Pajamas from the Barcelona restaurant 7 Portes.
Gastrohistorias
Flan, balls of ice cream, whipped cream and fruit have made up one of the greatest gastronomic fantasies of the Spanish summer since 1951
Have you already eaten pajamas this summer? If you live or spend your holidays on the Mediterranean coast, it is very possible that you have at least seen it on the menus of restaurants, ice cream parlors and various beach bars. However, if you are from the dry land or from the northern third of the peninsula, you may not even know what we are referring to, even though you have tried it more than once.
The RAE may not admit it yet, but in much of Spain the word “pyjama” means more than just a nightwear. Imagine the dessert dreamed of by any child, without limits to quantity or eclecticism: that’s pajamas. You can see the original in the photo above, a sweet combination plate that mixes flan, strawberry and vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, peaches in syrup and candied fruit. There the set still has a certain order, it is stately and contained pajamas, the same one that has been served for 71 years in the Barcelona restaurant ‘7 Portes’. It was the place where this dessert was invented and from which pajamas took flight alone, spreading first to the whole of Barcelona, then to the Catalan coast and from there to the entire Mediterranean coast.
Pajamas from the Madrid restaurant La Gabinoteca.
Along the way it became more baroque, more festive and infinitely more kitsch. Pajamas with pineapple, banana, chocolate syrup and caramel were born. With Peta Zetas, waffles, ice creams of any shape and flavor, paper umbrellas and lighted flares, with everything that caught the attention of customers or was in the pantry of the restaurant in question. Unfortunately, during its golden age (the 1980s and 1990s), pajamas made with industrial flan, spray cream and horrendous cut ice cream were legion, excesses that caused its fall from grace and gave wings to its fame as a crappy and almost needy dessert. Fortunately, in recent times it has resurfaced strongly in noble versions and its classic status has earned it a reinterpretation even in a deconstructive key.
Pajamas are a cornucopia in which almost anything fits, yes, an endearing hodgepodge of culinary nostalgia in which one must immerse oneself without prejudice or modesty, but how did it come about and why does it have such a peculiar name? To discover its history we must mentally travel to the Barcelona of 1951 to see how the soldiers of the United States Sixth Fleet (the unit of the US Navy that operates in the Mediterranean) disembark in the port. While the sailors spend their dollars in Chinatown, the officers stroll down Las Ramblas and go to the most elegant places in the city. They visit the 7 Portes restaurant, doyen of the Barcelona hotel industry since 1836, and there they order «peach Melba» for dessert. The Melba peach was created by the famous French chef Auguste Escoffier in 1892, at a banquet given at the Savoy Hotel in London in honor of the opera singer Nellie Melba. The recipe (vanilla ice cream, peach and raspberry coulis) quickly entered the repertoire of international haute cuisine created and was served in almost all the great dining rooms of the Western world, so the American military assumed that the 7 Portes would also have it in letter. Mistake.
Dessert menu at the 7 Portes restaurant.
Paco Parellada, owner and maître of the premises, was not daunted. He decided to present those customers with his own version of the Melba with peaches in syrup, ice cream, flan and a little cream. And the name? As the 7 Portes letter explains, “pajama” was the phonetic approximation used by Mr. Parellada to get along with those who asked for “pich melba”. Pichelma, pichama, pajamas. What a great invention.