Tag: History of food in Andalucia

The peppered history of Andalucía and its peoples has occasioned a fusion of ingredients and cooking methods. The arrival of the Moors from Arabia and North Africa proved the greatest influence on food, but they didn’t only bring with them aromatic spices and herbs. They also introduced irrigation systems (the ‘huertas’) to the arid lands of the south. Andalusian cuisine remains fresh and simple, with leanings towards a peasant’s diet due to historical periods of abject poverty in Spain. Staples were soups, paellas and rich stews cooked for great lengths of time on ‘stove-tops’, called poyos. The poyos and the poverty may be long gone, but the dishes remain, and these are a few you can sample during your visit to Andalucía: