The Elusive Tortitas de Santa Clara

Tortitas de Santa Clara have proven to be quite elusive. Fortunatly I was able to make some and feature them here as the next food in my meanigful food series.

These cookies are a specialty of the city of Puebla, where Jonathan is currently going to culinary school. Puebla is known for many things: the battle of Puebla (the reason for Cinco de Mayo), mole, and many many confections. Being a pastry chef, the confections interest me most. There is a whole street lined with confection shops. Most of them were started over a century ago by nuns.

Last September, fellow pastry chef and CIA alumna Fany Gerson published a great book called "My Sweet Mexico." It is filled with some of my favorite confections from Puebla and all of the recipes are simple to understand even for non pastry chefs. The book is also filled with beautiful pictures of Mexico, its culture and its food.

I have two small critiques of the book: it lacks recipes for horchata, a rice milk beverage and tortitas de Santa Clara, though it does refer to them and show tempting pictures. In Ms. Gerson's defence, in my own experience, people who make great horchata are very secretive about their recipe and the few recipes that I have seen seem to have all different methods. As for the tortitas de Santa Clara, that must be a very closely guarded Puebla secret that even she couldn't find because when I Google searched for a recipe, I only found one archaic recipe that was not easy to follow.

Whatever the reason for the secretiveness, these hard to find cookies are cemented as my favorite treat from Puebla.