Eat spicy cocktail sticks
Each week we celebrate the love of a good snack, with genius ideas for eating for pure pleasure – either solo or with friends…
Whatever Weather happens to be raging as you read this, we’ve had a modicum of sunshine and are now officially seeking opportunities to drink rosé all day, as they say. Pop it on ice, hand out the glasses – we’re here for a long time, not necessarily a good time (things are gonna get headachey).
All this has precious little to do with snacking because we tend not to snack as we go in this country; we’re more about panic-smashing a Mcdonald’s when we’re up to our necks in it. And I’m not suggesting the snack I’m serving today might replace your Mcdonald’s; just that in Spain, like in lots of other delicious cultures where they care about you, you get to nibble sparkling snackettes while you drink.
I was in northern Spain last summer when I encountered gilda in huge numbers, piled high on silver platters at bars where glasses of rosado cost £1.50. Gilda is a classic ’lil pintxo on a cocktail stick (pintxo is Basque for pincho, which is Spanish for spike), made up of olives, anchovies and pickled chillies. And it took me a few days to give gilda a go because I was taken in by bigger, floozier pintxos containing garlic mushrooms, ham and hot potatoes.
But once I started on those little spikes, I didn’t stop. A gilda is spicy, salty and acidic all at once – a frenzy of flavour that takes up such a small amount of space in the world. To make a pile of them at home to enjoy when you’re merely reading Grazia in the garden is to turn a moment into a summery event. You’ll need to play with the ingredients to find your ideal combo
– I, for instance, found the Brindisa guindilla chillies too hot to pop whole, but I wasn’t averse to an occasional cornichon or pickled silverskin onion.
If we really want to get this right though, what should we drink? I asked wine writer, sommelier and Spain-lover Laura Jane Faulds. She told me that dry sherry and gilda is a ‘classic for a reason’ and she would go for a floral Manzanilla ‘for a more intense, aromatic coalescence’ – try Hidalgo La Gitana (£8 from Sainsbury’s).
White-wise, Laura says we want a greener, oakless and mineral-driven white Rioja such as Marco Abella’s Olbieta (£13.95, dorsetwine.co.uk). She says this would work in an ‘ooh-la-la I’m sitting outside in the Spanish sunshine getting white wine drunk and munching mindlessly’ way.
Her dream gilda pairing, though, isn’t Spanish, it is a punchy, tannic Calabrian rosato (‘we need oomph to keep our wine from getting completely trampled on’). Cirò (£9.75, qwines.co.uk) is made from the hardy, thick-skinned Gaglioppo grape and therefore ‘its tart redcurrant and cranberry flavours are game for a sparring match with la gilda’s acid-mania’.
Are you?