COOKING WITH ABUELAS: SMALL-TOWN SAUSAGE

Two Spanish sisters’ “relleno,” meatballs, and a wood-burning oven keep Añora’s stories alive

8:30 a.m. - Bakery 

There is a constant wave of firewood that seems to waft through every small town at the waking hours, no matter the continent. We follow the comforting smell, the hazy sunbeams pricking every hairy straw in the overgrown field, as though it’s the source of the fire itself. But it’s Añora’s bakery in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia, a few doors down from my friend Sonia’s house, that’s pumping the olfactory alarm clock into the air.

We sneak in through the back door like true neighbors, and a burst of heat and a loud hum of chatter welcomes us in. We’re greeted with kisses and introductions, and within moments sisters and bakery owners Isabela and Antonia are offering to marry us off to their respective sons and nephews.

Isabela, barely 5-foot and sporting an old patterned nightgown and house slippers, works the oven. Her thick tuft of steel-gray hair and elegant crow’s feet are the only indicators of her 75 years (or that she’s been up since 3 a.m.), as she lifts 6-foot wooden boards of swollen dough off the proofing rack. 

Antonia helps her sister, performing solid assists in plopping the hefty loaves onto the peel. Isabella is focused. With both artful ease and stark determination, she slides the loaves into the oven with a flick of her wrist and cranks a captain’s wheel to keep the oven floor turning, all the while Antonia keeps the customers laughing with a slew of boisterous jokes bellowing from her hoarse voice and toothless smile. “In the bakery, the women are in charge!” she cackles. Isabela’s husband, short and built like a healthy farmer who has worked most of his life with his hands, unassumingly throws hot loaves into bags for customers. 

Townspeople pour in and out, stopping in for kisses, updating the sisters on the week’s happenings, and picking up their bread orders for the weekend. The bakery is more lively than the entirety of the sleepy town; it’s the main plaza and the community center. It’s also their home, as Isabela and Antonia live behind the bakery with their families. They spent their adult lives raising kids together and caring for their mother, but when she passed they remodeled to separate the house into two. “Go back and see it!” says Antonia, pawning off a few cinnamon and sugar dusted empanadas off on us and shooing us out. Apparently home remodel tours are pretty common in small Spanish towns, or at least in this one. “When we re-did a part of our house,” my friend Sonia tells me later, “total strangers would just show up to take a look and ask to come in. They would even take pictures!”

After a short, self-guided tour, we pop back into the bakery to give a raving review and snack on a chocolate empanada that’s magically appeared before us. Isabela scurries out the back and Antonia takes over oven duties. Antonia retired this year, handing over baking responsibilities to her son, but helps out on the busy Saturdays to get bread out the door. She works the oven with the same ease, though more distracted by her captive audience. She speaks proudly of their bread: “People sometimes buy cheap bread from the factories and supermarkets, but it’s no good!” She rocks a long white lab coat, undies shamelessly shining through the thin fabric. Her dusty house slippers, like her sister’s, have inexplicably endured countless early mornings shuffling along the concrete floor. 

Isabela comes back in full make-up, and her own white lab coat over her Sunday best. She grabs two old flour sacks full of loaves—both of which she could easily fit into— and drags them out the door and into the storefront spot they have in center of town. 

The bakery circus climaxes with the mumblings of a thin elderly woman sporting a baby blue beanie. In her quest to find a prime spot for oven-watching and town gossip, she tumbles backwards in slow-motion into a bread crate, squishing the buns with her very own buns, and yelping in dizziness with legs poking in the air. As we help her into a chair she begs us not to tell her daughters that she’s taken a tumble, “They’ll kill me if they find out!” After promising her secret is safe with us, we grab our bread order that’s miraculously grown with the addition of a wreath-shaped roscon we slice up for dinner, and sweet pillows of olive oil loaves I soak in more local olive oil at breakfast the next morning. 

The bakery keeps Añora on its toes, if even just for the few hours the oven roars. And it keeps these sisters moving too—their backs sturdy, ankles swollen, and need for sleep less than most heart surgeons. Isabela tells us she knows she can’t work as hard as she used to, but needs the work to keep her body and mind active. But more than bread and work, the bakery is an intimate space for this town. Come with your dentures or without, don’t worry if someone sees your undies or if you take a tumble. Forget about makeup. Be comfortable and wear your slippers and PJs. This is the flour-dusted, wood-burning heart of the pueblo, and it beats rather steadily. 

4:00 p.m. - Sonia’s House 

The sisters come to Sonia’s house dressed to the nines. Isabela is done-up from the bakery outpost in town and Antonia has dressed herself in a youthful flowered maroon dress, hair perfectly permed and lacquered. Most importantly she’s put in a pearly white set of dentures that make the crevices in her painted cheeks sparkle. 

They fill pots, demand knives and garlic, light burners in a furry. Antonia runs back to her house to fetch a pot for the relleno we’re about to make, the native Añora sausage traditionally cooked during the holidays. They open up their Tupperwares of chicken, pork, and chunks of cured ham, and toss one container into a pot of water with a few pinches of salt and a bay leaf. This is for the relleno. The rest of the meat is left raw for the meatballs, and Antonia returns, with an indestructible wok-shaped skillet in hand. 

