Celler Sa Premsa

Palma, Spain

Celler Sa Premsa opened in 1958 when a former banker converted an old warehouse in central Palma into a wine cellar restaurant. Three generations of the same family have run it since. The dining room has not changed: high ceilings, rows of enormous oak barrels along the walls, long wooden tables, and the smell of decades of cooking in the stone. The menu covers the full range of Mallorcan peasant cooking: sopas mallorquines, arrós brut, tumbet, frit mallorquí, and the cured pork products that anchor the island's food culture. Sobrassada comes to the table in its casing with bread already rubbed with tomato. The cooking is not refined. It is the kind of food that fed the island's working population for a century, served at prices that working people can still afford.

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Sausages served here

Sobrassada de Mallorca

Mallorca, Balearic Islands

Sobrassada is a raw cured sausage from Mallorca, spreadable at room temperature and coloured deep rust-red from a large quantity of ground sweet paprika. The mixture of minced pork, paprika, salt, and black pepper is stuffed into natural casings and left to cure over weeks, during which the fat softens and the paprika distributes through the meat until the whole mass becomes a dense, unctuous paste. It spreads onto bread with a knife, melts into eggs in the pan, and disappears into sauces. The version made from porc negre, Mallorca's native black pig, carries a richer fat and a deeper flavour than the mainland-breed equivalent. Two EU protected designations cover the product: IGP Sobrassada de Mallorca for the standard version using commercial white pigs, and the more restricted IGP for sobrassada made exclusively from the island's black pig. Both designations require production on the island. The black pig version is sold with a black label and costs considerably more. Neither version is cooked before eating. The casing is split, and the contents are scooped or sliced onto whatever is being eaten.

porkspreadablecured