Where should I eat in Mallorca, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

Sobrasada is the one to understand properly, because the specification tells you what you should be tasting. It is a raw, cured sausage of irregular cylindrical shape, made from minced pork lean and back fat in a ratio of 30 to 60 per cent lean against 40 to 70 per cent fat, with 4 to 7 per cent paprika from Capsicum annuum and/or Capsicum longum, 1.8 to 2.8 per cent salt, and pepper, rosemary, thyme and/or oregano. It is cured in drying rooms until it reaches its specified characteristics. That fat fraction is why it spreads rather than slices, and the paprika percentage is why it is orange-red rather than brown. The registered geographical area is the island of Majorca itself, which is unusually clean for a PGI — there is no sub-zone to look for.

The ensaïmada is the sweet counterpart, registered under the dual name Ensaimada de Mallorca or Ensaimada mallorquina in the bakery, pastry, confectionery and biscuit class. It is a coiled, laminated spiral, and the protection sits with the name and the place rather than with a single filling or size.

Where to eat them splits by the same island geography that governs everything else here. In the Tramuntana villages, sobrasada turns up as a warm spread on bread or stirred into a vegetable dish; along the southern and eastern coast, the cooking leans to fish and the local vegetable stews. Palma is where both traditions and the island's bakeries concentrate.

Sobrasada's registered fat range of 40 to 70 per cent is not a flaw in the product; it is the product. A visitor who orders it expecting a firm, sliceable salami will think something has gone wrong. It is designed to be spread on bread, warmed, or used as a cooking fat that carries the paprika through a dish — which is also why a jar or a whole sausage travels better than a plate of it does.

• Breakfast — An ensaïmada and coffee, in a bakery rather than a hotel buffet.
• Early evening — Sobrasada on bread, where the 4 to 7 per cent paprika does its work before a meal rather than during one.
• Dinner — Island cooking proper, which on a coast recording 17.7 inches (449 millimeters) of rain a year over 53.1 rainy days means the vegetable and fish dishes of a genuinely dry place.

Protected names are frequently approximated. "Sobrasada" without the Mallorca designation is a different legal product, and so is a coiled pastry sold as an ensaïmada without the registered name attached — worth knowing if you are buying to bring home. The island's seasonality matters too: a bakery or village restaurant in the Tramuntana may keep summer hours only, and the 53.1 rainy days a year concentrate in autumn and winter, which is exactly when the smallest places close. On the broader safety picture, the State Department's Spain advisory asks visitors to "exercise increased caution in Spain due to terrorism and civil unrest," and the page as published carries that wording without a numbered level attached to it.

The Mallorca things-to-do question in this group covers the Serra de Tramuntana's World Heritage inscription, which is also the landscape that produced this food.