Spanish cuisine has been popular in Britain for decades, but it wasn’t until the early Noughties that it hit the mainstream. Before then, chorizo, now a mainstay of British kitchens, was only available in specialist shops. Relatively few diners would’ve been able to wax lyrical about manchego.
Coveted dishes such as tortilla and paella have been around the longest. They might be the simplest to understand — eggs, rice. In fact, the Spanish omelette is believed to have arrived in Britain in 1912, paella a few years later. Gazpacho followed in the 1930s as European tourism flourished.