While the relleno meat stews, we mix the raw portion with fresh parsley, a clove of garlic Isabella minced in the first three fingers of her hand with a pairing knife, and dried mint from their garden. Isabela opens up a couple cartons of eggs, their dusty pastel shells caked with feathers from their backyard hens. She and Antonia crack them into the bowl, tapping them together to weaken the shells, and throwing in a few handfuls of breadcrumbs they’ve brought specially from the bakery. 

They fight about the quantity of breadcrumbs in the meatballs and the amount of jamón boiling in the stove concoction. They fight about the number of eggs to mix, the amount of salt. They reconcile and tell us that during Añora Carnival, everyone makes a big batch of these particular meatballs. Younger folks dress up in masks to disguise their faces as they run around from house to house stealing meatballs. 

Antonia mixes amontillado wine in a container with vinegar and we roll meatballs, dunking them first in wine and gently placing them into a pot of boiling water. Seventy-something years doesn’t keep her from making all kinds of sexual references to the balls of meat we’re delicately handling. The succession of jokes and mischievous looks has me bent over in laughter—Antonia’s deep scratchy voice roaring through the kitchen. Isabela, contrarily, quietly snips the boiled meat with a pair of steel scissors, motioning to the other bystanders to grab some scissors and give her a hand, and rolling her eyes at her baby sister’s antics. 

Isabela wears a gold pendant around her neck with a photo of her young parents plated onto the small rectangular charm. Their father died when they were just 4 and 11 years old, and it’s clear by her sober demeanor that she took on a more serious, adult role in caring for her two sisters (they have a middle sister in Madrid). “I used to go around town with a basket selling olive oil breads in the summer when I was very young, to help my mother out. In the winter I would sell ice cream.” 

We add practically the same ingredients as we did to the meatballs to the diced meat, breaking up a dozen or so hard boiled eggs and ground saffron to mix in as well. Isabella meticulously teaches me how to tie up the pork casings in a three step knot like a sailboat skipper. She attaches the metal sausage stuffer and confirms my suspicions that the apparatus is at least 100 years old. She aggressively stuffs the meat into the casings without breaking them, patiently advising me as I try my hand at it. Each is laid out on a platter and pricked with a special and supposedly modern version of a “pinchito”: two small prongs fashioned onto a block of wood. 

The infamous relleno pan is brought out and Isabela fills it to the brim with water, impressively hoisting the monstrosity from the sink to the stove without much of a flinch. Isabela spends the next two hours tending to each relleno like a crying newborn: monitoring the steady rumble of the boil, softly moving it around, and piercing each little bubble with the pinchito. The tremble of her delicate voice is endearing when she breaks her concentration, leans in close, and whispers that she’s planning on gifting me the beloved pinchito. “Really?” “Mmhm. I’m going to let you keep it.”

As the carefree youngest, Antonia is far sillier than her sister. She’s wild and boisterous in the way she cooks meatballs, adding a little bit of this and that, deciding we should fry a few in olive oil, and snickering as I sneak one into my mouth. At 16, Antonia left home to work in the service industry in Alicante, moving on to Girona, Barcelona, and even working multiple harvests in southern France. When her mom called to tell her she was retiring, Antonia left her professional galavants and headed home to run the bakery with Isabela. She married the love of her life at 25, had kids, and settled down in Añora.

But she’s collected hefty baggage in the last few decades. Severe health problems have worn her down, and though she eventually found answers after years of misdiagnosis, the effects the sickness had on her body and family were scarring. Additional medical issues have sprung up in other parts of the family and it’s enough to make the tears fall while she stirs. “People don’t see me cry about these things, not even my husband. Just my sister.” She later, after dancing the local flamenco-style dance called “The J” with Isabela, reminds us how important it is to spend more time dancing and laughing than crying. “You have to live your life.” 

Isabela lovingly pats her sister’s back and nods to acknowledge the reality of her turmoil, quickly shifting the focus back onto the project at hand. When the last relleno takes its final bath, she breathes a sigh of relief and hangs the sausages to cool on various hooks around the kitchen. 

“When do you leave?” they both ask. We’re off the next day, much to their disappointment. “You have to stay so we can make more food!” says Antonia. “You’ve got to try my rosquillas,” Isabela gloats, describing the process with a twinkle in her eye that assures me they’re pretty damn good.

To these benevolent women, the act of sharing traditions is their greatest honor. “It’s important to pass on these recipes to younger generations—they’re not learning how to cook, not learning family recipes.” says Isabela. “These ways of cooking will eventually be lost and forgotten,” Antonia agrees. 

The sisters head out empty-handed, leaving every scrap of food behind despite our insistence. “I don’t give people money,” says Antonia. “But I always feed people. We’re always feeding people.” Their generosity is astounding, and it is stirred into the jars of pisto, dried mint, and bag of sausage casings they leave with me. They thank us as though we’ve gifted them the most marvelous birthday gift, and we tell them over and over that we, not them, are the fortunate ones. 

The next day, I do my best to clean the relleno pot. It proves to be a rather useless endeavor. An inch-thick, sooty patina coats the bottom—a millimeter for each decade it has sat over the fires of their kitchen in Añora. A stain for each meal they’ve cooked for the town. 

I’m not surprised to find out later that Isabela recently won a medal for the most blood donated in the whole town. Or that the day prior Antonia made over 100 meatballs for family and friends. Or that the next time Sonia visited the sisters, they sent her home with a feast of pisto and slices of pizza baked in the cooling fires of their humble garage oven.