Bocadillo de Anchoas

A good anchovy fillet is so dense with flavour that a sandwich of it is mostly an exercise in restraint. Three or four mahogany strips of cured anchovy laid in a split roll, maybe a layer of cold butter beneath them, and nothing else: that is the whole bocadillo de anchoas, and the reason it works is that the fish has already had eighteen months of work done to it before it ever meets bread. Everything else on the plate exists to carry that and to keep quiet.

The anchovy here is not the limp grey thing from a pizza. The fish from the Cantabrian Sea, the bocarte caught off the north coast in spring, is packed whole into salt and left to mature for the better part of a year or more, until the flesh firms, deepens to a russet brown, and turns savoury all the way through. Then it is desalted, and the fillets are lifted off the bone by hand, one side at a time, and packed under oil. What goes in the roll is the result of that long cure, salty and oily and intense, closer to a condiment than to a piece of fish.

The bread's only job is to hold and to dilute. A neutral crusty roll, its crumb sometimes wiped with olive oil or rubbed with ripe tomato in the Catalan manner, gives the salt something bland to land against and a structure that will not fight the soft fish. Butter is the classic northern Spanish move, a cool fatty cushion that rounds off the anchovy's edge the way it does on a Cantabrian tapa, the fish laid on a buttered cracker. The danger is going heavy: pile in too many fillets and the bite is pure salt, use a roll with no crust and the whole thing goes slack under the oil.

Bite in and the oil reaches you first, then the salt, then a long savoury depth that keeps going after the fish is gone, the taste people reach for the word umami to describe. The butter, if it is there, is cool against the warmth of the room and softens the landing. There is no crunch beyond the crust, no heat, no sauce; it is a quiet, adult, faintly briny mouthful that asks for a cold beer or a glass of albarino and a few minutes at a bar, not a meal so much as a pause built around one extraordinary ingredient.

Its relatives are sorted by which cured fish goes in. The boqueron version uses anchovies cured in vinegar instead of salt, white and sharp and milder, a different fish experience entirely. A matrimonio, the marriage, lays a salt anchovy and a vinegar boqueron in the same roll to play the two against each other. The bocadillo de bonito reaches for cured tuna instead. Where this one parts from the broader bocadillo de pescado is that nothing is fried or fresh: the fish arrives already preserved, the bread a frame around a thing made months earlier on a Cantabrian quay.

The Sicilians of Santona

The cured anchovy that defines this sandwich is a documented nineteenth-century arrival, not an ancient Spanish craft. Italian salters, many from Sicily, came to the Cantabrian coast in the second half of the 1800s drawn by the spring runs of anchovy in the Bay of Biscay, and they brought a salting-and-filleting method the local industry had not used. The figure usually named is Giovanni Vella Scaliota, a Sicilian who settled in the port of Santona and, around 1883, is credited with developing the filleted, oil-packed semi-preserved anchovy that became the regional standard.

Around him a small industry grew. Salting houses with Italian names, the Vella and the Sanfilippo among them, opened in Santona in the 1880s and 1890s, and the town built its identity on the cure, the modern semipreserved anchovy in oil dating from that wave rather than from any older Spanish tradition. The sandwich is the casual end of that industry: the same fillets that get sold in careful tins, laid instead into a bar roll for someone standing up. The bocadillo itself has no inventor and no date, but the thing that makes it worth eating does: Giovanni Vella Scaliota and his Sicilian filleting method, settled at Santona around 1883.