How Spain’s Most Enduring Foods Turned Necessity Into Tradition

Walk through the markets of Spain and you’ll see some familiar sights: Manchego wheels, jamón slices, anchovy tins, olive jars. A lot of these are the same foods you pick up at the grocery store back home when you want to impress guests with a snack board. But before these delicacies were able to travel across Spain and beyond, they were local foods that were preserved so they wouldn’t go to waste.

Before the age of refrigeration, spoilage was a constant problem that every Spanish region had to overcome. On the northern coast, Basque fishermen spent months at sea chasing cod and needed a way to store their fish until they returned home to sell it. Just west in Cantabria, the spring anchovy catch had to be eaten fresh or sold nearby. Inland in Castile-La Mancha, sheep’s milk didn’t keep for long, so shepherds needed to turn it into something more sustainable. Farther south, the Andalusian summer made cooking indoors miserable, and in Extremadura, farmers and shepherds didn’t want to throw out bread just because it had gone hard.

The solutions to all of these challenges came from what people had on hand: salt, oil, time, and ingenuity. Many of those fixes outlasted the problems they solved and are now the cornerstones of some of Spain’s best-known dishes. Here’s how five of the most enduring Spanish foods came to be.

Salt cod: How Basque fishermen made their catch last

Spain’s Basque Country hugs the Bay of Biscay, but the bacalao (cod) that Basque cooking centers on comes from much colder waters. We have salt to thank for that.

Basque fishermen would travel beyond Spain’s shores to fish for cod as far away as Newfoundland and Iceland. Norse fishermen used to air-dry their cod in the cold, dry north, but Basque crews had access to salt, and salted cod kept in any climate. Cod was cleaned, salted, and then dried, which drew out moisture so the fish wouldn’t spoil on the trip back across the Atlantic. By the mid-1500s, salt cod made up a large share of all the fish eaten in Europe.

Today, many Basque dishes start with salt cod that’s soaked for a day or more to remove some of the salt content. For bacalao al pil-pil, the cod is then cooked slowly in olive oil with garlic and chili while the cook swirls the pan until gelatin from the fish thickens the oil into a pale, creamy sauce. Another dish, bacalao a la vizcaína, serves the cod in a sauce of dried choricero peppers, onions, and olive oil.

Manchego: Cheese that gave Castile-La Mancha’s milk a longer life

In the dry plains of Castile-La Mancha, south of Madrid, sheep fare better than cows. But milk spoils within days, so shepherds turned it into something that would keep: a firm, salted cheese that could be eaten throughout the year and stored easily. Cheesemaking here is thought to go back to the Bronze Age, and early tools for draining curds, including perforated vessels and molds, now sit in museums.

Shepherds pressed the curds into baskets of woven esparto grass, which squeezed out the whey and left a zigzag pattern, called pleita, on the rind. Salting and aging drew out more moisture, and the cheese formed a natural rind that protected it over time. Many producers now use molds that reproduce the esparto pattern. The marks are one way to spot Manchego on a cheese counter.

Under the Queso Manchego Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), Manchego can be made only from the milk of Manchega sheep. Wheels weighing up to 1.5 kilograms (about 3.3 pounds) must age for at least 30 days, larger wheels for at least 60 days, and none can age longer than two years. Every PDO wheel carries a numbered casein label (a round plate applied to the rind during pressing) that certifies it as genuine Manchego.

Gazpacho and salmorejo: The no-cook answer to Andalusia’s heat

In Andalusia, a lot of summer produce grows well in the region’s fields and gardens, but cooking it meant warming up the house in an often already sweltering climate. Using fresh and available ingredients without lighting the stove is the idea behind gazpacho, which combines tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, day-old bread, garlic, and olive oil into a chilled soup. It’s a simple recipe with ingredients that people had access to, becoming a light, inexpensive meal.

A close cousin is salmorejo, a cold tomato-based soup with similar ingredients that comes from Córdoba. More day-old bread gives it a thicker and creamier consistency and was a way to prevent food waste. Salmorejo is often topped with diced jamón serrano or jamón ibérico (both cured hams) and chopped hard-boiled eggs with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. Both soups, made with available ingredients and without heating up the home, have become defining dishes of Andalusia and are enjoyed throughout Spain, especially in the summer.

Migas: The shepherd’s dish that saved Extremadura’s stale bread

Migas, which translates to “crumbs,” is a dish with origins closely tied to farmers and shepherds, especially in Extremadura. Bread was portable and provided sustenance for a full day in the fields or for shepherds traversing long distances with their sheep. When the bread became too hard, throwing it away wasn’t an option; it was transformed into a new dish: migas extremeñas.

Day-old or stale bread is the base of this humble dish. Bread is broken into small pieces or reduced to crumbs, moistened overnight, and then lightly fried in olive oil with garlic, paprika, peppers, and meat, such as pork belly or chorizo. Migas are often topped with a fried egg, and in summer, they may come with grapes. You’ll find the simple yet delicious dish prepared in many Extremaduran households, as well as restaurants and tapas bars.

Santoña anchovies: How Italian salters inspired Cantabria’s tins

Cantabrian anchovies are a widely recognized symbol of Spain’s gastronomy. Fishermen in Santoña, a coastal town on the Bay of Biscay, caught anchovies to eat fresh or sell locally, but few were preserving them until the late 19th century, when Italian salters came looking for new sources of anchovies. The colder waters in this part of Spain produce a larger, fattier anchovy that’s abundant in spring.

The Italians introduced the technique of salting anchovies whole to ship back home. In the 1880s, a Sicilian salter began cleaning, filleting, and canning the cured fish, launching an industry that turned Santoña into an anchovy-canning hub. Across Spain, Santoña anchovies are served as tapas (or as pintxos in the Basque Country). Once a seasonal food, Santoña anchovies are enjoyed year-round.

Today, you can find many of these foods at home, thanks to the wonders of preservation. But eating them where they originated — salt cod at a Basque cider house, gazpacho on a summer afternoon in Seville, anchovies a few blocks from Santoña’s canneries — lets you appreciate them in a whole new way. What a delicious excuse to visit Spain.