Last summer I was in Barcelona for a couple of days. Our first morning we went to visit Park Guell, and then we just sort of wandered around, walking downhill towards downtown and the shore.
Eventually we got hungry and stepped inside a large cafe/deli. I walked around the counter perusing their offerings and picked out a couple of sandwiches that were very thin, about 8-10 inches long, and had jamon and cheese inside. I can’t stress enough how thin the bread was, it was like a split breadstick, but with the bake and texture of a hard roll or a baguette. It was a fantastic breakfast/lunch and if I ever see it on a menu again I’ll order it, but at the time I had it in Barcelona it didn’t have a label or a name it was just premade inside a glass case, so I don’t know what it’s called, if it even has a name.
Sounds like a Cuban sandwich to me. But those originated in Florida/Cuba and might be called something else in Barcelona. Or the one you had might have had a completely different origin…
Possibly. I just dug it up from the recesses of my brain as the spanish word for sandwich.
But this article does suggest to me that it is used more specifically to mean sandwiches made with barra de pan rather than sliced bread. I’ve never been to Spain though so take everything I’m saying with a big ole grain of salt.
Based on that link, bocadillo seems to be what I had. It was just bread, meat, and cheese, no veg or sauce or anything else. The inside of the bread may have been rubbed with tomato and/or garlic and olive oil, but that’s it.
Thanks!
If it’s not obvious, my Spanish is extremely poor to nonexistent, so I never would have come up with that. It would not have occurred to me to just look up the Spanish word(s) for “sandwich.”
If the bread looked like the tiniest baguette ever (rather than being slices), it’s a mini. Normally the type of cheese would be identified, mainly because jamón y queso sounds like you mean “pink ham” rather than serrano. Turns out that a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich is among the few that have a special name rather than being described: in many places they’re called bikinis.
Bocadillo is the generic name and also the default; bocadillo includes sandwich AKA bocadillo de pan de molde or bocadillo de pan Bimbo (pan de molde/Bimbo being what we call sliced bread), but if the bread isn’t specified you can assume it will be some sort of barra.
In Barcelona the default is tomato; in other parts of Spain if you want tomato you need to specify that you want pantumaca (transcription of the Catalan pà amb tomàquet, bread with tomato).
Okay I just looked at Google Maps, retracing our path from Park Guell back toward the city. We walked down what seemed like a major road, that was apparently the Travessera de Dalt, and I’m certain the place we stopped was the Store Cafe. The sandwiches I pointed at and ate were out of this case: Google Maps. From the top shelf underneath the beer I got one of the grainy ones from the center and another of the non-grainy ones to the right of them. The filling in both was the same, jamon and some type of cheese. They were both amazing.
The “grainy ones” look to me like the bread is a multigrain. The oregano bread from Subway looks similar but it’s all soft, the crust is more look than feel. If the cheese was kind of sharp it was probably a manchego or a Burgos semicurado: those two areas produce a lot of decent, cheap cheeses which are strong enough to hold their own against a serrano.
That’s interesting. I know of “Bimbo” as specifically a Mexican (?) brand of bread.
In parts of the U.S., there are grocery distributors who carry the usual American grocery fare right alongside common Mexican/Central American/Carribean grocery items. It’s common here to see signs near in our grocery stores advertising several brands of, say, pastries & bread. On these signs advertising several brands of pastries/bread, Bimbo’s logo is almost always shown even if the store doesn’t carry Bimbo (which is only sold in specialty markets in the New Orleans area).
Therefore: pan de Bimbo seems to be a borrowing from Latin American Spanish into castellano.
There is an analog in American English, though the usage is fading away: some Americans call sliced white bread “Wonder bread” – also a brand name.
EDIT: Wow, Bimbo’s more intertwined in the American grocery business than I thought. The Mexican parent company has a fully-fledged American arm, and owns/produces dozens of baked-good brands that have been stalwarts in American groceries for decades. Lots of mergers and acquisitions over the last 10-15 years.
They are, yes. They’re also the first brand to sell that kind of bread in Spain, back in mumblemumble (before I was old enough to ask for sandwiches anyway… 1965, according to their website). They didn’t have any noteworthy competition for that kind of bread until 1978, when Panrico started selling it.
We didn’t even borrow the expression, we got return-invaded by the company which originated the expression
