Porreres - A village sees orange
Many Mallorcans could take Gabriel Mora as an example. He belongs to a long-established family in his village of Porreres, in fact there are many people here with the surname Mora. He studied English and cookery, worked abroad and then went back to what shaped him.
The 38-year-old's grandfather was probably the deciding factor. He spent a lot of time with him in the apricot orchards, he says, and some of his fondest memories are of siestas in the shade of a tree, his grandson lying on his grandfather's stomach. Pleasure and tradition really are two different things,
that come to mind when you enter Mora's restaurant L'Escrivania. It is located on the church square and is housed in a 400-year-old building: an open space with large arches, all raw sandstone. The market hall used to be here, as well as the town hall and the town clerk's office upstairs, hence the name of the restaurant.
L'Escrivania
Today you can have breakfast, lunch and dinner here and discover just how versatile apricots are.
Mora and his staff not only use them to top sheet cakes, they also stuff suckling pigs with them, mix them into gravies, mix them into salads or garnish the Coca de Trampó vegetable pizza with them.
Mora enjoys experimenting. He started out in 2011 with a store where he sold the apricots from his 1,300 or so trees: as a liqueur, dried, in dark chocolate or dipped in white chocolate .... The store was doing well. "People came and wanted to know what they could do with the apricots," says Mora, "and that's how I came up with the idea of recreating old recipes and creating new ones."
In early summer, however, he spends more time in the fields than at the stove. Harvest time is between May and July.
Most of the fruit is cut in half and placed on wooden boards. "Then we put them in the courtyard and let the sun do its work," he says, before disappearing back into the kitchen. Mora's mother, Margalida Rosselló, stands in the background of the café-restaurant. She is putting chocolate apricots into cellophane bags to pass the morning. You can see her pride in her son; after all, he is one of the few of his generation still making a living from apricots in the village, in the broadest sense. Rosselló is an experienced "apricosologist". She explains which varieties are best for making jam, for drying, for preserving in syrup, for cakes or for eating fresh. "They weren't used as a roast filling or sauce in the past," she says, "we didn't eat roasts at all."
Traditional & new recipes
Demand far exceeds supply
- Text: Brigitte Kramer
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