Butter in Menorcan cuisine

Menorca is an island with a cheesemaking tradition and therefore butter is also one of the star products of its gastronomy, especially when it comes to sweets.

We have three types of butter, normal butter, unsalted; salted butter, called English butter; and cooked butter which is made by cooking butter and is the most used by pastry lovers.

We know that in the 18th century in Menorca butter was made from cow's milk, the painter Chiesa from Mahon immortalized a peasant woman who was making it with her feet in a wooden trough, which was how this product was made on the island in the past, as was wine.

In the kitchen

Because Menorca was not a major producer of olive oil, and this was a product that was mainly imported from Mallorca, butter was used in cooking, which was either cow's or lard, which is how pork fat is defined in some old recipe books.

Unsalted butter, the traditional one, was used to cook delicate dishes, such as some fish such as ratjada with butter and capers, or was part of fish sauces such as butter, salted anchovies and capers.

But where butter was and is most useful, especially cooked butter, is in pastries, where it replaces lard and even olive oil in many cases.

In the oldest recipe books we find, for example, that butter is used to make pastissets, coca bamba and cuscussó, dishes of Arab and Jewish origin where, probably in the years of the conversion of the Jews, as happened in many preparations, the butter was replaced by pork tallow, to Christianize these preparations of ancient cuisine.

In the 18th century with the English and French domination of Menorca, butter regained prominence and sweet cakes were made with it, in addition to tea cakes, biscuits and donuts for the wealthy, who knew that the taste of cow's butter was more refined than that of pork butter. In this way, all these confectionery and pastry creations from Menorca have survived to this day, because butter also becomes the protagonist of sweets that use butter with natural flavors and colorings to make party sweets with their flowers and filigree of colored butter, which today are in danger of disappearing due to new fashions in pastry that, unfortunately, are being left aside and imposed on those traditional sweets that filled the counters of our long-awaited sweet shops.

Menorca continues to produce butter, both unsalted, salted or cooked butter, which cheese producers offer as a quality and at the same time sustainable product because we are dealing with a local product, made in Menorca, with almost no carbon footprint and which is not sold in individual portions, but in bars or in containers of 250 or 500 g, as well as bars of more than one kilo for bars and restaurants, which have been able to eliminate butter in portions, wrapped in aluminum foil or in individual plastic containers, thus committing to sustainability in gastronomy.