomb of the apostle Saint James. It is a flourless cake, made of almost nothing but ground almond, sugar, and egg, scented with lemon zest and a little cinnamon, and it carries on its surface, stencilled in icing sugar, the Cruz de Santiago, the sword-like cross of the Order of Saint James. The almond cake itself is medieval, recorded in Galicia from at least the sixteenth century; the cross was added to the recipe in the twentieth, and the cake now holds a protected European designation that fixes both its makings and its emblem. The dish is a direct inheritance of the Moorish almond confectionery of Spain, the ground-almond paste of Al-Andalus carried north into Christian Galicia and married there to the cult of the pilgrim saint. Its virtue is its purity: with no flour and no butter, it is the almond, undisguised, that the cake is built to taste of, the lemon and cinnamon serving only to lift it. The texture is dense and moist, somewhere between a cake and a macaroon, and it keeps for days. Naturally gluten-free, made with ingredients a Galician kitchen always had to hand, the Tarta de Santiago is at once a humble home bake and the edible emblem of one of Christendom's oldest journeys.
The cake keeps, well wrapped, for up to five days and the flavour deepens. A printable Cruz de Santiago stencil is easy to find, or cut a simple sword-cross freehand. Some Galician bakers set the cake on a thin shortcrust base (tarta de Santiago con masa); the flourless version given here is the protected traditional one.
Mapping Culinary History
To explore — select an ingredient below.
To explore — select an ingredient below · click any location dot on the map for recipes and stories · browse the information panel on the right · trace the full journey on the timeline.
Journey Point Map Key