The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [135]
The real Valencian paella is a traditional lunch for workers in the vineyards. There are four rules for making one. It must be cooked outdoors, by a man or men, over a fire of vine cuttings and citrus wood. It must contain chicken and rabbit (no lobsters crawling all about). The grains of rice must be three millimeters long, like the arborio rice you use in risotto. And you must add either twelve snails or two sprigs of rosemary, but not both.
The rest of us were skeptical on several points. Few of us had ever met a paella we’d liked. And how can two sprigs of rosemary substitute for twelve snails? we asked, thinking that Lourdes, who is just now learning English, must have confused “or” with “and,” or “snails” with “rosemary,” or something like that. As would often be the case over the next few hours, Lourdes humbled the skeptics among us. In Valencia, when you catch snails for your paella, you feed them rosemary for a few days, both to purge them and to give them flavor. Herbs from the sunburned gardens of Spain are so intense that twelve snails contribute all the rosemary flavor you need.
Why bother with vine cuttings and citrus wood? Lourdes explained that as the cooking liquid evaporates from the wide surface of the pan, it mixes with the smoke and then condenses back, bestowing an indispensable flavor to the dish. Vine cuttings and orangewood have a high acid content, which creates a hotter fire. Their smoke contributes an aroma absolutely required in all the true Valencian paella.
Paul Levy, a transplanted American who is food and wine editor of the London Observer, author of the very funny Out to Lunch (Harper & Row), and one of the pillars of the British food world, lives in a seventeenth-century farmhouse ten miles northwest of Oxford, with his wife, Penny, who edits art books, and their two daughters. When the symposium was over, Paul and Penny invited ten of us back to their farm to join Lourdes and Alicia in adapting their ancestral rite of cyclical fecundation to the Oxfordshire terrain. Paul had a good supply of plump corn-fed chickens, but the only rabbit in sight was Leonard Woolf, a family pet. When Penny defended Leonard Woolf against our offers to dress him for the pot, Lourdes settled for Paul’s frozen pigeons. Paul had neither collected snails from his garden nor gorged them on herbs, so Lourdes sent one of us off to pluck some branches from Paul’s pungent rosemary patch.
We gathered round as Lourdes and Alicia meticulously leveled Paul’s U.S.-made barbecue grill so that the oil and broth would lie perfectly even in the pan and lit the fire of vines and apricot branches and, finally, in a desperate act, an old crate. For the next two hours they composed the paella, continually dispatching the rest of us on vital errands to other parts of the garden and the farmhouse. First the fowl were browned on all sides in olive oil. Green beans and chopped tomatoes were added and sautéed for a few minutes, then the heat was reduced. To say that the heat was reduced is to summarize a complex process in which Lourdes made the rest of us reach into the dense billows of smoke engulfing the paella, the grill, and most of Lourdes to pull out and somehow dispose of huge bundles of flaming wood. Tedious micromanagement of the fire continued throughout the endless hours of cooking. My slacks and jacket lost their perfume of Valencia-on-Thames only after two dry cleanings back home in New York, where you regulate your cooking fire by turning a knob.
Paprika, some broad white beans in their cooking liquid, and additional water now went into the pan. Lourdes had brought the dried beans from Spain, and Alicia had boiled them indoors before the fire was started. Lourdes and Alicia called them limas, but nobody else agreed. We argued aimlessly about whether they were really dried favas, butter beans, or broad beans, until Lourdes silenced us all with their Latin classification, Phaseolus lunatus, which Paul nicely translated as “moon beans.” When I returned to the hotel that night and opened the Oxford Book of