Where to stay

Biniarroca

Near Menorca airport, but in open country, this is a friendly rural hotel with cosy, romantic rooms. They do an excellent breakfast and the restaurant has a peaceful garden. Doubles from £115. Camí Vell 57, Sant Lluís, 00 34 971 150 059, http://www.biniarroca.com

Brondo Architect

Palma’s coolest boutique hotel. It’s secluded, fresh and imaginatively designed. María Salinas’s cooking is delicious and uses the freshest market produce. Doubles from £75. Carrer Can Brondo 4, 00 34 971 720 507, http://www.brondoarchitect.com

Ca Na Xini

Outside it looks like a country house, inside like an all-white film set. It has its own winery, cheese factory and a sculpture garden, and is handily in the centre of Menorca. Doubles from £107. Camí de Sant Patrici, Ferreries, 00 34 971 37 45 12, http://www.canaxini.com

Hotel San Lorenzo

In a tiny backstreet of the oldest part of Palma, this discreet address has all the trappings of a boutique hotel but feels welcoming like a well-run B&B. Doubles from £132. C/San Lorenzo 14, 00 34 971 72 82 00, http://www.hotelsanlorenzo.com

Monnaber Nou

A working finca in the lee of Majorca’s Serra de Tramuntana that doubles as a getaway hotel with riding, cycling and spa. Two restaurants – one gastronomic and the other doing wood-fired barbecues. Rooms and apartments are simple but comfortable. Doubles from £110. Predio Monnaber Nou, Campanet, 00 34 971 877 176, http://www.monnaber.com

S’Olivaret

Not so much a polished farmhouse as a hideaway on a scenic road between Alaro and Orient. The location, overlooked by two massive striated rocks is dramatic, especially when viewed from an infinity pool. Rooms and suites are individually styled. The Almez restaurant, just revamped, gives a new touch to traditional Majorcan cuisine and the breakfasts are scrummy. Doubles from £115. Carretera Orient-Alaró 3, 00 34 971 510 889, http://www.solivaret.com

Travel Information

The currency of Spain is the euro and time is one hour ahead of GMT. Majorca and Menorca lie to the east of the mainland and weather on the islands in April is warm with average highs of about 19 ̊C and lows of 11 ̊C. Travel time from the UK is 2.5 hours.

GETTING THERE

EasyJet offers daily direct flights from London airports such as Gatwick to Palma on Majorca, and to Menorca’s Mahón airport.http://www.easyjet.co.uk
Monarch offers regular direct flights from London airports to Palma and Menorca’s Mahón. http://www.monarch.co.uk

RESOURCES

Spanish Tourist Office is the official resource for information about the country, http://www.spain.info, or visit http://www.illesbalears.es for the Balearics tourist office. Both offer a wealth of tips, ideas, advice and more.

FURTHER READING

A Winter in Majorca by George Sand. During the 19th century, Sand captures the natural beauty of the island while struggling to look after her invalid partner Chopin and deal with peculiar local customs.

CARBON COUNTING

Return flights from London to Palma produce 0.31 tonnes of CO2. Cost to offset for this trip is £2.30 at http://www.climatecare.org, and donations will go towards supporting environmental projects around the world.

Where to eat

Es Cranc

Slow Food-supporting bistro that cooks caldereta de lagosta – a lobster stew made from the freshest local catch – perfectly. £60. Escoles 31, Fornells, Menorca, 00 34 971 376 442

Es Molí de Foc

Family-run microbrewery and restaurant in Sant Climent, Menorca. Great atmosphere and super cooking – especially the rice dishes – with refreshing ales. £25, including beer. Carrer de Sant Llorenç 65, 00 34 971 153 222, http://www.esmolidefoc.es

Es Racó d’es Teix

Chef Josef Sauerschell has created a distinctive cuisine based on clean, bold flavours. The Michelin-starred restaurant, situated at the base of the Teix mountain, also offers you stunning panoramic views. Four-course tasting menu, £55. Viña Vieja 6, Deià, 00 34 971 639 501, http://www.esracodesteix.es

