Nick Bramham’s Espinacas con Garbanzos
A Spanish dish with Moorish roots inspired by one of Nick’s seminal food memories. Text and photographs by Nick Bramham.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this weekly slot, our roster of six rotating columnists share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Nick Bramham. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
Nick Bramham’s Espinacas con Garbanzos
A recreation of a Spanish dish with Moorish roots. Text and photographs by Nick Bramham.
On a quiet corner on the edge of the Casco Antiguo in Seville, there’s a 350-year-old tapas bar called El Rinconcillo. A long, beaten-up mahogany bar connects two high-ceilinged rooms adorned with intricate Moorish tiles and ancient apothecary-style cabinets heaving with local sherries and vermouths.
Grey-haired men in long-sleeved white shirts and black waistcoats hustle behind the bar, pouring drinks, yelling out orders, throwing down plates, and carving glistening legs of jamón ibérico, scores of which dangle from the ceiling. These pros don’t even use the customary ham stand, instead expertly wielding the cured pig’s leg and a long knife like a violin and bow, spinning and twirling the leg and shaving off perfect slices of jamón with the same controlled manic grace as Warren Ellis mid-flow at a Bad Seeds concert.
Steaming plates of clams, terracotta pots of long-cooked meat stews, and piles of battered salt cod arrive from a kitchen somewhere deep underground, along with oozing prawn croquetas and fried padron peppers, shimmering with flakes of sea salt. A running total of what you order is scribbled on the bar in chalk and dusted off in a cloud with the swoosh of a hand the moment you pay.
Most exciting of all is perhaps the most unassuming-sounding dish on the menu, espinacas con garbanzos – spinach with chickpeas. More often than not, espinacas con garbanzos is a sort of chickpea stew into which maybe a handful of spinach leaves have been wilted, but at El Rinconcillo the inverse is true. What’s delivered is a plate of braised spinach that has been cooked for such a long time that I’m not sure there’s even a name for its particular shade of green, studded with just a few chickpeas.
Tasting this dish for the first time was a revelatory, mind-expanding experience. The energy, depth of flavour, and complexity held in a single spoonful was like nothing I’d ever tasted before. It was one of those seminal food moments, a sense memory to carry forever, like tasting an expertly made demi-glace for the first time, or a perfect pour of ’05 Chave Hermitage, or a Solero. Earthy and rich, with an occasional pleasingly creamy pop of chickpea and a deep, piquant background hum, the dish displayed a mastery of spicing more stereotypically associated with North Africa and the Middle East than with Spain. But then this is a dish with distinctly Moorish roots (spinach, which originated in Persia, was introduced to Spain by the Moors during the Islamic Golden Age, along with cumin, algebra, and a revolutionary agricultural system that hugely expanded Andalusian olive oil production and consumption).
I desperately needed to know how this espinacas con garbanzos was made, but figured there was no way they’d give me the recipe. Yet, surprisingly, I found some instructions on the El Rinconillo website (how twenty-first century!): not a recipe as such, but a list of ingredients and a loose method – more than enough to work with. The most enlightening part of this method was how the spices were incorporated – while vast quantities of spinach are wilted in a pan, gradually steaming in their own receding juices, the spices are blended in olive oil, which is then added to the wilted spinach and left on a very low temperature for four hours (!).
When I first put my version on the menu at Quality Wines a few years ago it was a bit of a hard sell – ‘Spinach and chickpeas? Is that it?’ – but it brought me great pleasure seeing people gradually being won over by it. Espinacas con garbanzos is now in annual rotation and has attained a sort of cult status (like our caponata, our fasolakia, and a lot of our sandwiches), with regulars badgering us to know when it’s next coming back on the menu.
At El Rinconcillo, the dish is served with a few slices of fried bread, most likely with lots of other delicious plates in its orbit. So, if making this at home, I’d lean into that and eat this with jamón ibérico, a juicy tomato salad, some anchovies, perhaps, and a few slices of manchego – and obviously keep your copas well filled with ice-cold Fino or Manzanilla.
Espinacas con Garbanzos
Serves 4–6 as a good lunch or dinner (as part of a spread)
Time At least 3 hrs 30 mins