Island prepares to celebrate with a song and a buñuelo

by Irene Taylor
PALMA
LOCAL bakeries are now stocking buñuelos, which are traditionally eaten at this time of the year, to mark the local festival known as the Night of the Virgins.
It will be celebrated tomorrow night, the eve of the feast of St Ursula and the 11'000 virgins, when it was the tradition, still maintained in villages and to a lesser extent in Palma, for young men to serenade their girl friends.
In return, they would be invited in for a glass of wine and buñuelos, which can be made of choux pastry filled with cream or custard, or from a potato dough and fried.
One of the best places for buying them is at the Reina Maria Cristina bakery near the bullring, where Margalida Serra said that “at this time the filled buñuelos sell very well. “There is a great demand, mostly for those which contain custard. And the day of the Virgins, it is impossible to say how many we sell, but they are very much in demand”.
In this bakery the price is 17 euros a kilo for the buñuelos filled with truffles; 16 euros a kilo for cream filled ones; and 15 euros a kilo for those filled with custard.
In the Serralta area the Mestre bakery has a lot of customers buying buñuelos. They are planning to increase production over the next two days.
Margarita Alameda confirmed that “we have kept prices steady, the price of cream filled ones is 13 euros a kilo, 12 euros for those with custard and 15 euros for those filled with chocolate cream”.
The fried ones, the most typical form of buñuelos, are also very much sought after, but their prices vary a little, depending on where they are bought.
In Palma they can be bought for 13 or 14 euros a kilo, while in Soller, in the Frau bakery, they are sold for 16 euros a kilo.
But while the tradition is still going strong in Majorca, the feast day was actually removed from the general calendar of saints in 1969, as the story of St Ursula and the 11'000 virgins (after whom Columbus named the Virgin Islands) is considered to be a fiction.
According to the legend, she was a Roman-British princess, who at the request of her father, King Donaut of Cornwall, set sail with 11'000 virgin handmaidens, to join her future husband, the pagan Governor Conan Meriadoc of Armorica in Brittany.
Before her marriage, she set off on a pilgrimage first of all to Rome and then to Cologne, which was being besieged by Huns, and where she and the virgins were massacred.
They were buried in Cologne, where the church of St Ursula is dedicated to her.