Sobao Pasiego: Difference between revisions

Various authors (García Lomas and Vega Ruiz) have said that the sobao was a cake made crudely from [[bread]] [[dough]] (to use up scraps), [[sugar]] and [[butter]]. This old version of sobao was improved by the addition of [[eggs]], grated [[lemon peel]] and anis or rum.  The big change in the production method came when high-quality [[wheat]] [[flour]] was used instead of [[bread]] [[dough]] and adjustments were made to the quantities of other ingredients used. In his book ''Los Pasiegos'' (1986), García Lomas attributes the creation of the new sobao moderno to the cook Eusebia

Hernández Martín, a letter from whose son includes the following passage: ‘I knew that my late mother invented the sobao that we know now, i.e. as made from [[flour]], as a variation on the old [[bread]] [[dough]] version. This was before 1896, the year in which she married my father, Joaquín Laso; she was then 19 years old and died in Vega in 1902 at the age of 25, leaving three sons and a daughter; I was her first child, born in 1897’.

Finally, in a 1946 study on terms used in the high valleys of Santander province but not included in the ''Diccionario de la Lengua Española'', J Calderón Escalada records the term Sobau, defining it as follows:  ‘Cake made from [[flour]], [[eggs]], [[sugar]] and [[butter]], baked in the oven in paper folded into a special shape; given as a favour on her wedding day by the bride to her friends’.