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TRAVELLER
ALMOST EVERYONE
now agrees that paella was
invented in Valencia. That’s not up for discussion.
We know that some time in the 19th century, peasants
from the Albufera area, a few miles south of the
city, first began frying up rabbit, chicken and beans,
occasionally with mountain snails, before adding
water, seasoning and, finally, rice.
That’s paella. Or rather, that’s what it’s supposed
to be. But, as any Valencian will tell you, paella didn’t
remain in this state of purity for long. Pretty soon, the
dish spread down the coast and villagers who didn’t
know better started adding seafood. From the point of
view of paella purists, it’s been downhill ever since.
Fast forward a hundred years or so and you end
up with the more touristy restaurants on the Costa
Blanca, in Alicante, advertising something called
“paella” which their neighbours up north would
dismiss as “prawns in rice”.
So it must have come as a shock to Valencians last
year, when legendary chef Ferran Adrià, he of globally
acclaimed restaurant El Bulli, said that a restaurant
called Paco Gandía, in the province of Alicante,
serves the best paella in the world. Then, when critics
such as the respected American food writer Colman
Andrews began describing that province as a culinary
superpower, it must have been as if a kitchen knife
were being twisted in the heart of Valencia’s proud
tradition. Welcome to the great Spanish food rivalry
of the 21st century.
A culinary competitiveness has always existed
between the Basque country and the rest of Spain, but
now the south has its own fiery enmity to be proud of
and it all comes to down to one simple thing: how one
cooks that most humble of grains – rice.
Temperatures were raised even further when some
of the better restaurants in Alicante actually started
to question the official definition of “paella”. In the
past, they’ve always called their own rice dishes simply
arroz
(rice). However, the chef of Alicante restaurant
Monastrell, María José San Román, who’s so well
respected that she was invited to the White House to
give Obama’s chefs tips on how to make paella, was
among those who’ve broken ranks.
“I realised that when my menu just said
arroces
[rice dishes] nobody from outside Spain was ordering
them,” she says. “So now I put paella at the top of
the page. Why shouldn’t we use the word? I don’t
want to fight with Valencia. I just want to say, ‘Come
on, we have so many dishes, why don’t we put them
all together under one umbrella called paella?’ You
can have traditional Valencian paella as well, but we
developed the original idea and made it better.”
This is fighting talk indeed, but the question
remains: who’s right? Late last year, on the outskirts
of Valencia, an event took place that promised to settle
the dispute. At the City of Arts and Sciences building,
the First World Rice Congress and Homage to the
Paella was a three-day event that saw chefs from all
over the world arrive to swap ideas and celebrate the
city’s most famous dish. When I heard that a team
consisting of nine of Alicante’s best chefs was going, I
decided to tag along too, securing a lift with another
of Alicante’s most acclaimed chefs, Dani Frías of La
Ereta. To add comfort to the trip, I booked a room at
La Casa Azul (
7 Calle Palafox, tel: +34 96 351 1100,
lacasaazulvinosandrooms.com
) and prepared myself
to see the competition first hand.
Appropriately, Dani, with his dark, piratical beard,
looks like someone you might imagine marauding up
north to show a rival city a thing or two. However, he
wouldn’t admit to feeling any sense of competition.
“They might have a rivalry with us,” he said on the
ride up, “but we don’t with them.” One thing’s for
A traditional Valencian
paella has vegetables,
meat, such as chicken
or rabbit, seasoning,
beans and rice
Chef Jesús Melero,
exhibiting in the
“tunnel of paella”at
theWorld Congress
of Rice inValencia
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