La Castanyada, Catalonia’s autumn festival
On the evening of 31 October, while much of the world dresses up as witches, Catalonia has its own date in the diary: the Castanyada. A simple, family festival that smells of roast chestnuts and wood smoke. And it is doing very nicely, thank you.
A festival on the eve of All Saints
The Castanyada falls on the eve of Tots Sants, All Saints’ Day. For centuries, this was the night when people kept vigil for the dead. Families stayed up late, church bells rang for the departed, and everyone needed something warm and filling to eat. Chestnuts, harvested at the same time in the forests of the Montseny or the Pyrenees, were perfect.
The next day, 1 November, many Catalans still take flowers to the graves of their loved ones. The Castanyada is the cheerful side of it: remembering, but around a table, together.
The Castanyada trio
A real Castanyada rests on three things.
The castanyes, chestnuts. Roasted over a fire or in the oven, after a little cut so they don’t burst. You buy them in the street in a paperina, a cone of newspaper that warms your hands.
The moniatos, sweet potatoes. Simply roasted in the oven. Sweet and melting, they have always gone with the chestnuts.
The panellets. The stars of the show: little balls of almond paste, sugar and potato (or sweet potato), rolled in pine nuts and baked until golden. There are coconut, coffee, chocolate and almond versions… but panellets de pinyons, with pine nuts, are still the kings. In cake shops they’re sold by weight, and the queues grow longer from mid-October.
They’re traditionally served with a glass of moscatell, a sweet wine.
The castanyera
The festival’s figure is the castanyera: an old woman wrapped in a shawl, a scarf on her head, selling hot chestnuts on a street corner. You can still find a few in town, with their little smoking stoves.
At school, children dress up as castanyers and castanyeres, learn songs about chestnuts, and sometimes make their own panellets in class. It’s often the first recipe they ever learn.
What about Halloween?
Of course, Halloween has reached Catalonia too, with its pumpkins and costumes. The two festivals get along without too much fuss: many families do both, sweets in the evening and chestnuts at the table. But for Catalans, the Castanyada keeps something more personal: it’s a festival of home, of the kitchen, of grandparents. A tradition passed on mica a mica, little by little.
Making panellets at home
The basic recipe is surprisingly simple:
- 250 g ground almonds;
- 200 g sugar;
- 100 g cooked, mashed potato;
- 1 egg (the yolk to brush on top, the white to stick the pine nuts);
- 200 g pine nuts.
Mix the almonds, sugar and potato, shape into small balls, dip them in egg white and then in the pine nuts, brush with yolk, and bake for 10 minutes in a hot oven (220 °C). That’s it.
Castanyada words
- Bona Castanyada!: happy Castanyada!
- les castanyes torrades: roast chestnuts
- un moniato: a sweet potato
- els panellets: the little pine-nut cakes
- la tardor: autumn
Bona Castanyada!
Photo: pine-nut panellets, by Judesba (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons).