Arcadia Spain

October 31st is a well-known date in many different countries. It’s widely known that one of the most popular celebrations –Halloween– takes place on this day. However, there are other celebrations around the world that take place on this date. For example, there’s a tradition in Catalonia that we love to celebrate these days: La Castanyada!

La Castanyada is a popular Catalan celebration that takes place on the 31st of October and the 1st of November “Tots Sants” (All Saints). Like Halloween, it began as a funerary ritual many centuries ago. Nowadays, it is a day to celebrate the fall season and also to remember our friends and relatives who passed away. In Catalonia many people celebrate it by getting together with family or friends and eating roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes, candied fruit and panellets (a kind of marzipan), usually accompanied by moscatell (a sweet wine).

Also, one of the key characters in this tradition is “La castanyera”. La castanyera is a Catalan character that is getting harder to come by: an old lady, originally with a kerchief covering her head, who sells toasted chestnuts wrapped in newspaper. Nowadays there are less castanyeres who keep doing this tradition, but it’s still easy to find some stands.

Today our students had the opportunity to try some panellets and some roasted chestnuts at Arcadia, they were soooo good =)

Want to make your own panellets?!

1-Mix crushed almonds, sugar and stiffed eggs whites (you can add boiled potato too) to make a dough.

2- Then make a little dough ball and put pine nuts around (or coconut, or chocolate..) and cool them in the oven until they are ready.

3-The “panellets” will be ready to eat!!! Serve them with some Moscatell (sweet wine)