Welcome to the 4th of edition of the least anticipated segment of The Grand Adventure: Alex Goes Snacking. If you’ve read these before, I’m sorry. If you haven’t and you’re just picking this one up, I’m sure there’s a better use of the next 7 minutes of your time. Here, I’ll review a variety of Spanish snack foods from our first couple of weeks in the country.
As a reminder, here’s the scale (based on restaurant rankings):
5 stars – perfection. (Everything about this is perfect. Nothing should be changed.)
4.5 stars – excellent. (Great experience; great food.)
4.0 stars – very good. (Good food plus great experience or great food plus okay experience)
3.5 stars – good. (Would happily go again if convenient)
3.0 stars – satisfactory. (Would go again but only if someone else proposed it)
2.5 stars – fine (with tone). (Would try to avoid going again but would relent if pushed)
2.0 stars – poor. (Disappointing. Would not go again)
1.5 stars – bad. (This place shouldn’t be in business.)
1.0 stars – very bad. (No redeeming features.)
0 stars – beyond categorization. (Implies a category error, as in “I am not sure this was a restaurant,” or “I’m not sure this was food.”)
Chaskis – 3.5 stars
I wasn’t sure quite what these would be. They look a little like pork cracklings, so I was worried they might not be Gelsey-friendly, but a quick survey of the ingredients revealed they don’t contain any animal product.
They smell is non-descript. The taste is a bit like a Bugle, however, and Bugles aren’t bad as snack foods go. They’re a little firmer than Bugles, which, if not careful, can cause scrapes in the mouth, and I think I prefer the shape of Bugles to these weird thin circles, but overall, this isn’t a bad snack food.
Pringles, Sabor Jamón – 3.5 stars
When in Spain, right… Ham-flavored Pringles. And not just any ham, mind you, these are nice Spanish-ham-flavored Pringles, as you can tell from the leg of jamón on the cover. I guess if they can make every other flavor of Pringle, they can make ones that taste like Spanish ham, right? Right???
Upon opening the can, I became suspicious. They smelled less like ham and more like… barbecue? Do they just make barbecue-flavored pringles and sell them in different geographies under what the most popular kind of meat-labeled flavor? Hmmmm.
Then I bit into one, and another, and another. I couldn’t tell what the flavor is. If it’s any different from a barbecue flavored Pringle, I wouldn’t be able to tell you how. Maybe slightly smokier? Maybe not. I really don’t know. They’re not bad – I just don’t know what they are.
Gelsey initially didn’t want to taste one. But they are vegetarian, and after I told her they taste like barbecue (one of her favorite flavors of chip), she decided to risk it. And she mostly agreed! They taste mostly like barbecue—“bad barbecue”—she claims, but she’s more a connoisseur of barbecue flavored chips than I am. My palette is unrefined enough to offer further commentary here.
Cigarrillos de Tolosa – 4.5 stars
Tolosa is a small town 30 kilometers south of San Sebastián (where we are currently based), in the eastern part of the País Vasco. And there is a bakery there by the name of Casa Eceiza that has made cigarrillos (cigarettes) and tejas (tiles) for the better part of the last 100 years.
It is, admittedly, slightly odd to open up a can of a sweet snack called cigarettes. Perhaps when they were invented, cigarettes conveyed something different than they do now. These days, the name is at odds with the fineness of the product. These are an expensive high-class product, to be consumed (if possible) sparingly.
The flavor more than overcomes any initial hesitation from the name. It is a fine butter flavor, the perfect accompaniment to a coffee. The richness of the butter cuts through the acidity of the coffee to give it a warmer, rounder flavor. I have sometimes (frequently, when we were in Ireland and Wales) been known to have a shortbread biscuit with my coffee, but I believe these are actually a better accompaniment than either the finest shortbread or the more universal Biscoff cookies specifically designed for such a purpose.
We also tried the Cigarrillos con Chocolate and the Tejas (the other original flavor). The original Cigarrillos de Tolosa are definitely the best, but I’d give the Cigarrillos con Chocolate 4.0 and the Tejas 3.5 stars.
Risketos – 2.5
There is much that is confusing about the packaging of Risketos. First, what is the name even a reference to? Spanish doesn’t use the letter ‘k’ and ‘eto’ is a suffix, so I found myself looking up the word ‘risco’, which means ‘crag’ or ‘cliff’. That didn’t leave me any more enlightened as to what these snacks were going to taste like. Maybe a native Spanish-speaker gets the reference? If so, please leave a comment!
