Espeto de Sardinas

The espeto belongs to El Palo, a former fishing village now part of Málaga. It is traditionally traced to 1882, when Miguel Martínez Soler — known as Migué el de las sardinas — opened a beachside merendero called La Gran Parada in El Palo and built his menu around sardines skewered on cane and roasted in the sand beside a fire; he is widely credited as the father of the espeteros, and his establishment is often called the first chiringuito of its kind in Spain. A much-repeated anecdote holds that King Alfonso XII, visiting the area in the mid-1880s after the 1884 Andalusian earthquake, was served an espeto and tried to eat it with knife and fork, whereupon Miguel told him sardines are eaten with the fingers — though the exact date varies between tellings. Eating the espeto by hand has been part of the ritual ever since. The fish is at its best in the so-called months without an R — May through August — the warm months when the sardine carries the most fat.

Skin blistered and salt-crusted, splitting to oily, smoke-scented flesh that comes away from the spine in soft flakes. There is no sauce and no marinade — just coarse salt, the fat of the fish, and the perfume of olive-wood smoke. You pull each sardine off the cane with your fingers and eat it hot, working down the spine; a squeeze of lemon is optional and often skipped. Eaten at a chiringuito with a cold beer or fino, the season showing in how rich and melting the flesh is between May and August.

The sardine is a fatty pelagic fish — roughly ten grams of fat per hundred, rising to some 12 to 18 percent intramuscular fat at its early-summer peak — which is exactly why it suits this method. The skewers are set beside the embers, not above them, and angled with the fish tilted slightly downward, so rendering oil drips onto the sand and the front edge of the coals rather than straight into them; that keeps the fat from flaring up and charring the fish black, while the smoke from the few drops that do reach the embers perfumes the flesh. Espeteros work with olive or almond wood, prized for steady, intense heat, and hold the fish about 15 to 20 centimetres from coals running around 200 to 220 °C, always with the breeze blowing from fish toward fire so smoke carries away rather than smothering them. The single cane is threaded in through the mouth and along the backbone of every fish, so the rigid spine — not the soft belly — bears the weight and the row of sardines can be turned as one without falling apart. Coarse salt on the skin draws out a little surface moisture and seasons as the heat sets the proteins and browns the skin.