The gilda: the anchovy, olive and pepper skewer, what to order and what to avoid

Overview

A gilda is three preserved things on one stick: a green olive, a salted anchovy and one or more pickled green peppers, dressed with olive oil. Nothing in it is cooked and nothing is fresh, and that is the point. It is a bite built for the bar counter, made to sharpen the appetite and to be eaten with a drink, and it is the saltiest, most honest thing on a pintxo counter in this city.

The pepper is what makes it local. The piparra (in Spanish, guindilla) is a long, thin, pale green pepper picked young and pickled in vinegar. It is mild, faintly bitter, with a heat that arrives late and stays small. The classic ones come from around Ibarra, in the Gipuzkoa hills just inland, and the Ibarra pepper carries the Basque quality mark Eusko Label. A gilda made with a thick-walled, fiercely hot chili is a different snack.

The origin story is a good one and should be held as a story. It is told that in the 1940s a regular at a bar here started skewering the pepper, olive and anchovy together, and that the result was named after the Rita Hayworth film Gilda, which reached Spain under Franco with its glove scene already notorious: green, salty and a little spicy, like the character. The name and the decade are widely accepted; the details of who, where and how vary with the teller, and none of it rests on anything more solid than local memory. It is also commonly called the first pintxo, which is a claim about identity as much as history.

What to order

Ask for una gilda, or point. On most counters they sit ready on a plate, and the standard version is olive, anchovy, peppers, a thread of oil, nothing else.

What separates a good one:

• The anchovy should be a salt-cured fillet, brown-pink, firm and glossy with oil. Cantabrian anchovies are the reference here, and where a bar uses them it usually says so. This is where the cost of the bite lies, and it is the part worth judging.
• The peppers should still bend and snap a little. One or more per stick, depending on their size, often folded so the anchovy wraps around them.
• The olive is a plain green one, usually a manzanilla, sometimes pitted, sometimes not. Bite carefully until you know which.

The variants worth knowing:

• gilda con boquerón — with a vinegar-cured white anchovy instead of, or as well as, the salted one. Milder, sharper, less salt. Some people prefer it; it is a variant, not a correction.
• With tuna or a pickled onion added. You will see these; they are additions to the classic, not part of it.
• banderilla — the general word for a pickle skewer. A gilda is one particular banderilla; a skewer of gherkin, onion and carrot is another, and is not a gilda.

How it is eaten: by the stick, in one go if you can manage it, or in two, so the salt of the anchovy, the oil and the vinegar of the pepper land together. Picking the components off one by one is not wrong, but it misses what the thing is for.

What goes with it: a zurito (a very small beer), a glass of txakoli (the local, sharp, lightly sparkling white), or a vermouth at the midday aperitif hour. A gilda is the classic first bite of a round, not the last.

What to avoid

The failure of a gilda is almost never the kitchen; it is the jar.

Peppers that are soft all the way through and taste mainly of vinegar come from an industrial brine, and they make the whole skewer limp and sour. Real piparras keep some structure. If the pepper tears rather than bends, it has spent too long in the jar.

The anchovy is the second tell. Grey, mushy or overpoweringly fishy means a cheap fillet, and a skewer where the anchovy is a thin scrap wrapped around a lot of pepper is a cheaper bite pretending to be the same one. A gilda is small; there is nowhere to hide a bad fillet.

Watch for gildas that have been sitting dry. Everything on the stick is preserved, so a plate set out at opening is normal, but the oil should still be visible. A dulled, matte surface means it has been under the lights since morning.

Pre-assembled gildas sold in jars and vacuum packs are made by perfectly respectable conservers and are fine at home. Taken out of the packet and served on a bar plate at full price, they are a shortcut. They give themselves away by uniformity: identical skewers, identical pepper counts, an anchovy that is perfectly rolled and very soft.

Finally, a menu that lists the gilda alongside elaborate hot pintxos at the same price is asking a lot for three preserved ingredients. In the Parte Vieja that is not unusual, but it is worth noticing.

Practicalities

A gilda in an ordinary pintxo bar costs roughly €1.50 to €3. Above that, the anchovy is usually the reason, and it should be visibly better. Well below it, look hard at the pepper.

It is an aperitif food, so it follows the two drinking hours rather than meals: the late-morning and early-afternoon round before a lunch that starts around two, and the evening round, busiest from about eight. Midday is the better moment for it. The counters are calmer, and the gilda is what the vermouth hour was built around.

How it is bought depends on the bar. In some, you take from the counter and settle at the end, telling the barman what you had or leaving the sticks on your plate to be counted. In others you ask and are served, and hot pintxos are almost always ordered rather than taken. If nobody else is reaching across the bar, do not.

One gilda and one drink per bar, then move on, is the rhythm the whole culture assumes. Small amounts mean cash and cards are both normal; a coin or two for a single gilda and a zurito is as common as tapping a card.

And if you want them at home, the jarred piparras travel well and are sold in ordinary grocers. That is the one ingredient here that is genuinely worth carrying back.