Trinxat: Catalan kale and potato cake
La Cerdanya, Pyrenees, Catalonia
Trinxat — from the Catalan word for mashed or chopped — is a winter dish from the Pyrenean Cerdanya region: boiled kale (col d'hivern) and potato mashed together with pork fat, formed into a cake, and fried until deeply caramelised on both sides. It is then topped with crispy strips of bacon or panceta. The kale must be winter-sweetened — frost-touched col must be used, which converts its starches to sugar and removes the bitterness.
Trinxat is mountain food, mountain winter food. It is not elegant. It is dense, fatty, deeply savoury, and completely honest.