Jack Jam Alfajores

These cookies are a mark in space-time. On some simple level, they’re just a shortbread sandwich with jam in between–conventionally milk jam or dulce de leche, but I’ve used jackfruit jam instead–rolled a bit in desiccated coconut (usually) and (maybe) dusted with powdered sugar. Not all that different from the Austrian Linzer cookies in shape and form, but texture and sweetness-wise, worlds apart.

Andalucia, alajú, alfajor, Argentina

But alfajores were not always this. Once upon a distant time, they were apparently an idea the Moors brought along with several others to the Iberian peninsula during the time of Al-Andalus, 8th century onwards. I could find no preparation akin in the Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the 13th century [trans. Charles Perry], suggesting they were likely a later innovation. The Moors brought a great many confections to Iberia, and the Alfajores of Medina Sidonia are thought to be one such, though they bear little resemblance to the “cookie” that the alfajor would later become in its Latin American life.

Medina Sidonia in Cádiz, southern Spain, has a tradition for confectionery going back several hundred years, some say to the 15th century. Its alfajores are among its best-known confections and have had a GI tag for some time now. These are pastries made with pure bees’ honey, almonds, hazelnuts, flour, breadcrumbs, and spices–shaped into elongated ‘cylinders,’ coated with sugar powder and cinnamon and wrapped like toffees. These, along with amarguillos [little almond+bitter almond cakes] and tortas pardas [also almond cakes filled with cabell d’àngel or a thread-like confit of the fig leaf gourd, Cucurbita ficifolia] represent a sort of prized triumvirate of Asidonense pastry. Note that Cucurbita ficifolia‘s native range is from Bolivia to Peru even though it is sometimes called the “Malabar” squash, so tortas pardas had to be a post-colonial (in that sense) innovation, an outcome of what gets politely called the Columbian exchange.

The recipe being used to this day seems to track back to one recorded by the Spanish philatelist Don Mariano Pardo de Figueroa [who wrote under the nom de plume El Doctor Thebussem] in his 1882 booklet Los Alfajores de Medina Sidonia–which he discovers in an anonymous 1786 pamphlet entitled “Recetario Práctico De Guisados Y Dulces. Medina Sidonia.” So the recipe is at least 240-ish years old [and you can find Mary Ann Boermans’ translation of this into modern weights and measures here].

Many sources present the alfajor as but another word for alajú, probably derived from the Arabic al-hasu [“filled”] though that is now properly a Castillian cake in its own right, made with almonds, breadcrumbs and other ingredients common to the alfajor. But the alajú is sandwiched between wafers, making it in a sense a closer cousin of the turrón-nougat. Whatever the lineages, alfajor and alajú are not identical confections; their interchangeability may in fact be the result of a “semantic confusion,” says the researcher-priest Francisco Gómez Ortín [2009]. The fact that Doctor Thebussem uses the words “alajú” and “alfajor” interchangeably in 1882, he says, allows him to deduce not that they were the same thing, but that alajú must have been much more widespread in Andalucia, though later alfajor would prevail.

And just how they did prevail! I’m not sure how the cylindrical alfajores of Medina Sidonia or any other alfajor version extant at the time became the Latin American sandwich cookie alfajores–or when; many sources say it was as late as the late 19th c. and thanks to a chemist named don Augusto Chammás who started a small confectionary in Buenos Aires. The jam fillings perhaps came into vogue here, because what is dulce de leche if not a milk jam? And so much a part of gastronomical heritage in the Río de la Plata that links Argentina and Uruguay.

Then of course El Libro de Doña Petrona provided in 1934 the recipe that Argentines at least now hold as classic, relying heavily on locally used cornstarch for the cookies’ characteristic softness, color, and crumble. Other regions will have other stories, but it does all go to show that regionalism, the tipicita of a region’s cuisine that we see also expressed in La Cassata Siciliana, is not just a Mediterranean distinction, but something of a global truth. Now there’s an alfajor for every place, the taste of its innovation and its terroir and its colonizations (how else would coconut have become so prominent in dressing the Argentine alfajor?). The home industry got an enormous boost in the 1950s from commercial manufacturing; in the days before the internet, I suppose that’s how things “went viral” and became matters of national economics and pride.

An Afternoon with Ruby

So then, having made these cookies the classic Argentine way with silky-delicious dulce de leche from The Farm in Chennai more than a few times, as my images will attest, I thought why not a Pondicherry version?

I love the fact that the tipicita of at least some Latin American alfajores is the cornstarch in the cookie dough, corn being among the most important starches of that place in the world. I kept that element, and really only swapped out the filling which here is nothing but the equally dulce de leche-like chakka varatti or jackfruit jam a bit modified for this filling, for reasons soon to be clear.

Now, that recipe for chakka varatti went into this absolutely lovely jackfruit cheesecake along with the idea for its use in alfajores–and Ruby Talreja, working as a baker with Marc’s Coffee in Auroville at the time, picked up both and put at least the cheesecake on the menu, with a few minor spice-flavor variations. Kutti cheesecake cups with jackfruit jam on top were there this last Saturday morning, and I imagine will be every jackfruit season.

Ruby and I got together to try out the alfajores with jackfruit jam filling, and almost all the photos in this post are from that afternoon we spent together. She’s trained as a pastry chef and had all the meticulous precision that I neglect in my baking. So, her cookies were absolutely perfect–dough no trouble to roll to a perfect and even thickness, baked to perfection.

But the jam wasn’t quite right. It was fine for cheesecake but much too “wet” for these cookies, which then did not store well at all. It would take me until the next jackfruit season to tackle this problem, which I’ve done now in two ways.

• First I increased the fat content by adding coconut milk and ghee to the jackfruit jam the way it’s done with chakka pradhaman or the “twice-cooked” [because jackfruit is cooked before being cooked again] classic Kerala payasam-like preparation. [Payasams are cooked once only and therefore suitable to be offered as temple naivedyam or ritual offerings. Pradhamans come in as many forms and have their place in the classic Onam Sadhya, but since they typically involve the use of some other ingredient that is cooked first, they’re unsuitable for ritual offering. See Sandhya’s post on this for more.]
• Second, I cooked the mass down a lot further almost to halva-thala-thala, or a jelly set. The result is a thick, brown jam that’s so hard to make look as attractive as that red-rich flowy dulce de leche because it just lacks the same viscosity–so you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that it’s every bit as delicious and then some, especially when you add tiny coconut bits fried in ghee.

The alfajore recipe I followed was Paula Montenegro’s from The Vintage Kitchen, because it was cornstarch heavy and because at least she’s Argentine. It’s not about “authenticity” as much as it is about acknowledging origins. But I then made several modifications to suit our ingredients and temperatures, as the dough became a little too sticky to handle easily.

Alfajor Assembly

Here’re images of the alfajor assembly process–self-evident, really, but also the most fun to photograph, especially to capture the precision of Ruby’s various expert movements. The recipe follows, just after.

Sources

1. Francisco Gómez Ortín. UN CAPÍTULO DE LEXICOLOGÍA GASTRONÓMICA. PRECISIONES DIATÓPICAS SOBRE LAS VOCES ALFAJOR / ALAJÚ. Tonos Digital; NÚMERO 18 – DICIEMBRE 2009.
2. Don Mariano Pardo de Figueroa, El Doctor Thebussem, Los Alfajores de Medina Sidonia, 1882