anchoas

The Spanish 'anchoa' entered written Castilian in the fifteenth century, but its roots belong to Basque, where 'antxoa' named the small, silver-bodied fish that schooled in great numbers along the Cantabrian coast. Basque fishermen had netted and salted these fish for generations before any Castilian scribe found a name for them. The word passed through Catalan 'anxova' on its way into Castilian, collecting its characteristic '-oa' ending somewhere along the Iberian coast.

The Romans already understood what to do with anchovies. Garum, the fermented fish sauce that Roman cooks poured over nearly everything, was made largely from these fish, processed in coastal factories from Hispania to Tunisia. When the western empire dissolved in the fifth century, the knowledge of salting small oily fish survived in the hands of Basque and Cantabrian communities who continued to work the same waters and needed ways to carry the catch inland.

By the sixteenth century, 'anchoa' had become the preferred Castilian term as Basque fishing fleets grew large enough to supply the Habsburg empire. English borrowed its version, 'anchovy,' around 1596, when the writer Thomas Nashe used it in prose. The Basque fishing towns of Bermeo and Getaria built small curing industries around the fish that would eventually reach tables from Seville to London.

Today 'anchoas' appears on Spanish menus specifically to signal the premium Cantabrian variety, cured in salt for months before packing in olive oil. The method Basque fishermen developed has changed very little: fish pressed belly-to-back in brine, aged under weights, rinsed and filleted by hand. The Spanish plural used in English food writing is a deliberate marker of origin, the way 'Champagne' signals something other than sparkling wine.