Christmas gastronomy

These Christmas and Kings’ Day festivals, which end and begin the year, bring together a whole family saga around the table, in an authentic gastronomic festival that is usually celebrated with sumptuous dishes. 

In Mallorca an elaborate Christmas soup begins the meal, made using bread, meat and vegetables. It is followed by magnificent stuffed dishes, like the Christmas cold meat or carn freda, or the laborious stuffed pasta. And poultry is also cooked, or roasted or stewed suckling pig (porcella). Turkey-based dishes are another highlight, like rice with turkey, escaldums – a stew made with turkey, potatoes and lightly fried onion, tomatoes, garlic and a little white wine with hazelnut and pine kernel sauce – or stuffed turkey. However, in many coastal villages it is customary to prepare a good Mallorcan-style stewed fish on Christmas Day. The following day, December 26th, is also a holiday on the islands, and families gather again to eat the leftovers from the previous day.

In Ibiza and Formentera people usually eat ‘bullit de Nadal’ on Christmas Day, a stew made with pork fat, poultry and pork, or rice with broth – dishes from which the stock has been extracted to make the star sauce of the festive season, ‘salsa de Nadal’ or Christmas sauce. It is followed by sofrit pagès, a dish that uses up the meat, and often roast suckling pig.

In Menorca the meal may begin with a soup – like ‘sopa reina’, with semolina and little meatballs. The second course is stuffed capon and truffled loin of pork – a piece of loin of pork that is boiled and stuffed with fruit, hard-boiled egg and sobrassada, amongst other ingredients, and eaten cold. Next day a rice dish is prepared using the leftover meat from Christmas day.