Gilda: The Basque Pintxo Named After a Film

A gilda is three ingredients on a cocktail stick and it takes four minutes to assemble. It is also the pintxo that every bar in San Sebastián makes, that every Basque has an opinion about, and that fails more often than a dish with three ingredients has any right to.

It fails because people treat it as a garnish. It is a constructed thing with an order and a ratio, and the difference between a gilda that makes you order a second beer and one you leave half-eaten on the bar comes down to which anchovy you bought and which way round the pieces went on the stick.

Rita Hayworth, 1946, and a bar in San Sebastián

The dish is named after the film. Gilda came out in 1946, Rita Hayworth in a black satin dress, peeling off one long glove in a scene that got the picture banned outright in Franco’s Spain and condemned from the pulpit — which is, reliably, the best publicity a film can have. Basques went over the border to Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz to watch it.

The pintxo was invented at the Bar Casa Vallés on Calle Reyes Católicos in San Sebastián, some time around 1946, and the usual account credits a regular named Joaquín Aranburu, who is said to have been eating the three things together and christened the combination after the film. Casa Vallés is still there and still serves them.

The reason the name stuck is the joke about the adjectives. Gildas — the pintxo and the character — are described in the same three words: verde, salada y un poco picante. Green, salty and a little bit spicy. It is a decent gag and it has kept an entire bar snack in business for eighty years.

What is genuinely interesting is that the gilda predates the word pintxo as a category. The Basque bar tradition of small things on sticks laid out along a counter grew up through the 1950s and 60s, and the gilda is usually named as the origin point — the first thing that was deliberately assembled on a stick to be eaten standing up with a drink. Every elaborate San Sebastián pintxo with a foam on it is a descendant of a man in 1946 spearing an olive.

The anchovy is the whole thing

You cannot make a good gilda with a bad anchovy, and there is no technique that will rescue you.

Buy Cantabrian anchovies — anchoas del Cantábrico, from Santoña or Ondárroa. They are fished in spring, salted in barrels under weights for six months to two years, then hand-filleted, trimmed and packed in olive oil. A good one is deep rust-red, firm, glossy, and tastes savoury and clean with a long finish. It costs a startling amount of money — five or six pounds for a small tin — and there are eighty-odd hands involved in getting it there.

A cheap anchovy is grey-brown, soft, aggressively salty, and tastes of nothing beyond the salt. Put twelve of them on sticks and you have twelve small punishments. This is a dish where the entire budget goes into one line of the shopping list, and the compensation is that the other two ingredients cost almost nothing.

Do not rinse them. People rinse anchovies out of a vague fear of salt, and it washes away the oil and the surface savour that six months in a barrel produced. Drain them on kitchen paper for two minutes and that is all. If you are working with salt-packed rather than oil-packed anchovies, rinse the salt crust off under cold water, fillet them with your thumbnail, and steep them in olive oil for an hour — the same principle that runs through the garlic butter prawns approach of letting oil carry flavour rather than washing it off.

The guindilla should be de Ibarra, from the Basque town of the same name — pale green, slender, pickled in white wine vinegar, and barely hot at all despite the name. They give acidity and a faint warmth. The olive should be large, firm and green; Manzanilla is standard and Gordal is better if you can find them, being meatier and less aggressively brined.

The order on the stick

The sequence is guindilla, anchovy, guindilla, olive, and each position is doing a job.

The olive goes on last, at the top, because it is the widest and firmest thing and it caps the stick — it stops everything below sliding off when someone lifts it from a plate. Bars that put the olive at the bottom lose pintxos on the floor.

The anchovy sits in the middle, protected on both sides. It is the fragile item, and thread it through three times in a loose zigzag so it grips the wood; a fillet speared once slides down and pools at the bottom in a sad rust-coloured heap.

The guindillas concertina along the stick and take up the space. Two of them to one anchovy is the classic ratio, and it is a balance question: one anchovy carries enough salt and enough umami to need two peppers’ worth of acid against it. Some bars use three. Some fold the guindilla in half and use one. The ratio you want is the one where you get pepper, fish and olive in a single bite, which means the whole thing goes in your mouth at once and comes off the stick as one.

