page_title: Cuisine of Menorca
section_title: Vegetables, legumes and greens
hierarchical_section_title: Cuisine of Menorca / Traditional dishes / Vegetables, legumes and greens
caption_attribution_description: Català: És un plat típic de Menorca
context_page_description: Minorcan cuisine refers to the typical food and drink of Minorca.
  Minorca is a rocky island in the Balearic archipelago in Spain, consisting of eight municipalities. Featuring a Mediterranean climate, the weather is milder in the south while in the north there are strong winds all year round. Marine salt, carried by the wind to the pastures where cows graze, is what gives the cheese its typical flavour. Fish is a certain source of food, but additionally, there are horses, pigs and cows. Agriculture is small-scale and varied, consisting of typical Mediterranean products. Within this typical Mediterranean cuisine there are also the influences of various invading people, particularly the English, who brought plum cake, puddings, and punch. The rural and marine cuisine is mostly based on greens and vegetables from one's own garden, locally produced meat, and fish and seafood caught in the same day. Cold cuts are used as seasoning. Olive oil, although not produced on the island, is also a fundamental ingredient in local dishes.
  Minorcan cuisine is at times a survival cuisine, which preserves the original flavour of its high-quality products to the maximum.
context_section_description: Minorcan cuisine is very Mediterranean,  rich in vegetables of all types. The island has been very self-sufficient providing these type of fresh products, thus they have never gone missing, thanks to the farming activity as part of the economy even to this day, time in which the crops represent approximately half of the Minorcan territory. The salad, hanging, bouquet tomatoes, etc. ,and other green vegetables to prepare salads and stir fry stand out—onions, Italian green peppers, red pepper, garlic—, Roman lettuce to prepare salads, Mediterranean green vegetables that are fried, stuffed or oven baked, like eggplant, that in Minorca is small and very white in its interior, a variety of the summer season that cannot be cultivated in a greenhouse, zucchini,  that is prepared in a similar way, or the artichoke, that is also from a local variety, small, long, and purple-colored, that is eaten mainly as a side dish, battered and fried, oven-baked or in stews.
  Fruits are also abundant, especially figs, that are also eaten in savoury dishes, like for example the oliaigua.
  Local green vegetables are prepared a "thousand ways", some of the most common are the guixons, the habas, the lentils, and the chickpeas.
  Mushrooms are very much appreciated, oven-baked, fried, with or without sauce to accompany meats, and the wild asparagus, very appreciated in the oliaigua (local soup) or simply with a tortilla.
  Olive oil is the grease that is used to cook these dishes and is also common in pastry, while olives themselves are appreciated in this cooking, just like local capers. Until a few decades ago there were hundreds of olive trees in Minorca but nowadays these are not cultivated.
  Some Minorcan dishes that contain these ingredients are:
  Oven baked eggplant: a species of local eggplant is used that is smaller and more tender, they are thinly laminated and oven-baked in a single layer, covered in shredded bread, with minced garlic and basil. It is similar to the carbassonada, made with zucchini instead of eggplant, and usually has chopped onion and is eaten in the other Balearic Islands.  Oven-baked tomatoes and stuffed zucchini are also traditional.
  Oliaigua, which in its origin was the scantiest soup, food for when you were lacking ingredients. It is usually eaten with figs during the summer.
  Perol, consists of a layer of laminated potatoes, another of laminated tomatoes, covered with shredded bread, garlic, basil and grilled. You can add fish- gilt-head bream or striped red mullet, for example, in between the layers of potatoes and tomatoes.
  Cuttlefish with fesols is a stew with fresh cuttlefish and peas, it is very common that is also traditionally served as a tapa. Sometimes little balls of minced meat are added.
  A lot of salty products are made with wheat flour, many of which the bread dough often encircles the land's produce, like for example, the rubiols, the Minorcan flaons- salty pasta filled with cheese-, to the agujas or croissants – made with bread dough and shaped like a half moon – filled with sobrassada.  The  formatjades stand out, common in Easter time. The salty cocas are usually rectangular, open or closed, and can be traditionally filled with a stir-fry, vegetables or pepper, even though some have meat or fish. On Christmas eve it is common to eat, before the Midnight Mass, bread rolls filled with diced meat and soaked in milk and oven-cooked.
caption: Stuffed zucchini.
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