Over the centuries, the historical repository for the rich tradition of sweets in Spain has been in convents and monasteries. To learn more about dulces monacales or dulces de convento (monastery or convent sweets), I spent some time in Arcos de la Frontera. An ancient city founded before the Roman era, perched on a massive cliff with sweeping views over rolling groves of olives trees, Arcos de la Frontera came to prominence as a Moorish town during the tenth- and eleventh-century reign of the Caliphate of Córdoba. The best sweets in this stunning Andalusian pueblo blanco (white town) are prepared by the nuns at the Convento del Corpus Christi of the Mercedarias Descalzas. These “Barefoot Mercedarians” specialize in pastries made with almonds—namely dense, round alfajores that have flour, nuts, honey, and a touch of aniseed and cinnamon—that they sell through a revolving window that keeps the cloistered nuns out of sight.
When I asked a baker in Arcos about this, he smiled. The valued ingredients for such traditional pastries always took money to procure or produce, and often substantial time to prepare. “Look who used to enter a convent,” he said. “Cultured, noble people . . . people with money.” Thus they could keep the wealthy traditions alive over time, even as the surrounding area had long periods of poverty, he explained. “The pastries haven’t evolved for centuries.”
He wasn’t too far wrong. For instance, the first details for tocino de cielo, a flan-like egg dessert, date back to 1324 by the nuns of the Convento de Espíritu Santo in nearby Jerez de la Frontera. Of the versions I have eaten in Andalucía, the sweet seems about the same as it must have been back in the fourteenth century.
Another interesting tradition is the abundance of monastery sweets that call for many egg yolks. This comes in part from sherry and wine producers, who used egg whites for fining, or clarifying, wines. (Some still do. I have watched a man at a famous winery in La Rioja cracking eggs one by one into what looked like an old-fashioned set of scales, separating the yolks and whites in a series of plummeting levels.) The yolks were often given to a convent or monastery in town. The most famous of these sweets are candied egg yolks called, simply, yemas (egg yolks), or sometimes yemas de Santa Teresa after the sixteenth-century Carmelite nun St. Teresa de Ávila. (Yemas became popular during her lifetime in the Castilian town of Ávila.) Yolks are laboriously worked with sugar and a touch of lemon juice until they have a delicate, creamy consistency before being rolled in sugar and individually wrapped in waxed paper. These medieval candies dissolve in the mouth as you barely bite down.
While I enjoy buying such dulces monacales from certain monasteries on my travels around Spain, I get most at a wonderful shop in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter called Caelum. It sells only goods from monasteries and convents located around the country. It is one of my favorite spots in the city, and a place I always take visitors. It has a small café, and you can sit and have a cup of tea and individually sample the dozens of celestial temptations that they sell.