That is also the etiquette, incidentally. A gilda is one mouthful. Eating it in stages, dismantling it on the stick, is the mark of somebody who has misunderstood the assignment.

The warm bath

Here is my addition, and it takes half an hour of doing nothing.

Warm four tablespoons of olive oil to about 60°C with a strip of lemon zest, two sprigs of thyme and a crushed garlic clove. Pour it over the drained olives and leave the lot to cool to room temperature.

Olives out of a jar taste of brine. That is their job and it is a fairly one-dimensional job — salt and acid, with the olive’s own flavour buried under the curing liquid. Thirty minutes in warm aromatic oil does two things: the gentle heat opens the olive’s flesh enough to let some of the brine out and some of the oil in, and the lemon oil and thyme lay down a herbal top note that gives the gilda a third dimension over the salt and the vinegar.

The temperature is the only thing to watch. Sixty degrees is hot to a fingertip and nowhere near a sizzle. If the garlic bubbles, the oil is too hot, and hot oil will cook the olives to mush and turn the garlic bitter. Pull it off, let it cool for a minute, and start again.

You can keep the olives in that oil in the fridge for a week and they get better. Use the leftover oil to dress the finished gildas, which is where most of it ends up anyway.

Variations, and how far you can push it

The classic is fixed and the bars of San Sebastián play with it constantly, which tells you something about how much room there is inside three ingredients.

Gilda de bonito. Swap the anchovy for a chunk of good jarred bonito in olive oil. It is milder, sweeter and considerably cheaper, and it makes a pintxo that people who claim not to like anchovies will eat by the handful. Keep the ratio at one piece of fish to two peppers.

Gilda con boquerón. The white, vinegar-cured anchovy rather than the salt-cured red one. This is a genuinely different snack — sharper, cleaner, less savoury — and it wants only one guindilla, because the boquerón brings its own acid.

Gilda de piparra y queso. A cube of Idiazábal, the Basque smoked sheep’s cheese, replacing the olive at the top. The smoke against the vinegar is very good, and it is the one variation I make as often as the original.

Anchovy, olive and a pickled onion. Common in Bilbao, and it swaps the guindilla’s herbal acid for something rounder and sweeter.

What does not work is adding a fourth substantial thing. Cherry tomatoes, cornichons, cubes of tortilla, folded slices of jamón — I have tried all of them, and the moment there are four items on the stick you can no longer get the whole thing into your mouth at once, and a gilda that takes two bites stops being a gilda. The constraint is the design.

The other thing that does not work is making them small. Cocktail-sized guindillas and tiny olives on a short stick look elegant on a tray and deliver nothing; the gilda is meant to be a slightly overwhelming mouthful that leaves you reaching for a drink, which is precisely the commercial logic that a bar in 1946 had every reason to understand.

Serving, timing and the things that go wrong

Soggy, collapsing gilda. Everything went on wet. Pat the olives, guindillas and anchovies dry — surface water thins the oil and slackens the whole construction.

Punishingly salty. A cheap anchovy, or an anchovy threaded at the top of the stick, where its salt and oil drain down through everything below it. Buy better and thread properly.

Everything falls off. The olive is at the bottom, or the anchovy was speared once.

Bitter. The garlic in the oil went too hot.

Serve gildas at room temperature and never cold. Fridge-cold olive oil goes cloudy and waxy and the anchovy’s flavour shuts down entirely — take them out fifteen minutes before, or assemble on the day and leave them on the counter.

Make them within a couple of hours of eating. The oil-marinated olives keep for a week, and the assembled pintxo holds for about four hours before the anchovy starts to soften against the vinegar of the pepper.

They belong on a table with a beer or a cold Txakoli and other small things — a plate of patatas bravas, some salt and pepper squid, bread and oil. Put out a small empty dish for the sticks. In a San Sebastián bar the sticks used to be your bill: they counted them at the end and charged you accordingly, which is an honour system that lasted rather longer than you might expect.