Gilda: Spanish Pintxo with a Hollywood Connection
Gilda: Spanish Pintxo with a Hollywood Connection
— by David Eugene Perry
Ahoy! One of our favorite watering holes when Alfredo and I are visiting his family in Santander, Cantabria, España is “LaLula.” The pours are friendly, the staff is generous and the clientele diverse in age and perspective.
Also, they offer a nice nosh selection, including a Spanish classic that I first discovered at LaLula and have come to love: La Gilda, a small bite with a big Hollywood connection.
That connection is Rita Hayworth.
The Gilda is a deceptively simple thing: usually an olive, a pickled green pepper — often a guindilla or piparra — and an anchovy, all threaded onto a toothpick. Salty, sharp, briny, and a little spicy, it is now one of the classic bites of Spanish bar culture.
Its origin story is generally traced to San Sebastián in the 1940s, often to Casa Vallés, where the combination became linked with the 1946 film Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth.
The reason for the name is wonderfully Spanish and wonderfully cinematic. Hayworth’s Gilda was considered provocative, seductive, and a little dangerous — and so was the pintxo. Delicious, salty, and a little spicy.
In the film, Hayworth plays Gilda, a nightclub singer in Buenos Aires who becomes the center of a tense love triangle involving her husband, casino owner Ballin Mundson, and Johnny Farrell, a man from her past. It is classic film noir: glamour, jealousy, betrayal, and cigarette-smoke atmosphere. The moment that made Hayworth immortal was her performance of “Put the Blame on Mame,” in which she removes one long black glove and somehow manages to make Hollywood history without really revealing very much at all.
That mattered in Spain.
In the late 1940s, under Franco, Spain was still deeply conservative and tightly censored. A character like Gilda — independent, knowing, sensual, and defiant — landed with particular force. The film became a sensation, and Rita Hayworth became an icon. The pintxo’s name was not just a joke; it was a wink.
Hayworth herself had a Spanish connection. She was born Margarita Carmen Cansino in New York City in 1918. Her father, Eduardo Cansino, was a Spanish dancer from near Seville, and Rita began performing as a dancer when she was still a child. Hollywood remade her into Rita Hayworth: the hairline altered, the hair dyed, the name changed. By the 1940s, she was one of the great stars of the screen — and one of the most famous women in the world.
Her personal life was as dramatic as any studio script. She was married five times: first to Edward C. Judson, then to Orson Welles, then to Prince Aly Khan, then to singer Dick Haymes, and finally to producer James Hill. She also had a long and complicated connection to Howard Hughes, who pursued her romantically but never married her.
Later in life, Hayworth suffered from Alzheimer’s disease at a time when the illness was still poorly understood. She died in New York in 1987 at the age of 68. Her daughter, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, went on to become a major advocate for Alzheimer’s awareness and fundraising in her mother’s memory.
So there it is: a toothpick, an olive, a pepper, an anchovy — and one of Hollywood’s most luminous stars.
At LaLula in Santander, with a drink in hand and a Gilda on the plate, you get a perfect little collision of Spanish bar culture, Spanish culinary history, postwar cinema, and Rita Hayworth glamour.
Not bad for food on a stick.
¡Buen provecho!
