Elda rellenos recipe (faseguras or fasegures)

What rellenos are

Rellenos (literally “fillings”) are balls of meat and bread that are simmered in the broth of the cocido stew and served with it. The recipe on this page is Consu Rico’s, who sent it to the portal No Eres de Elda Si No in September 2017 and says she cooks them “as my grandmother did”. It makes eight pieces, each the size of a fist. According to that same source, it is a typical dish of the Medio Vinalopó: Elda, Petrer, Monóvar, Novelda and Pinoso.

With the name, it is best to be careful. The Elda recipe writes fasiuras and faseguras. The form fasegures, ending in -es, is recorded by the blog La rosa del azafrán as the name used in Novelda; it does not appear in the normative Valencian dictionary, and that is why it is in italics. The same blog says that in Elche they call them pelotas or terongetes.

The mixture: meat, sausage and bread

What defines the recipe is the mixture: minced lean pork, crumbled longaniza (a pork sausage), two eggs, parsley, a little of the cocido broth and stale bread. Every part of the bread is used: the crust is soaked and squeezed out well, and the crumb is crumbled separately. Both go in at the end, once everything else is mixed with the beaten eggs.

The list also includes “2 blancos”, which are added crumbled later, and the author does not say what they are. There are hints that it is a sausage: in her introduction she lists “magro de cerdo, longaniza, blanco, pan, huevo” (lean pork, longaniza, blanco, bread, egg), with the egg separate, and Convega’s recipe book, from the Vega Baja, asks for “una longaniza y un blanco picados” (a chopped longaniza and blanco) for its pelotas. A reader from Elda, on the other hand, writes “2 egg whites” in her version. We leave it with the source’s word until we can confirm it with someone from the area. The author adds that pine nuts are sometimes put in, though her recipe does not use them.

How to shape them and how long to cook them

Hands are wet with lemon juice so the mixture does not stick, and the balls are shaped to the size of a fist. They go into a large pot of boiling cocido broth and cook for about an hour. With a roomy pot the pieces are not squeezed against each other and cook evenly.

The hour comes from the base recipe. La rosa del azafrán gives about 30 minutes in two litres of broth, but it is another family recipe (lean pork and pork fat in equal parts, two-day-old bread, cinnamon and pepper) and has no weights, so we do not use it for the quantities. They are two recipes for the same dish, and it is best not to mix the timings of one with the weights of the other.

When they are eaten

The author puts it like this: it is traditional to eat them on 8 September, the day of the Virgen de la Salud, during Elda’s Fiestas Mayores, and also on Christmas Day. That September fiesta has its page in the Elda calendar. Elda’s Moors and Christians are a different fiesta, and the source does not associate rellenos with them. They are also made on any day of the year.

La rosa del azafrán speaks of Christmas or New Year and of Sundays for the rest of the year, and places the dish in the Bajo and Medio Vinalopó. Only the base recipe names Elda; we have not found a source to link it with Petrer, Monóvar or Pinoso beyond the list that same recipe gives.

What they are served with

They go with the traditional cocido, along with the broth, the potatoes, the chickpeas and the meat. It is a big-pot dish, eaten with a spoon. If you are looking for other pelotas from the province, the cocido con pelotas of the Vega Baja and the arroz rossejat have their own, with recipes different from this one.

If you are making a cocido for a crowd at Christmas and would rather forget about the kitchen, we cook for company Christmas lunches and dinners.