A bowl of thick golden potato chips beside a plate of thinly sliced cured ham draped in folds, a small dish of green olives, a few slender pickled green peppers and a small glass of dark vermouth with an orange slice on a marble table

The Chips-and-Ham Party

Published 29 Sep 20266 min read

In most of Europe the aperitif belongs to the evening. In Spain it traditionally comes before lunch: friends at a bar or a kitchen counter around noon, something cold and slightly bitter in a small glass, and a spread of salty things that promises a meal without being one. The classic mix runs to pickles, chips, canned seafood, cheeses, cured meats and olives, and the chips are not an afterthought in that list. They are on it as an equal. The chips-and-ham party is that hour, moved into your house and stripped to its two best components: a bowl of serious potato chips and a plate of jamón, with a few small dishes in orbit around them. Nothing is cooked. The whole thing is assembled in twenty minutes, and it may be the highest ratio of pleasure to effort in all of hosting. Our vermut hour piece covers the tradition; this is the operating manual.

Take the chips seriously

Spain treats the potato chip the way France treats the baguette: a humble thing done to a standard that stops being humble. San Nicasio fries in extra virgin olive oil, and its entire recipe runs to potatoes, that oil and pink Himalayan salt. Galicia's Bonilla a la Vista and Papas Argente of Valencia enter their chips in international taste competitions the way wineries enter wine, and both hold the Superior Taste Award. This is a category where the label reads like a wine label, and it rewards the same thirty seconds of attention.

The house whose story tells the category best is Torres, which started in 1969 as a fried potato stand in Premià de Mar, outside Barcelona, run by Manuel Torres and his wife Ángeles Medel, and grew into a family firm whose chips now travel to fifty markets. Its aperitivo range runs from a chip fried in 100 percent extra virgin olive oil through black truffle and Mediterranean herbs to, yes, an Iberian ham flavor, a chip seasoned after the most famous food in Spain. That is the standard to shop by wherever you buy: a thick-cut chip, olive oil named on the label, a maker that does little else. Pour the chips into a wide bowl at the last minute so they stay in rank, and put out more than feels reasonable. They are the thing that runs out first.

The ham is the subject

The pairing works because the two halves answer each other. The chip is fried and immediate, all salt and crunch; jamón is cured and slow, all silk and fat. One resets the palate and the other rewards it, and guests go back and forth between the bowl and the plate all hour without any help from the host. That contrast is the whole architecture of the party, and it costs nothing to stage.

The real thing deserves a moment of label reading before you buy. Since 2014, Spanish law has sorted ibérico products into four color-coded seals: black for acorn-fed ham from pigs with two purebred ibérico parents, red for acorn-fed ham from crossbred ibérico pigs, green for field-raised pigs fed on pasture and feed, and white for ibérico pigs raised on feed. The color tells you how the pig lived and what it ate, and price follows it closely. Mercado Famous slices both ends of the spectrum into packs sized for exactly this table: a 100 percent ibérico jamón (shop 100 percent ibérico jamón) and a 50 percent ibérico (shop 50 percent ibérico) that is the smart buy for a crowd. Take the pack out of the refrigerator half an hour ahead; the fat should turn glossy and start to melt at the touch, which is when jamón tastes like itself. Drape the slices loosely on a plate rather than laying them flat, and let people lift them with their fingers. The jamón guide goes deep on breeds and curing, and the piece on jamón storage and the white spots answers the question someone at the table will ask, because someone always asks.

If the budget has room for one more cured thing, a few slices of salchichón (shop salchichón) or chorizo ibérico (shop chorizo ibérico) beside the jamón give the plate a second register without competing with it.

The rest of the table

Olives. A dish of anchovy-stuffed Manzanillas (shop anchovy-stuffed Manzanillas) is the Spanish bar standard; the anchovy inside does the seasoning. Espinaler has been supplying the aperitivo hour outside Barcelona since before anyone at your table was born, and our Espinaler guide tells that story. The olive guide covers the wider field.

Piparras. Slender pickled green peppers, mild and sharp at once. Eat them whole by the stem between slices of ham; they play the same acid note the olives do, in a longer shape.

One tin, opened at the table. Mussels in escabeche are among the vermouth hour's classic tins; Ramón Peña (shop Ramón Peña) packs them in a paprika-tinted escabeche. Open the tin in front of people, plant a fork in it, and add a dash of Espinaler's aperitivo sauce (shop Espinaler's aperitivo sauce), which exists for precisely this gesture. Our piece on serving fish straight from the tin explains why the tin itself belongs on the table.

Bread, optionally. If lunch is going to be late, a round of pan con tomate (pan con tomate guide) turns the hour into something sturdier, and a slice of it under a fold of jamón is one of the great bites of the Western world.

Nothing sweet, nothing hot from the oven, nothing that needs a knife. A roll of cotton cocktail napkins handles the fingers.

How much to put out

The aperitivo is a prelude, not a meal, and the quantities below assume lunch follows within the hour. If it does not, this becomes a snack dinner, and the numbers roughly double; the snack dinner piece covers that happy failure mode.

On the table	Per person	For four	For eight
Chips	35 to 40 g	One 150 g bag	Two 150 g bags
Jamón	25 to 30 g	One pack, about 100 g	Two packs
Olives	6 to 8	Half a jar	One 350 g jar
Piparras	2 to 3	Half a jar	One jar
Tins	A quarter tin	One tin	Two tins
Bread, if serving	One slice	Half a loaf	One loaf

These are planning numbers, not rules, and they carry one bias worth naming: the chips row is the one guests will exceed. When in doubt, buy the extra bag. An unopened bag keeps; an empty bowl at half past noon does not.

The glass

The traditional pour is vermouth: wine fortified and aromatized with botanicals, wormwood among them, served the Spanish way over ice with a half-moon of orange and an olive in the glass. A small tumbler, not a goblet; the drink is meant to be finished while it is still cold. The vermut hour piece has the history, and the vermouth storage piece explains why the open bottle lives in the refrigerator. For the guest skipping alcohol, a flute of sparkling tea poured very cold does the aperitif's whole job of bitterness and occasion, and the non-alcoholic drinks guide maps the rest of the field.

The hour itself

Start at noon on a Saturday or Sunday. Everything goes out at once; there are no courses and no timing to manage, which means the host is a guest from the first minute. The party ends when lunch begins, or it becomes lunch, and both endings are correct. The chips bowl gets refilled once, the tin gets a second fork, and the last piece of jamón is offered around twice before someone takes it.

The Ambrosian Pantry is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and products ship across the continental U.S. from theambrosianpantry.com. Visitors can ask staff questions in the shop, and which ham to start with is a very good question.

See also: European snacks to buy, including Salsa Espinaler and tinned seafood from Spain and Portugal.