When one wants to know about the origin of the tapas, one comes across an endless number of legends, which often have to do with a king. One explains that when Alfonso X the Wise (1221-1284) fell ill, his doctors told him to drink glasses of wine throughout the day. Strange disease that must be.
The fact is that, in order not to get drunk, it is said that he forced himself to take a bite with each sip. As it is seen that it worked for him, and concerned as he was about the virtue of his subjects, it occurred to him to force the Castilian innkeepers to do the same with their guests: to feed them to “cover” the effect of alcohol .
More fun is another, which attributes its origin to a medieval version of “if you drink, don’t drive.” In the Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, it must have been common for carters to stumble along the roads, as the monarchs forced the innkeepers to “cover” the glasses with some cold food, whether it was ham or cheese. Until it was finished, one could not soak his throat, lest he get drunk on the wagon.
In Cádiz neither one nor the other is worth it. There they say that a king, it is no longer known if he was Ferdinand the Catholic (1452-1516) or Alfonso XIII (1886-1941), was enjoying a wine in the city when a strong easterly wind rose (common there). To prevent dust from entering the glass, the illustrious diner would have asked that it be covered with some sausage, popularizing the gesture among the population.
This latest version has two problems. The first, that if there was dust, it would surely have adhered to the sausage, and the second, for the Alphonsine version, that covering the jugs is already documented in the 18th century. With more insight, it was made with stale bread or with a saucer, not with something that one was going to put in his mouth.
Then there are those who mention a passage from Don Quixote, when the ingenious hidalgo runs into some who were “well supplied, at least with inciting things that call thirst two leagues away.” It refers to salty rations, the kind that are still given away today in bars to encourage drinking.
However, that does not mean that they were tapas, nor are the “visillos” that appear in La vida del Buscón (1626) by Quevedo –as the name indicates, “notices” before a main meal– or the snacks that all their lives have been eaten by peasants at mid-morning.
The tapa as such did not appear until the beginning of the 20th century, in Andalusia. We know this because no previous dictionary mentions the word in its culinary sense. One of the first to do so was the Diccionario general y técnico hispano-americano, by the lexicographer Manuel Rodríguez-Navas, in its 1918 edition. Curiously, in the 1906 edition he had not included it. Being an author from Cádiz, who would therefore be aware of the fashions in his land, this allows us to limit the chronology.
The Dictionary of the Royal Academy did not add the meaning until 1939, and in 1956 it corrected it to classify it as Andalusianism. Now there is no doubt, it is an Andalusian custom.
As Frédéric Duhart, an anthropologist specialized in gastronomy, explains in an article for the Spanish Magazine of Gastronomic Culture, if tapas are different from avisillos, snacks or simple sandwiches, it is because they were born in a different context and with a different intention.
They are daughters of the bourgeois and aristocratic environments of modernity, Duhart tells us. In the Seville of 1903 there was no gambling den or tavern that served them. You had to go to exclusive places, such as Venta Eritaña or Café Iberia, which had dishes from all over Spain on the menu, from Cantabrian anchovies to sausages from Vic.
Of course, only in Seville. Tapas is originally from Seville, or from Western Andalusia at the most. This is demonstrated by a text from the time, by the journalist Nicolás Rivero y Muñiz. In Travel Memories (1904) he wrote down everything he ate during his itinerary, and it turns out that neither in Córdoba nor in any other southern city did he hear of tapas.
From Seville they became popular throughout the rest of Andalusia and Spain as an aperitif or as an accompaniment to alcohol; at first, served on top of a glass, hence the name. In the 1920s, for example, the Andalucía café-restaurant on Barcelona’s Ramblas offered “Seville-style” tapas, and there are similar examples throughout the peninsular geography.
Culinary historians agree that the postwar period was an incentive for the spread of the custom to the lowest social strata. Many could not afford to eat in a restaurant, which led bars to improve their offer of light dishes. At the same time, they were years of rationing, which forced restaurateurs to do the same with less, and hors d’oeuvres were a field in which to sharpen their ingenuity.
Anyway, this is the story, and it has nothing to do with any king. What happens is that, as it is such a popular and deep-rooted custom and as there are so many hundred-year-old taverns, many origins have emerged. It is a convoluted case, which deceives us even by its etymology.
“Tapa” is of Germanic origin, but only in its meaning of “cover”. Although it is now extinct, there is another meaning, which comes from the French étape. In the 16th century, an étape –which became Spanish for “tapa”– was one of the camps that were set up to supply the armies on campaign. They were not places to sleep, only to eat and then move on; that is why several were arranged along the path to be traveled. This, for example, explains the etymology of the “stage” in cycling competitions.
However, despite its relationship with food, this meaning has nothing to do with our subject. And that, when a group goes for tapas –or poteo, as the Basques say–, it seems that they cover a stage in each bar. But no, the link is only apparent.