Then there are the caricatured Cheetos. Why does one guy have a sombrero, soft drink, and sunglasses while the other seems to have only regular glasses and no accessories? Why does the person on the left seem to be holding (without arms?) a popsicle? Why are there two boxes of popcorn and a skateboard? What about these snacks makes them the authentic ones, as it advertises right at the top? Mysteries and more mysteries – would any of them be answered with a taste?
Alas, no. These are simply a poor man’s Cheetos. The crunch is surprisingly good. It felt like eating a Cheeto. But it didn’t taste like eating a Cheeto. The fake cheese flavor wasn’t strong enough, and there was a weird sweetness that simply doesn’t belong in a savory cheese-flavored snack. Would I eat them again if they were placed in front of me? Yes, they’re like Cheetos, a snack I find so impossible to resist I basically only let myself buy them once per year. But are they good? No.
Conguitos – food: 2.5 stars; existence: 0.0 stars
If you were experiencing relief at being able to read a post on the light-hearted and frivolous topic of snacking, surprise, this post couldn’t be written without a discussion of one of Spain’s most popular (and the world’s most racist) candies: Conguitos.
How, you wonder, can a candy be racist? Well, to start with, there’s the name. Conguitos means, literally, little Congolese people. It’s kind of weird to name a candy after a people, right? It gets weirder. They’re not shaped like people. They aren’t anthropomorphic in any way. Petit Ecolier (little schoolboy in French) at least have an imprint of a little schoolboy on the chocolate, but these contain basically (we’ll come back to this in a moment) no shape that would make them humanoid.
So why are they called little Congolese people? Well because they’re brown of course. If you spewed your coffee over your phone while reading because you can’t believe that a candy would be named only based on the melanin levels of the imagined person from another nation, I’ve written a long sentence here to allow you time to go get a paper towel and mop it up, but it’s true. This piece interviewed the guy who came up with the name/marketing campaign and he said, more or less, “because Congo was in the zeitgeist when we invented them.”
But what are they? That, my friends, is a secondary question, but I will answer it. They are chocolate-covered peanuts. And to be clear, the chocolate is bad chocolate. Worse-than-M&M quality chocolate. I’m hoping the peanut doesn’t have anything to do with the name, but let’s be honest, would it really surprise me? No.
At this point, perhaps you’re not that concerned. You think, well, they gave it a kind of racist name, but there are lots of things with kind of racist names, like Robert E. Lee Boulevard, or Robert E. Lee Elementary School or Robert E. Lee/Stonewall Jackson/Jefferson Davis whatever. That’s all true, not that the truth justifies it, but it also doesn’t get to the full picture of how racist these candies are.
Yeah. It’s really hard to overstate how racist that caricature is, right? There’s the fact that it’s sort of a childlike figure – the name carries the diminutive suffix ‘ito’ – which are both infantilizing. There’s the massive bright-red lips. There’s the fact that the shape of the head has been designed to look more simian and less human. There’s the smile, which is Sambo-like in its intended conveyance of both stupidity and contentment.
The company that manufactures Conguitos (Lacasa), of course, denies that the mascot is even meant to be human. But Lacasa also runs ads in which the mascot speaks in a clearly African language and carries spears. And in the photo above, the mascot has arms. So I don’t think I’d be taking their attestations at face value.
The thing is, Conguitos are just the best-known of a series of obviously offensively-named products in Spain.
Bardinet is a French company with a Spanish offshoot that produces Rhum Negrita. I went to their website to see if they had much to say about this product, and I was not-all-that-surprised to discover that they happily display decades-old even-more-racist-than-the-current-branding advertisements.
Then there is Cacique, a Venezuelan-produced rum that is now owned by Diageo, the second-largest distillery in the world. The word ‘cacique’ is a Spanishization of the Taino/Arawak word for the head of a tribe, and the man in the logo is pretty clearly a massively caricatured indigenous person.
Here, I was going to ease off a little and talk about how the Spanish have maybe improved slightly on this front in recent years, but then we went to the grocery store again, and found these two products next to each other.
That’s Gypsies and Little Dark People for those of you following along at home. So, uh, yeah, we’ve still got enough for a full jeopardy category. I’ll take “offensively-named Spanish food products for 200, Alex.”