Bocadillo de Sepia

On the flat-top of a chiringuito a few steps from the sand, a cleaned cuttlefish goes down with a flat sizzle and stays put. The cook presses it to the steel, lets the side facing the heat take real colour, then turns it once. Sepia a la plancha is a beach-bar fixture all along the Spanish Mediterranean, from the Costa Brava down past Valencia, and the bocadillo de sepia is that griddled cuttlefish slid hot into a roll instead of left on a plate. The whole thing is built around one ingredient cooked one way, on a hot surface in the open air, with the sea close enough to be part of the lunch.

Cuttlefish is the firmer, sweeter cousin of squid, with flesh meaty enough to take a griddle on its own. The flesh is thick, so the body is scored or splayed flat and given a hard sear on a clean hot plate that browns the outside and sets the inside while it stays tender; pulled at the right moment it slices like a steak, held over the heat too long it turns to the texture of an eraser. What gives the dish its name is the dressing, an ajillo of raw garlic and chopped parsley loosened in olive oil and spooned on as the cuttlefish comes off, so the residual heat takes the raw bite from the garlic without cooking it. Lemon is squeezed over it at the last second, and some counters add a smear of alioli; in Valencia the same garlic-parsley dressing often goes by the name salsa mery.

The loaf is a plain crusty barra, the everyday Spanish stick, split down its length and sometimes wiped on the cut faces with oil straight off the griddle. It works as a sturdy, neutral carrier: open enough in the crumb to take up the garlicky oil and the cuttlefish’s own juices, crusted enough to hold a hot wet filling on the walk back to a table without going to paste. The sepia is laid in still steaming, cut into strips or left in slabs, so most of each bite is seafood and only a little is bread. The bread exists to stay quiet and let the filling carry the bocadillo.

You eat it warm and a little messy, garlic oil running where the bread meets your hand, the lemon and the sea air doing as much for it as anything on the griddle. It belongs to the long Spanish coastal habit of a chiringuito lunch: a beer or a soft drink, a paper napkin, sand underfoot, the cuttlefish hot off a plancha that has been running all afternoon. In Valencia it also turns up in the esmorzaret, the mid-morning meal that grew out of farm work in l’Horta, often made with the small local sepionet. The same seared filling is the coastal relative of the fried-squid bocadillo de calamares of landlocked Madrid.

How it shows up shifts a little with the stretch of coast. A Catalan counter is the likeliest to set down a pot of allioli, the hard garlic-and-oil emulsion, alongside it; some kitchens brush the cuttlefish or the bread with a little of its own ink for a darker, brinier slick. The flavour stays clean and faintly sweet, the char off the steel giving it depth and the raw garlic and parsley keeping it lively. It tastes of a hot day by the Mediterranean more than of a kitchen, the reward for cooking it within sight of the water.

Born on the Beach Bar

The beach bar that gives the bocadillo its setting can be dated precisely. The word chiringuito came back from Cuba with the journalist César González-Ruano, who in 1949 renamed his Sitges beach kiosk, open since 1913 as El Kiosket, “El Chiringuito.” It was the first Spanish beach bar to carry the name, and the term spread from there to every hut at the foot of the sand. The bocadillo de sepia belongs to that world of plainly cooked fish, rice and tapas eaten in your swimsuit on the beach.

The cuttlefish itself is far older on this coast, long fished along the Mediterranean for its firm flesh and dark ink, and griddling it with garlic and parsley is a preparation widespread enough that no single cook is credited with putting it into bread. The sandwich reads as the obvious next move in a place where a hot plancha and a basket of bread are usually within reach of the water. In Valencia that move is folded into the esmorzaret, the working almuerzo the city built its mornings around.

Up the coast in the Balearics the cuttlefish has earned a festival of its own. Sant Joan de Labritja, in the north of Ibiza, holds its Fira de la Sèpia each March, when the sepia comes into season; the day opens with a blown conch shell, the island’s old signal that fresh fish has landed, and runs a contest for the best dish built on cuttlefish. The seaside bocadillo is the everyday end of that same catch, eaten standing at a beach counter with the oil still warm.