Mantecol, a Christmas treasure.

Cherished by everyone and highly expected during Christmas times. As sweet as a Bon o Bon bite and delicious as a Vauquita, the beloved Mantecol is another popular Argentinean dessert, commonly sold at every kiosco or supermarket of the country. You can enjoy it anytime of the year and is probably more recommended to have it around the colder days and not on the warm ones, but it tastes so good that it deserved to be one of the stars of the desserts served on the Christmas table.

It is kind of semi-soft nougat with a very special texture that is really hard to describe but amazing to experience. It is lightly hard, quite crunchy and a little bit spongy enough to melt into your mouth. It is usually sold in presentations of 80 to 100gr, and since one of its principal ingredients is peanut butter is recommended to keep it cold.

Story has it that the origins of Mantecol come from a very old and ancient greek dessert, originally called “halva” or “chalwás” which is elaborated with %50 of toasted and grounded sesame seeds, and a warm mix of sugar and glucose. Once it is cold it hardens and becomes something so exquisite that it demands to be tasted.

So in 1939, the Greek descendant Miguel Georgalos who was an expert on “halva”, opened his first factory in Buenos Aires and started to introduce different variations of the original recipe in order to slowly adapt it to the local palate. One of them was a premium version that had pistachios and the other one was a bit more ordinary and had peanut butter. The latter was the chosen one by the general public and gradually started to become a tradition. The given name, “Mantecol” is because one of the ladies who first tried it said it looked like Manteca (butter).

Nowadays, the brand is owned and commercialized by Cadbury - Mondelez since they bought it around 2001, but Gerogalos, the company that belong to Miguel Georgalos and his family and who first produced it, started to sell the product again in 2008 under the name “Nucrem” with its original and glorious recipe.

And as it happens with many other famous argentine sweets that have a special place in our hearts, you can ask for it as an ice cream flavor in some ice-cream parlors. (Yes, we love weird Ice-cream flavors!)