Forn de Sant Joan

It’s the hottest tapas bar/restaurant ticket in Palma. As with the rest of the city, the best bargain basements – it’s in a cellar – are at lunchtime, with a £16 menu. Expect to pay double plus drinks in the evenings. Sant Joan 4, 00 34 971 728 422, http://www.forndesantjoan.com

Jardin

Macarena de Castro is a star of the islands’ cuisine, jetting off around the world for special appearances. Her fine-dining restaurant is matched by a bistro and gastrobar that does menus for as little as £12 per head. There’s no menu for the main stage, but the dishes are imaginative reworkings of Majorcan favourites. Tritons, Port d’Alcúdia,00 34 971 89 23 91, http://www.restaurantejardin.c...

Simply Fosh

Marc Fosh pioneered fine dining in Majorca, and he’s working to bring it into the middle-ground too. This Michelin-starred offering puts his full talents on display. £53. Carrer de la Missió 7A, Palma, 00 34 971 720 114, http://www.simplyfosh.com

Food Glossary

Amargos

Chewy macarons made with local almonds.

Bacalao

Salted cod, often dried.

Bomba

Spanish short-grain rice that is grown slowly in cold, mountain water. When cooked, it absorbs far more liquid than regular rice making it ideal for broths and paella.

Cocarrois

A traditional Majorcan vegetable pasty.

Cordero asado

Roast lamb.

Empanada

A semi-circular savoury pastry filled with meat and vegetables.

Lechona

Honey-glazed suckling piglet leg.

Patatas bravas

Potatoes in a spicy tomato sauce.

Rosado

Rosé wine.

Rubiols

Sweet pastry turnovers dusted in icing sugar, and filled with apricot, orange preserves or almond paste.

Sobrassada

A raw, cured sausage from the Balearics made with ground pork, paprika, salt and spices. Often used as a paste to flavour empanadas. Comes as spicy picante or milder dulce.

Tombet

Vegetable stew, often containing peppers, tomatoes, aubergine and olives.

Food and Travel Review

Romantic novelist George Sand would have made a great copywriter. In the 1838 diary of her stay in Majorca she described its ‘turquoise waters, lapis lazuli skies and emerald mountains’. Living with her partner Frédéric Chopin in Valldemossa probably sharpened her lyrical pen.

Majorcan pigs enchanted her too: ‘These animals are the most beautiful on earth,’ she wrote. Sand felt, with good reason, the same about the olive trees, though kept back, alas, a waspish postscript for the oil. ‘Its stench impregnates houses, inhabitants, carriages and even the air in the fields.’ That’s a charge that could not be justified today. Majorcan cooks, it’s true, drizzle, sizzle and splash it on every fish or vegetable in their repertoire. The aceite de olive, virgin or otherwise, is never rancid.

Tomás Graves, author and son of poet Robert Graves, settled in Deià. His is a more intimate view. In Bread and Oil, his defence of the island’s culinary culture, he claims pa (bread) is the second word Majorcans learn to pronounce (after mama and before papa). His title is a literal translation of pa amb oli, coarse bread, rubbed with the local Ramallet tomato, sprinkled with salt and doused in oil. If there were a national dish, this would be it.

Until recently, farmers left olives to ripen and blacken before harvesting them. Often they waited until the fruit fell to the ground before taking them to the taifona for pressing. This yields more oil, but is too acid to earn an extra virgin tag. Taste has shifted to a fruitier style. At Monnaber nou, a finca shaded by the Serra de Tramuntana, the groves climb steps of buttressed terraces. Sheep graze stubble at the base of gnarled and twisted trunks, some many hundreds of years old. Francisco Mayordomo, the landowner, treats his crop with more care than his ancestors may have. He picks the fruit directly off the trees when they start to change colour to produce mellow, golden oil that tastes of herbs and almonds.

