Empanadas

A disc of dough folded over a savoury filling, sealed along the curved edge with a rope of pinched crimps and baked or fried: the empanada is Spain's portable pie, taken across the Atlantic in the sixteenth century and now claimed with more passion by Argentina than by the country that named it. The Galician original is a large flat pie of yeasted bread dough, filled with tuna, peppers and onion or with pork, cut into squares and eaten cold at fairs. The hand-sized half-moon is the form that spread: Argentina has a dozen provincial styles, Salta with potato and chilli, Tucumán with hand-cut beef and lemon, Mendoza with olive and egg; Chile bakes the pino with beef, onion, raisin, olive and a wedge of hard egg; Colombia fries a corn-dough pocket. The crimp, the repulgue, tells a regular which filling is inside before the first bite.