Grape, Olive, Pig by Matt Goulding

Author:Matt Goulding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

A crew of fisherman row into the teeth of the tuna trap.

Michael Magers (lead photographer)

This isn’t exactly the southern Spain most people know—Sevilla, home of flamenco and matadors and oversized cathedrals, is an hour to the north—but it’s not far off. Life moves slower down here than it does almost anywhere else in Spain. Beaches, among the finest in the country, cradle bronzed bodies in their soft sands six months a year. People sit for hours in the amber afternoon light of the smooth tiled plazas, happy enough to feel the sun on their skin and the wine in their bellies. One afternoon, I stepped into a restaurant to ask directions and stayed for three hours, watching bullfights and bullshitting with the old men drinking beer at the bar.

As its oldest city and southernmost gateway, Cádiz has been on the front lines of Spain’s food culture for millennia. This was one of Spain’s earliest wine regions, started with grapes brought over by the Phoenicians in 1000 BC. Today, Palomino grapes for fortified wines, brandy, and sherry vinegar cover the hills and fill the bodegas around Jerez. The gaditanos (the people of Cádiz) have long been recognized as masters of fried food of all stripes, especially pescaito frito, small, oily fish eaten spine and all. And an entire culture of pastries and sweets developed in the convents of the province, nuns long a major driver of Spain’s traditional food culture. The flan-like tocino del cielo, one of Spain’s most enduring desserts, came about as a way for the nuns to use the egg yolks from sherry producers, who only needed the whites to clarify their wine.

But no food has done more to shape the history and the economy of the region than Thunnus thynnus, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, today considered the most valuable fish in the sea. Engravings and cave paintings of the bluefin date back to 4000 BC. Hippocrates wrote of the importance of bluefin, as did Aristotle and Pliny the Elder. Phoenician coins in early Hispania came with two tunas engraved on the face.

For most of tuna’s long history in Spain, its principle value has been in by-products. The Phoenicians set up centers to make Spain’s first salazones, salted and dried tuna products, which they exported to its colonies throughout the Mediterranean.

To catch the massive schools of tuna migrating from the Atlantic, where they fatten up in the winter, to the Mediterranean, where they spawn in warmer waters, the Phoenicians developed elaborate net traps and positioned men on top of towers along the coastline to spot the incoming schools. Later, the same technique would spread elsewhere in the Mediterranean—to Portugal, Morocco, Sicily.

The Romans continued the tuna-hunting traditions popularized by the Phoenicians. They still made salt-cured fish, but placed even greater importance on the oil extracted from tuna’s fermented flesh, skin, and innards, called garum, one of the world’s first fish sauces. Wheat, grapes, and olives, the heart of Spanish cuisine, have been at the center of its economy since

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