Let’s start with deconstruction. Madrid, one morning in October, chef Javi Estévez sets up his gilda – which is not a gilda at all – in his restaurant La Tasquería, specialized in offal and with a Michelin star. Of the pure gilda, two of its three preserved ingredients remain in his invention, the olive and the “acid-spicy”—he says—Basque chilli or piparra. The other one, the salted anchovy, disappears, replaced by smoked sardine. And he introduces his house brand of offal: two tacos of cooked Iberian pork tongue plus chicken liver pâté. For adults: dried tomato, crinkle-cut fries with paprika, goat cheese cream, extra virgin olive oil, sherry vinegar reduction, dill. The cook starts from the concept of the gilda to create a dish with all these ingredients arranged along a small tray: the wooden stick also disappears. This is Estévez’s succulent and unique gilda, which, as he himself is responsible for emphasizing, “is not a gilda.” In the visible kitchen, his team is busy preparing the first service and Bad Bunny plays through a speaker, the star whose motto fits what this chef has done with the gilda: YHLQMDLG (I Do What I Want) .
Now, let’s rebuild.
One November morning in San Sebastián, Juan Pedrera picks up the phone and says: “Let’s see, a gilda, what a gilda is, is a manzanilla olive, our country’s chilli pepper and Cantabrian anchovy, all of quality, skewered on a toothpick, square better than round so that the ingredients don’t dance, and drizzled with a little olive oil.” He speaks from Casa Vallés, where according to legend a client named Joaquín Aramburu, nickname Txepetxa, In Basque the wren bird, tiny and at the same time with a very powerful trill, used to mix on a toothpick the snack that they put with its wine until, one fine day, savoring the pintxo, He contemplated it and announced to the world: “This is a gilda.”
The film had just arrived in Spain Gilda.
Txepetxa made the analogy between its cover and the character of Rita Hayworth, who at that time was an erotic paradigm in Spain and the object of moral censorship of the Church, and word of mouth spread about the gilda, “because it was green, salty and a not very spicy,” says Pedrera.
Food writer Marti Buckley, a resident of San Sebastián, will publish in 2024 The Book of Pintxos (Artisan), to which he has dedicated three years of research. During his investigation, he found a photograph of a gilda in 1942 in the Martínez bar in San Sebastian, so, according to his documentary investigation, the gilda must have existed formally before Txepetxa I gave him a name. Pedrera limits himself to giving his story. He assumes that every legend is controversial, even contestable: “Those from Bilbao say that they invented the gilda.”
So the gilda took root in the Basque Country and for decades spread throughout Spain until today it represents the dome of the church of the aperitif.
In recent years, the rise of this pintxo has been particularly intense. Alfredo Escobar, Kiki, member of the San Sebastián Pintxo Institute, maintains that the peak in popularity is linked to the tourist explosion in his city. “It is the first thing that anyone who arrives is made to try, and since now everyone comes here, it has become even more renowned if possible,” he says. Buckley also believes that tourism has resized the gilda; and he adds another factor, the cultural tendency to reclaim what is traditional, what is traditional.
Gabriel Bartra, content director of the Bullipedia (elBullifoundation, by Ferran Adrià), places the root of the gilda in the Neolithic, when it began to be preserved, and states about its contemporary evolution: “It has transcended from a simple pintxo. It originates in a geographically specific place, is known and reproduced in other places and then versions begin to be made: there you can see its impact. This implies that it is part of the collective gastronomic memory of a country.”
Transcendence, that is, is putting into your mouth in one bite the gilda version of Carlos del Portillo, Bistronómika (Madrid), a notorious grilled fish restaurant. It happens with its gilda that all this is spread on your palate in a single instant: kalamata olive, piparra – the aforementioned pickled chilli, typical of the Basque Country -, crushed dried Korean chilli, pickled French onion, onion that is not onion, central loin and almadraba red tuna belly and a delicious olive and anchovy mayonnaise; in the blink of an eye, all this together, covered with a stainless steel skewer whose metallic cold touch on the tongue adds elegance to the matter. “I took the gilda from the bar and put it on the table,” summarizes Del Portillo, who decided to make this wonder after trying the one from Casa Marcelo, by Marcelo Tejedor, in Santiago; In 2013, the Galician chef invented a gilda in which he changed the anchovy for hake and added pieces of jalapeño.
Del Portillo jokes that the gilda is his best-selling “dessert,” because although they usually start with it as an appetizer, when they finish eating it is common for customers to ask him to close with another pass of gildas. If you want, he also puts it with some caviar.
On the same street as Bistronómika is La Cocina de Frente, which serves the basic gilda, the one with three preserves mounted on a stick, without further ado. Its chef, Carlos García Pérez, defines it as “the perfect appetizer to awaken your appetite and have a beer before eating.” “The gilda enters and opens your mouth completely, it activates your palate with the salinity of the anchovy, the spiciness of the piparra and the freshness of the olive, which does not have such an intense flavor but for me it is what rounds out the whole ”. He gives special importance to serving a good gilda because he considers it a parameter of hospitality competition: “At the first bite of a gilda you already know how you are going to eat in a restaurant.”
The aperitif now has its own day of honor. Since 2018, the Gilda and Pintxo Brotherhood has celebrated Gilda Eguna, Gilda Day, in San Sebastián every December (this year, Saturday, December 16). “We thought it deserved a tribute because it is the pintxo par excellence,” says Sonia García Olazabal, spokesperson for the organization. The day includes a contest called Gilda Innova. In 2021 he won one that consisted of a gordal olive stuffed with piparra and anchovy tartar, with chilli and red onion mayonnaise and a black olive ground base; In 2022, another one that had apple, spirulina, cider and dehydrated tomato won the first prize.
La gilda is no stranger to the era of experimental cuisine, whose desire for ingenuity can be excessive, especially when it comes to compositions that are perfect in their elemental nature. Javi Estévez, in La Tasquería, while emphasizing that he does not intend to present his hybrid of preserves and offal as a gilda, assumes that the phenomenon is beginning to be dizzying: “The issue is being given a lot of thought, often in “In reality, what you see are skewers with ingredients from the gilda.” In the brotherhood they are clear about what “a good gilda” should be. On his website they dictate that “the piparra is not very large and has a touch of vinegar, that the anchovy is fine and without beards and that the olive is of the chamomile type, without pits.” “It should be taken in one bite to enjoy all the aromas and flavors at the same time.”
As is, the brothers say, they give it in Casa Vallés. With one caveat: to be faithful to the origin, they use pitted olives, like in the 1940s. Apparently, this orthodox detail has given some tourists a hard time. Everything is to enjoy the charm of San Sebastián and the memorable flavor of the gilda.
CREDITS
Photography Geray Mena
Set design and styling Sara de Miguel
Lightning Diego Perez
Retouch Arena Retouch
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