Seville oranges, the bitter fruit British cooks turn into marmalade, grow along Sevilla's own streets, and much of the crop is picked in winter and shipped north for exactly that. The city keeps the blossom. By March the trees are coming into flower, and the azahar, sweet with a honeyed edge, drifts through Santa Cruz and the Alcázar gardens, usually strongest from late March into April. For anyone who travels to eat, it is one of the best months to come: warm enough to stand outside a bar in the evening, with the kitchens deep in Lent.
Through Lent, meat gives ground to salt cod and chickpeas. Espinacas con garbanzos is the dish to order, spinach and chickpeas bound with a majao of fried bread, garlic, cumin and pimentón, and served here as a dry, dark, heavily spiced tapa rather than a soup. El Rinconcillo on Calle Gerona, pouring drinks since 1670, is the classic counter for it. Pavías de bacalao, also called soldaditos de Pavía, are strips of salt cod in a crackling batter, and they turn up in most old-fashioned bars. Eat them as soon as the saucer lands, while the batter still shatters.
From the start of Lent the confiterías stack their windows with torrijas, thick slices of bread soaked, fried and scented with lemon and cinnamon. Some are soaked in milk, others in sweet wine and finished with honey, and the wine ones are the more Sevillano of the two. Buy one of each and compare them on a bench.
The Mercado de Triana sits over the bridge by Plaza del Altozano. Cross on a weekday morning, before lunch, when the fish stalls are still piled high, and eat at one of the tapas counters inside.
Holy Week runs up to Easter Sunday, so in years when Easter falls early the processions take over the second half of March; otherwise they arrive in April, and it pays to check before you book. About sixty brotherhoods take to the streets, and incense joins the orange blossom in the air. Eating bends around the processions. Bars fill to the door, and crossing a route can take far longer than you expect, so book lunch near where you plan to watch and eat late, as Sevillanos do.
When the crowds wear you down, walk to the Convento de San Leandro on Plaza de San Ildefonso. Its Augustinian nuns have made yemas, small rounds of egg yolk and sugar, for more than four centuries, and they sell them through a torno, a revolving wooden hatch in the wall. You put your money on the turntable, it turns, and a box comes back. You never see the cook.