Many of the trees on his estate are wild. From these he gathers teardrop-shaped green olives for his mother’s recipe of olives trencades. Bashed with a mallet to split them, they’re brined with fennel and lemon zest until the astringency fades. Then they have a unique taste and texture that’s fruity with a hint of bitterness. Even the stone is unusual, tapering and pointed at one end.

He also keeps native black pigs. Piglets have a short life expectancy. They’ll end up crisp and roasted in his rural hotel’s kitchen. The sows, once they’ve completed maternal duties, have another fate. Sobrassada looks like a salami. It can be long, thin, short, stubby or balloon-shaped. The largest ones weigh more than a dachshund. They are at the heart of cooking in both Menorca and Majorca. To make it, butchers pipe coarsely minced pork, blended with pimentón, the local paprika, into casings that they air-dry for up to a year. There’s picante for hot and a gentler dulce. It’s neither for frying nor for slicing. It has a spreadable texture that appears visibly or discreetly in most every meal. It can be in bowls at the breakfast table, spread on galletes (like croutons) with honey. It’s the umami flavour in cocas (a kind of ratatouille- topped pizza) and empanadas (small pastries). Macarena de Castro, chef-patron of Jardín at Port d’Alcúdia, Majorca, borrowed the name to create her signature cigala con sobrasada de mar, a slipper lobster made with a prawn pâté and shellfish bisque.

Lagosta, spiny lobster, is the prize catch in the Menorcan village of Fornells. Aleix Riera Alonso has fished for them all his working life as his father did before him. He trapped them in pots. His son uses nets to save on the cost of bait. The fibreglass boat he crews single-handedly is a giant compared with the traditional llauts moored alongside it on the quay.

‘I bought it 29 years ago,’ he says. ‘It belonged to two brothers, but one died and the other didn’t want to carry on. When he saw it, my father was worried because it didn’t have oars.’ Fishing was much harder then, he recalls. Everything was done by hand, but there was a lot more fish. ‘The trouble is there are laws aplenty, but the sea has no inspectors to enforce them so people come and take the lobsters illegally.’

He and other fishermen deal with bistros in the village. They buy for a price that’s set at the start of each season. Es Cranc, the restaurant he supplies, keeps its crustaceans in seawater tanks for its caldereta. The stew, served with galletes and alioli (garlic emulsion dip) is more than a soup – it’s a meal in itself.

The Mercat de l’Olivar next to Palma’s Plaza Mayor teems with fish – it could be because the stallholders there own boats. Sceptics claim the Mediterranean has been polluted and over-fished. There’s no sign of it in their displays. At most Spanish markets the way customers judge freshness is by checking for bright eyes and red gills. On the Peixos ferragut stall, rockfish, red mullet and John Dory may still be flapping. Prawns come in assorted shapes, sizes and colours.

Those from Sóller fetch a premium. Chef Marc Fosh makes them the centrepiece of his gazpacho amarillo con hierba luisa, gambas y bulgur, a chilled mango soup, spiked with cubes of lemon balm jelly and two prawns lying head to tail on a bed of bulgur. He belongs to chefs(in), a body working hard to convince the world that the Balearics is an important destination on the gastronomic map. According to local food historian Miguel Angel Barrios, ‘The islands are not just about sea and sandy beaches. There’s also plenty of good cuisine.’

Fine dining he insists isn’t the problem: ‘We’ve got everything from molecular to Michelin stars.’ What chefs are working towards, is improving the middle-ground. That starts with the raw materials in the market. María Salinas, of Brondo Architect Hotel, the coolest boutique hotel in Palma, is there every morning buying seafood and vegetables for her five-course, £23 lunch menu.

In antiquity, the islands procured salt by scooping holes on the seashore at the high water level. Waves would break over them. When the water evaporated it left behind a saline deposit. The salt mountains of Salinas de Levante, close to the nudist beach of Es Trenc, are the 20th-century alternative. Next to them lie shallow square pans from which precious flor de sal crystals are raked. Any chef worth his salt relies on it to season his dishes.

