Angel’s Hair

angel’s hair cabello de ángel, a speciality of Majorca but familiar in other parts of Spain, has been well described by Janet Mendel (1996) as ‘fine golden strands of candied fruit … made from the flesh of the sidra, a type of large squash, striated in green and yellow, which seems to be used for nothing else but this’. The pulp is cooked, then cooked again with sugar to produce a stringy jam which is used for various sweet purposes, e.g. as a filling for ensaimadas. It is widely obtainable in canned form. References to it in culinary literature often say that it comes from a ‘pumpkin’.