La Garrotxa revives a (nearly) forgotten medieval dessert: the flaona

GironaMade from shortcrust pastry, shaped like a crescent moon, and filled with cream. That's the flaona, one of our Garrotxa desserts that, unlike the chicharrones cake or the aniseed roscón, has largely fallen into oblivion in recent decades. But now Lluís Riera, who has been preparing it every Friday at Cacau Pastisseria for the past 18 years, has set out to revive it. And he's doing it in style. "On the first Sunday of March, we will celebrate the first Aplec de la Flaona (Flaona Gathering). We will meet in the Plaça Major of Olot at 9 a.m. wearing barretinas (traditional Catalan caps), sashes, and seven-striped espadrilles. We will climb to the top of the Sant Francesc volcano accompanied by folk and traditional music. And at the top, we will eat flaones and drink a sip of ratafia.

Flaones are a medieval sweet dessert found throughout the Catalan Countries. According to the pastry chef of Olot, the name comes from flan. They have a variety of shapes, doughs, and fillings, and perhaps one of the best known is the Ibiza flaón, shaped like a cake and made from garbage. According to the Alcover-Moll dictionary, La Garrotxa is the only place where the term takes the feminine form, flaona. However, we find the same name in Figueres—with a shortcrust pastry—and in Castelló d'Empúries—filled with angel hair pasta. For Riera, To celebrate the flaona is to celebrate our own traditional desserts that unite us, in an era of consuming foreign desserts.

Changing traditions

While croissants, napolitanas or other pastries are now sold in bakeries and pastry shops cheesecakesCacau Pastisseria is calling for a moment of reflection on learning about and sharing traditional sweet treats. In the Garrotxa region, they still sell chicharrones cakes year-round, not just on Fat Thursday, because there's demand. But Riera explains that only customers over 55, or young people to whom she's explained their origins, are familiar with flaonas. The large one costs three euros, the small one two euros, and according to her research, these sweet desserts were designed to be taken to the countryside—since sandwiches didn't exist then—just like panadas and savory pastries. The movement to revive the flaona began with a workshop given by Riera and Alberto Pizarro, a baking and pastry teacher at the Olivar Gran Hospitality Institute in Figueres, during the Orígenes de Olot fair. They noted that the flaó shared "very similar dough and filling methods, whether it be brushed pastry, angel hair, marzipan, or cream." This would link the flaona to the pastries of Rasquera or the Valencian clotxa. This sparked a flurry of ideas, and at Cacau Pastisseria—where they've already established the new tradition of breaking the Easter cake on Easter Monday for those without godparents—they promoted the idea of ​​a gathering "with the aim of encouraging the people of La Garrotxa to rediscover the flaona and order it as a historic dessert of the region."