romesco

Romesco names both a small dried pepper and the sauce built around it, and both trace to the Costa Daurada of southern Catalonia. The pepper variety, a round, sweet-smoky ñora type, was cultivated near Tarragona by at least the eighteenth century. Fishermen along that coast ground the dried pepper with almonds, hazelnuts, garlic, and olive oil into a thick paste eaten with salt cod and grilled fish. The sauce carries no record of an inventor; it accumulated, stop by stop, from the harbor to the kitchen.

The word romesco is Catalan, and its origin reaches back through medieval Romance to the Latin Romanus, meaning Roman. The Costa Daurada was heavily Romanized: Tarragona, ancient Tarraco, was the first Roman capital of Hispania, and the adjective romesco likely meant something like of the Roman lands. By the nineteenth century, the word had narrowed from a geographic descriptor to the name of a specific pepper grown in that territory. Language, as often, ran behind the ingredient.

The sauce entered written record seriously only in the twentieth century, when Catalan cooks began codifying regional recipes. Josep Pla, the great Catalan writer, described romesco in 1929 as the taste of the Tarragona coast, a sauce with fire and patience in equal measure. Two versions competed: the fisherman's version, rougher and heavier on dried pepper, and the inland version, smoother with more tomato. Neither won, and both survive under the same name.

The global spread of Catalan cuisine after the 1990s carried romesco far beyond the harbor. Ferran Adrià and his contemporaries at elBulli cited it as a foundation of their larder. Today the sauce appears on menus in Tokyo and Sydney, often simplified and prettified, but recognizably itself: dried pepper, nuts, garlic, oil, and the patience of the Tarragona coast.