In a country that prides itself on the freshness of the peix and marisc it serves, this may seem something of an anomaly. But the fact remains that a vintage can of navajas (razor clams) can cost considerably more than a rack of fresh ones grilled in oil and parsley.
As Mark Bittman put it in a recent article in the New York Times on the subject of tapas bars in Barcelona: “Spain produces what is probably the highest quality and most expensive canned food in the world, and many tapas bars rely on it. Though much of it is good and interesting, for the most part I don’t get it, since Spain also produces among the highest quality fresh food in the world.”
While Bittman is certainly not alone in his opinion, the world’s wonder chefs and restaurants are starting to take notice, from the venerable Sam’s of Moro in London to the swanky new Boqueria tapas bar in New York. Customers are applauding new tastes and textures: canning mellows seafood and tenderises it, giving it a new and unexpected lusciousness, but only when it’s top-notch stuff, mind.
The art of conserving dates back to the late 18th century, when Napoleon offered a 12,000-franc reward to anyone who could come up with a method of food preservation that would keep his armies fuelled while marching. Nine years after Napolean’s decree, the French confectioner and entrepreneur Nicolas François Appert was awarded the prize for having invented a system for the airtight conservation of food by bottling it.
One year later, however, a fellow Frenchman named Pierre Durrand patented his own method in England, this time using a tin can. Durrand’s creation would become a cheap and reliable way of keeping almost anything fresh and edible in much the same way that adding large amounts of salt to food was used to dramatically lengthen its shelf life, 2,000 years earlier.
Spanish conservas (canned foods as opposed to bottled) are something of a sybaritic cult, with the majority of the businesses located in Galicia, though the quality of those produced along the Cantabrian coast, the Basque country and some parts of Andalucia are equally revered. And while the foreign market has been slow to accept them as a tapa in bars, they are doing a brisk trade from the shelves of supermarkets and colmados (delicatessens).
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