[Sca-cooks] Isfunj

[Christiane]

Here's the recipe from Cariadoc's Miscellany, which is from the Anonymous Andalusian cookbook:

Making Stuffed Isfunj
Take semolina and sift it, and take the flour and put it in a dish. Take water and sprinkle it lightly on the semolina. Then put your hand in it and gather it all up and cover it with a second dish, leaving it until it sweats. Then uncover it and mix it until it becomes like white flour [that is, the durum ground wheat should resemble soft wheat flour]. Throw oil in it, and mix it, and put in leavening and eggs, throw in a measure of five eggs and then mix the dough with the eggs. Then put it in a new pot, after greasing it with oil, and leave it until it rises. Then take almonds, walnuts, pine nuts and pistachios, all peeled, and pound in a mortar until as fine as salt. Then take pure honey and put it on the fire and boil it until it is on the point of thickening. Then take the almonds, walnuts, pistachios and pine-nuts that you have pounded, and throw all this upon the honey and stir it until it is thickened. Then take the semolina dough that was put in the pot, and make a thin, small flat cake (raghî f) of it, and put on it a morsel of this thickened paste. Then take the raghî f with your hand and turn it until it is smooth and round and bite-sized. [This sentence is in Huici-Miranda’s Spanish translation but not in the published Arabic text] Make all the dough according to this recipe, until the filling is used up. The dough should be only moderately thin. Then take a frying pan and put oil in it, and when it starts to boil, throw in a piece of isfunj and fry it with a gentle fire until it is done. And if you wish to thicken with sugar, do so, and if you with to throw almonds, ground sugar, and rosewater into the filling, do so and it will come out aromatic and agreeable.


Essentially, I think you're going to need an egg-enriched yeasted semolina bread dough for your "doughnuts." We're not talking light and fluffy here, especially after it's deep fried and doused in honey and rosewater syrup!

Gianotta