Chickpea and spinach stew with cumin

In Seville during Holy Week, when the processions block the streets and the bars are three deep, the thing to order is a small dish of chickpeas and spinach.

Espinacas con garbanzos is Lent food, which is why it appears in enormous quantities in the week before Easter and in steadier quantities all year round. Lent in Catholic Spain meant no meat for forty days, and forty days is long enough that a cuisine has to get properly serious about the alternative. What Andalusia produced was this: chickpeas, spinach, cumin, paprika, garlic, and a slice of fried bread blitzed into the sauce to thicken it.

The bread is the interesting part and it is much older than Lent. You fry a slice of stale bread in olive oil until golden, then pound or blend it with garlic, cumin and a splash of vinegar into a paste, and stir that into the pot. It thickens everything without cream or flour and it carries the spice through the whole dish. This is Moorish cooking, essentially unchanged, which is what a great deal of Andalusian food turns out to be the moment you scratch it.

For a kitchen with one person in it, the appeal is arithmetic. Two tins of chickpeas, a bag of spinach, a slice of bread and four spices give you four portions of something with real depth for about three euros, and nothing in that list is perishable enough to go off before you get to it.

It is thick enough to travel without sloshing, it reheats without complaint, and it is one of very few dishes that is equally good hot in February and at room temperature in July.