Miguel León’s family had a beach bar in Torremolinos. Since he was a child, in the summer, he spent his mornings watching the employee who was in charge of making the sardine skewers work. “Until the tourists’ children came down to the beach and I went to play with them, I sat on a box of Coca-Cola and watched it,” he says. Years went by like this, until one day, the skewer went away for a while to have a beer. In the meantime, a regular customer asked for a skewer and the boy stood up: “Don’t worry. I do it.” The client did not know who prepared it. When he finished, he called a waiter and said:
—But what happened today when you had never put such a good reputation on me before?
The waiter who served the customer told the boy. Miguel León felt “full of satisfaction.” He was 16 years old. Until today, when he is 37, he has not stopped making comments.
León is the chef at La Mar Bonita, his father’s restaurant in Torremolinos, next to his family’s longtime beach bar. It is on Carihuela beach, a promenade where the legend of Brigitte Bardot’s aura remains, who in 1957 filmed The Moonlight Jewelers there by Roger Vadim. Today there are sandals that come and go, top manta, ads for full English breakfast, coffee and Baileys and fish & chips, although there is also chef León with his skewers, recognized by different competitions among the best on the Costa del Sol. There he is Miguel León with his sardine skewers, holding up like a banner of Malaga’s cultural identity on the front line of international mass tourism.
The first sardines he pulls out this May morning are pretty good. Now, they are not as delicious as they are because it is not until a few weeks later, well into June, that the local sardine season begins, which is known in Malaga as manolita: because it is the size of a hand, from the little finger to the thumb. The ones that are serving now are from Blanes, Girona. They have an adequate size and flavor, but they lack the ideal amount of fat that makes them roast without drying out, and that they remain juicy and intense. “When you eat the sardine here on its date, it’s like eating acorn-fed ham. The key is the fat,” says León.
![Sardines are at their best in summer because they have more fat. Experts say that the best one for the espeto is from the Alboran Sea.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/EFARWV6PBVHUHFBN4UYGWOJCLU.jpg?auth=9264ccb891cbd805c77f1cc676183fe55430c3ef28632a2064d7295484748da7&width=414)
On his right bicep he has a traditional drawing of a boat with spits cooking. Around his neck, a chain with the figurine of a spit.
León rejects skewers made with Italian sardines. He says that they are plentiful and that they are sold because they are cheap, but they degrade the dish. “That’s not a skewer, but a bad sardine: buried in salt, or burnt, or raw, and without fat or flavor,” he explains. What worries him most, however, is the lack of candidates to continue the espetero tradition. “People don’t want this job and they could be lost.” He says that there are many places where the fish is not grilled by skewers but by employees, usually seasonal waiters, who improvise as best they can. “And not just anyone does this. It requires experience, craftsmanship, affection. “You have to know how to prepare the candle, prick the sardine, give it the exact point.”
He has three children and none has shown him a desire to succeed him. “It’s hard work,” says León, who in summer is surrounded by a ball of heat (the 40 degrees it can get, plus the hundred-odd degrees of fire, plus the earth, the warm wind that comes from the interior to the coast), pouring water on their heads and taking out dozens and dozens of skewers. On a high season day they serve more than 200 espetos. Mostly sardine, but also other fish, such as sea bass, sea bream or anchovy from Malaga, a unique feature of La Mar Bonita.
A few weeks ago, one of the young people who work at the top manta on the promenade, next to his business, approached Miguel León and asked him if he needed an assistant. “I told him I would love to, but to hire someone we have to be able to sign them up.” The young sub-Saharan man returned resigned to his nondescript position selling counterfeit glasses, caps and luxury bags.
![A plate of sardines cooked on a spit at the La Mar Bonita restaurant, where Miguel León cooks.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/FW3VKQCAEZFG3NFBPR7TIHYJWQ.jpg?auth=ed73bd667cc81a824fa514c695b26159390c02a0ea4d05f8ae906640cc03b531&width=414)
In order to defend the essence and continuity of the craft and the dish, the Mesa del Espeto has been created in Malaga, a civil association that wants UNESCO to recognize it as intangible cultural heritage of humanity and that seeks “to safeguard the maintenance of the essential features of the sardine skewer” and “the defense, transmission of knowledge and safeguarding of the profession of skewer or moragador through training.” Espetero is the word that is most used, but the proper word, the traditional one for the profession of one who cooks espetos, is amoragador. The historian Fernando Rueda, author of La Cocina Popular de Málaga and member of the Board, cannot, nor does he want to, hide the anger he feels when he calls himself an espetero: “It kicks me a hundred times! It is amoragador, or amoragaor as it is pronounced here, and amoragar is to make moragas, to burn with fire, a term of Arabic origin. In fact, a long time ago, here, when you saw a guy with his back badly sunburned, people joked: ‘Well, he’s not amoragao!’ And take advantage of Rueda for another lexical warning. Chiringuito is not an original word either, it came with tourists from other areas of Spain. “In Malaga it was always called picnic area.”
In the picnic areas, in the last third of the 19th century, beach leisure began to appear. Then, the sardine skewer, which had always been a dish of the people of the sea, a cheap and everyday dish among the most humble, was also entering the taste of the wealthy classes. In an 1879 article in the magazine La Illustration Española y Americana it was explained: “In Malaga the name moraga is given to any food that poor people improvise on the fine sand of the beach, and whose main element is freshly caught sardines. ”. The text accompanied an image of the painting La Moraga, by Horacio Lengo (1879), in which some children appear roasting sardines on the sand of the beach.
The use of wooden boats to roast sardines, Rueda clarifies, was a folkloric nod to tourism when its mass era began in the sixties; And already in this century that little detail of the wooden boat was replaced by that of the steel boat, which maintains the symbolic seafaring reference and is neater. But before all this, always, the espeto was made without any boat, simply on the floor of the beach, on the sand, making a couple of piles to house the embers called balates. The root of the espeto, says Rueda, can be traced to Reliefs of the tables, about the delights of food and different dishes, a book by the Andalusian wise man Ibn Razīn, from the 13th century. The technique of roasting fish was common throughout the Spanish Levant. But what made espeto a typical and properly Malaga tradition is the specific evolution of the technique, consisting of softening sardines, or other fish, in cane.
Miguel León himself is in charge of collecting reeds from the streams in the area and sharpening them with a knife, giving them a sculptural elegance. He also uses steel skewers made by a village blacksmith. The cook assumes that the cane will disappear. The Espeto Table wants to avoid that. There is no agreement among experts on whether or not the steel changes the flavor of the sardine on spit, but it would make sense to preserve the cane if only for the sake of good heritage taste.
A national tourist passes in front of León’s boat, which is outside the restaurant, and exclaims: “How wonderful! Look how I spit! “Can I take a photo?” The elderly man orders a young couple who is walking with him to stand next to the boat. She and he, very neat and wearing tight clothes, stand body to body, smile for the photo and intertwine their hands. “But separate, make room!” the man corrects them. “Let the spit be seen.”
#sardine #skewer #facing #abyss #purity #mass #consumption