In Defense of the Anchovy: Creating New Culinary Memories through Applied Cultural Context

La Centralita Culinary Studio, a small business in Albany, New York I opened in December 2021 with my creative partner Yuri Morejón (from Bilbao, Spain), is dedicated to teaching small groups of people about the cuisines of Spain through private cooking classes, pedagogical tasting experiences, and themed events. As a complement to our respective careers as consultant and professor, we bring our expertise in these areas to each unique event. We started the business after observing a need for contextualized pedagogy about Spain’s diverse cuisines in the US. Specifically, our guests often have negative memories of anchovies and are hesitant to try them, often seeing them as an unpopular canned food languishing on grocery store shelves alongside tuna. By contrast, in Spain, anchovies are revered artisanal products cleaned and prepared by hand mostly by women in tinned fish factories. They are valued for their culinary traditions as an expensive delicacy that lend umami to numerous dishes. In this paper, I contrast food discourses about anchovies in Spain versus the US, contending that disdain for anchovies comes from lack of knowledge about their traditional origins and artisanal characteristics combined with improper food storage. To counteract these ideas, at La Centralita, we utilize cultural texts, food storage education, and acknowledge women’s labor to teach guests about anchovies as a gourmet food in context. Guests create new memories, thereby enhancing their “culinary competence,” replacing old connotations with new memories and an openness to the foodways of others.