I’ve lived in Majorca for a little over nine months now. In my relatively short time here I’ve come to know a lot of details about the island, meet a lot of people, see and experience what it is like to live in a place of intense physical beauty – a beauty which attracts the millions of visitors the island receives each year, mostly Germans and British, who are responsible both for lifting the island out of persistent poverty and for slowly eating away at the natural and cultural beauty that attracts them here in the first place. If I’ve learned anything about Majorca in these nine months, it’s that it’s complicated. There are a lot of competing identities, changing customs and mores and levels of optimism, pessimism and resignation about the island’s future.

In the midst of this hangs sobrassada, a resilient symbol of Majorca’s centuries of autarky and knack for creating powerful impressions from the fruits of one’s own labor.

Sobrassada is a sausage. The name is cognate to the English word “suppressed,” in an apparent reference to the packing of the sausage inside its casing. This generic term passed into Catalan from Italian, where “soppressata” refers unspecifically to sausages made in this region or that, a generic word for generic product. Sobrassada mallorquina, however, is far from generic.

Sobrassada is a pork sausage. The consensus is that the best is made from porcs negres (black pigs), which feed exclusively on acorns. The meat is chopped and mixed with salt, paprika and perhaps more – depending on whose padrina’s (grandma’s) recipe you’re using – until a creamy, powerfully red paste is formed. This paste is then stuffed into a casing, for which no attempt is made to cloak its colonic origins. A string is tied around the product and it is left to hang. The other ingredients effectively cook and preserve the meat, and the finished product retains both the creamy texture and the flavor of all its component ingredients.

It’s kind of gross, to be honest. I first tried sobrassada as a pizza topping; the meat was in small pieces, melting atop a generic cheese pie. That might have been a good introduction; I could appreciate the strength and depth of flavor without experiencing the grossness of its original form. I mean, I’m an adventurous eater, but the sight of creamy red meat coming out of what is obviously a long intenstine is for very few people a pleasant sight. I’ve since gotten over that. I now proudly buy whole sobrassades to keep in the pantry, in open air at room temperature. Sobrassada is a product made by those-lacking-refrigeration for those-lacking-refrigeration.

The best way to experience sobrassada, or at least the most mallorquí way, is with pa amb oli. Pa amb oli is the universal Majorcan dish – a basic exposition of the staples of Majorcan food. The name means, simply, “bread with oil,” which fails to convey the fact that any standard pa amb oli is also served with tomato. So, pa amb oli is essentially the combination of three foods – pa moreno (an unsalted brown bread), olive oil and tomato. Beyond this one can and does add any of a myriad of ingredients, be it sobrassada, cuixot (air-dried ham, sliced thinly, reminiscent of prosciutto), cheese, seafood or any other fruit of the earth that strikes one’s fancy.

This past weekend I joined some friends on a drive to the northwest corner of Majorca, a place where the Tramuntana mountain range, which constitutes a dramatic spine along the entire north coast of the island, drops precipitously into the sea. We visited the town of Pollença, close to which lies Cala Sant Vicenç (Saint Vincent’s Cove), a small and idyllic beach surrounded by rocky cliffs. After some too-pretty-for-words swimming and snorkeling, we hopped in the car and drove down the coast.

We ended up at Alcúdia, a picturesque town still guarded by walls built during the time the island was ruled by Arabs. Not very far from the town is the site of where the Romans built their capital on the island. We parked outside the walls and walked into the center of town through the medieval gates and up the carrer major (main street). We sat at a table outside of Ca’n Fuat, just off the main square, and I ordered a pa amb oli de sobrassada.

Ca’n Fuat makes its own sobrassada. This is not much of a distinction on Majorca, but Ca’n Fuat makes it very well. They also make a spectacular pa amb oli. Given such an aggressively simple dish, the spectacle lies in the ingredients and the presentation, and Ca’n Fuat scores highly on both counts. The dish is two slices of pa moreno with olive oil and some salt – the first with slices of sobrassada, and the second with slices of tomato, sprinkled with capers.

The sobrassada is, as it should be, rich and pungent. It has the texture and a little of the flavor of raw meat, marinated in copious spices and left to hang in the air. The pa moreno is tough and bland, but it works perfectly in this combination. The tomatoes are fresh and the capers have a salty acidity that cuts the sobrassada’s meatiness perfectly. I think the capers were what pushed this particular pa amb oli over the top – I had associated capers mostly with smoked fish and bagels, and never thought much of them. Now I feel like I know what they’re supposed to do.

After the meal we hit up another beach as the sun was going down, then hit the road back through the middle of the island to Palma. Yes, Majorca is complicated, but when it works this well, no questions need be asked – except, perhaps, to inquire about seconds. Fins la pròxima.

Ca’n Fuat
Carrer Major 1
07400, Alcúdia, Spain

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 9:19 am and is filed under None.