Marc Fosh knows it intimately. He started flavouring it with, seaweed, hibiscus, rosemary, Sri Lankan spices and truffle when the company harvesting it started out over a decade ago. Beetroot, a recent addition, has the colour and zing food stylists dream of.

Balearic windmills pepper the landscape and once ground blocks of salt. Their main task though was milling cereals. George Sand remarked that Majorca exported its finest white flour to Barcelona, but made bread from wholemeal. Be that as it may, the Balearics have a rich baking tradition. Ensaïmadas, coiled like a catherine wheel, have the texture of a soft, flaky croissant. To make it, bakers stretch, fold and pull out the leavened dough like a skein of wool.

Midway between Menorca’s ciutadella and Mahón, the island’s capitals past and present, is Es Mercadal. The sleepy township has two pastry shops on its main street, both going by the name of Ca’s Sucrer – one owned by a father, the other by his son. They fought for years in a dispute involving the right to advertise ‘established in 1873’ over their doors. Both make cakes and biscuits that date back generations. The best are amargos, chewy macarons made from egg white and Balearic almonds. Pastissets, melting short biscuits, are shaped like flower petals. Crespells are round tartlets filled with jam and apple compote. Neatly crimped pasties, rubiols, are stuffed with pumpkin jam.

Menorca’s landscape abounds with cows. They graze behind the dry-stone walls. The dairy industry owes a debt to Sir Richard Kane, governor when Great Britain ruled here in the 18th century. He imported English cattle to improve the native stock.

Farms had always made cheese, but his foresight changed the scale. It became a significant export both to its neighbour – whose obsession with pigs meant they have never had much time for cattle – and to the Spanish mainland. Protected-status Queso Mahón, cheese shaped like a square brick, has wrinkles over the top surface from cloth that wrapped the fresh curd.

At a fortnight old it is rubbed with pimentón and has an orange hue, while the texture is still chalky. Aged to a semicurado stage it turns pale straw. At a year old, it’s a powerful, mature hard cheese. One expert likened the latter’s taste to tanned hide. Nobody knows the exact number of artisans producing it but they run into the hundreds. Many are off the beaten track. Son Mercer de Baix is one of the best and can be found a kilometre or two down a dirt track overlooking a ravine.

The British also introduced gin during its occupation, probably to satisfy the Royal Navy. Xoriguer, the last company making it, is on the Mahón dockside. It distils grape spirit with wild junipers in ancient copper pot stills heated by log fires. Yes it’s a tourist attraction, but it’s popular with the locals too. Many older inhabitants will take a pre-breakfast nip from a thimble-sized glass to set them up for the day. Pomada, one part gin and two parts lemonade, served ice cold never goes out of fashion.

Order a bottle of rare 1999 Son Negre in a Michelin-starred restaurant and the price tag may be over £700. Wine in Majorca has come of age. A generation ago, country bodegas would sell bottles for a few pesetas. In bars, well-heeled tourists watched quaint islanders passing leather wine flasks from hand to hand. no more. The Denomination of Origin (DO) status Binissalem region makes intense oaked reds from the local manto negro grape. DO sibling Plà i Llevant in the east includes such bodegas as Armero Adrover in Felanitx, which crafts a diverse range of wines. Other winemakers outside the DO areas are experimenting with grapes that have faced extinction. Celler Son vives produces dry malvasia from a vineyard on terraces overlooking the sea at Banyalbufar. Galmes i Ribot, near Santa Margalida, experiments with varieties unknown outside the island, such as gorgollasa, argamussa and valent.

Twenty-five years ago, the Spanish author of a book of Balearic recipes promised to dispel a reputation for ‘poor and slow cooking’. Poor in the sense of not pointlessly luxurious and slow, as opposed to rushed and thrown together, would both seem positive virtues today. Majorca and Menorca have wonderful ingredients and – whatever George Sand may have written about the oil – they certainly know how to show them off.