Tapas bars, a British invention?

Trevor @ Saturday October 25th 2008 11:12

This isn’t about who invented bar snacks, or about why one particular gibber of Catalan nationalism should want to deny having invented them.

Someone speculated drunkenly last night that, since tapas appears in English from the 1950s (C Salter in OED, “In Spain, when you order a drink in a bar.., you will always be given..something to eat.”), it may have been part of the lexical cloud conjured as the Franco government commercialised Hemingway’s message, that Spain is different.

The rise of Spanish tourism and the appearance and generalisation of the phrase tapas bar/bar de tapas are linked, but I suspect that tapas made their way into standard Spanish several decades earlier–as part of the reinvention of the Spanish nation around Andalusian stereotypes devised by confused and dangerous racialists like Lorca during the transition from AzorĂ­n’s post-Cuba rediscovery of Castile to Jaime de Andrade’s famous Crusade. The Royal Academy’s dictionary first mentions tapa in this sense in 1936:

8. And. Ruedas de embutido o lonjas finas de jamón que sirven en los colmados, tabernas, etc., colocadas sobre las cañas y chatos de vino.

In 1970 it adds:

Hoy se da este nombre a pequeñas porciones de algunos manjares que se sirven aparte de la bebida.

In 1984, after careful consideration, that drink is declared to be alcoholic.

It would be interesting to know more about the history of the RAE dictionary. The 1936 edition includes new regionalisms and esotericisms (eg “homosexual. adj. Sodomita”) but I don’t know whether in numbers exceptional enough to suggest that gay Andalusians had stormed the lexical establishment, whether via the back or the front door.


Categories: Food, Languages, Liberals & locals

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  1. El Ciruco
    October 25th 2008 13:27

    The general take is that the custom and the word date back to a royal decree in colonial times ordering seaport bar owners to serve food with alcohol to ease the problems caused by drunken, hungry sailors. Tapa itself comes, it is said, from the custom of placing the dish on which it was served on top of the glass – como si fuera un tapĂłn.

    Whatever

  2. Trevor
    October 25th 2008 13:35

    And those sailors came from…

  3. El Ciruco
    October 25th 2008 13:43

    Trujillo, wasn’t it?

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