Espinacas con garbanzos: Seville's spinach and chickpeas, explained

Overview

Read as a list of ingredients, espinacas con garbanzos is spinach and chickpeas, and that makes it sound like a side dish someone forgot to finish. It is not. What turns two cheap vegetables into one of Seville’s defining tapas is the thing that binds them: a paste of bread fried in olive oil and pounded in a mortar with garlic, plenty of cumin, a little vinegar and often paprika. The spinach is stewed down soft, the chickpeas kept whole, and the paste stirred through until the whole dish is thick, glossy and dark green rather than wet. It arrives warm, usually in a small earthenware dish, with bread to push it onto.

The cumin is the tell. That warm, earthy spicing, and the trick of thickening a dish with fried bread and garlic rather than flour or cream, both point back to Al-Andalus — the centuries of Muslim rule that shaped the cooking of this whole corner of Spain. Chickpeas, spinach and cumin are the Andalusian and Sephardic larder, and the dish carries that inheritance more plainly than almost anything else on a Seville menu. It is not a generic Spanish plate that happens to be sold here; the seasoning is local history.

Its other home is the church calendar. Because it contains no meat, espinacas con garbanzos became a dish of Lent and above all of Semana Santa, Holy Week, when Seville fills for its processions and the traditional table is meatless. You will find it year round now, but it belongs to that season the way few tapas belong to any.

What to order

The name on a blackboard is often shortened simply to espinacas, and in Seville that one word almost always means this dish and not a plain plate of greens. Order it as a tapa to try it, a media ración if you already know you want more, or a full ración to share; the sizes are the city’s standard tapas ladder, not anything specific to this dish.

What should arrive is a small cazuela of dark, thick spinach studded with whole chickpeas, the surface glistening from the oil, the smell unmistakably of cumin and fried garlic. Good versions are moist but hold their shape on the spoon — neither soupy nor dried to a paste. Some kitchens finish it with a picatoste, a crouton of fried bread, sitting on top or crumbled through; some spike it with a little more paprika or a note of vinegar. These are house differences, not different dishes, and none is more correct than another.

A word on a closely related name. Garbanzos con espinacas served as a potaje is the soupier, brothier Lenten stew — more liquid, eaten with a spoon from a bowl, sometimes with salt cod. The tapa version you are ordering here is the thick one. If a menu offers both, they are genuinely different plates, and it is worth knowing which you are asking for.

The dish is vegetarian as it stands, which in a city built on jamón and fried fish makes it one of the more reliable things to order without meat. It is worth saying that it is not automatically vegan or gluten-free: the fried bread in the paste is wheat, and a very few kitchens still slip a little pork fat or stock into the pan. If that matters, it is a fair and ordinary thing to ask.

What to avoid

This is a dish that is made in a batch and warmed to order, and that is exactly where it goes wrong. In a busy neighbourhood bar the pan turns over fast and every serving is fresh and fragrant. In a place set up to feed the queue outside the cathedral, the same dish can be a scoop from a tub that has sat on a warmer since mid-morning: the green gone grey and dull, the edges dried and crusting, the cumin cooked flat to nothing. The colour and the gloss are the whole diagnosis — bright and shining is fresh, grey and matte has been sitting.

Do not read a tin as a warning sign in itself. Good tinned chickpeas and even frozen spinach are used in plenty of honest kitchens and in most Sevillian homes; the dish does not require a cook to have soaked pulses overnight to be the real thing. The problem is never that it came from a jar, it is that it was made hours ago and left to stew under a lamp.

The other quiet substitution is heat and cumin doing the work of care: a version drowned in paprika and vinegar to cover the fact that the spinach was overcooked to a uniform mush with no distinct chickpeas left in it. You should be able to see and feel the individual peas. When they have dissolved into the paste, the dish has been either overcooked or stretched.

Practicalities

As tapas go this is one of the cheapest things you can order: roughly €2.50 to €4 for a tapa, a little more for a media ración, and if you are being asked much above that near a major monument, you are paying for the address rather than for a better plate. There is no version of this dish expensive enough to justify a high number.

The date that matters is moveable. Holy Week falls in March or April, and in the weeks of Lent that lead up to it espinacas con garbanzos is at its most present and, in the bars that take it seriously, at its best — it is the meatless dish of the season, traditional on the Fridays of Lent and on Good Friday itself. Outside that window it is a steady, all-year tapa, and being served warm it is honestly better company in the cooler months than at the height of the summer, when the cold dishes take over the counter.

It is bar food, eaten standing or at a small table, ordered a plate at a time as the city does the rest of its tapas; nothing about paying for it differs from the general habits the city guide already sets out. Order it early in a session rather than last: it is a warm, substantial, faintly sweet-spiced plate that sets up an evening of fino and fried fish far better than it follows them.