Did You Put Chorizo in This?

That's a loaded question

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Did You Put Chorizo in This?

By Nina Caplan

One of the 21st century’s most esteemed marks of honor is the digital drawing. But when Apple debuted its new paella emoji in 2016, outrage ensued, most loudly from Guillermo Navarro, creator of the website wikipaella.org. Apple’s graphic included the distinctive shallow pan filled with yellow rice … and peas, a couple of mussels and a prawn. This was all wrong. Eventually, Apple corrected the emoji: it now has a chicken drumstick, green beans and lemon slices – all ingredients acceptable to paella purists. 

But in the interim, Jamie Oliver set off another row by tweeting his favorite paella recipe. It involved chicken thighs, which was fine, and stirring in a bit of chorizo, which was not. Paella doesn’t contain chorizo. (Nor should it be stirred, but we’ll get to that.) Chorizo is pork, and pork has historical resonance in Spain, where eating it was used, after the Christian reconquest, by Jews and Muslims as “proof” that they had converted. This is one reason why there are sprinklings of ham in so many Spanish dishes.

In Valencia, paella is a matter of local pride. “There is a series of ingredients prepared in a certain way in a specific pan,” says three-Michelin-starred Valencian chef Quique Dacosta, who recently opened a restaurant in London's Fitzrovia neighborhood, ArrosQD, dedicated to paella. “We are talking about rice, saffron, rosemary, chicken, rabbit, the garrafó [white bean], the French bean. Then there are variables, such as artichoke, depending on the season. We could not include kiwi or avocado, for example, because they are not from Valencia.”

Near the coast, you may get shellfish. The rice comes from the watery fields surrounding the city; the most exotic ingredient is the saffron, all the way from La Mancha, 300km inland. Real paella is delicious. The meaty liquid coats and cooks the rice without breaking its structure; at the base of the pan it caramelizes into a crunchy layer called soccarat, paella’s greatest delicacy. Stirring prevents the formation of the soccarat, which is why it is frowned on. 

For the English, however, paella is too often a mess of lurid orange rice topped with some dried-out chicken and a token prawn, and a crunchy bottom layer is grounds for complaint. To those of us who love Spain and admire Spanish food, paella as found in English restaurants or English-heavy tourist resorts is a puzzling anomaly that’s pretty much inedible. “It’s all the Spaniards’ fault,” says Marcos Fernandez Pardo, owner of Iberica, the UK mini-chain of Spanish restaurants. “If the British got terrible paella in Spain, somebody had to be making it for them.” 

But a true paella cannot be created from any old rice. In fact, it can only, strictly speaking, be made using one of three kinds: Bomba, Senia, or Bahia. There is a DO – a Denominación d’Origen – for Valencia rice that safeguards quality, rather like Appellation Contrôlée does for French wine. It is run by Santos Ruiz, who is more passionate about Valencian rice varieties than some people are about their spouses. Senia, he explains, is the difficult one: it keeps cooking when you take it off the heat, so requires an incredibly nuanced understanding of timing. “We say rice can’t wait – when you stop cooking it will carry on swelling.” This rice is really only for the abuelas, the grandmothers who have been making paella all their lives. Even chefs tend to prefer Bomba which, says Ruiz, is harder than Senia, absorbs flavor well, and is much harder to overcook. 

Photo: William Craig Moyes

Valencia has around 50,000 hectares of rice fields. You can take a boat out on Albufera Lake, just 10km from the city. It’s beautiful, the graceful rice plants reflecting in the water and the smell of the sea just beyond a strip of forest. But the malaria mosquito breeds in stagnant water, and rice fields have plenty of that. Over and over, Spanish monarchs made laws forbidding the growing of rice near the city; those laws were generally ignored. During the malaria epidemics of 1784, a local doctor observed that there were “many women with swollen bodies, and people living in these areas, in general, are likely to have a short life.” Small wonder that modern Valencianos are so vociferous about paella. Their ancestors were actually dying for it. 

The paella pan is the invention of the Romans who invaded eastern Spain in the third century BC and the rest of the peninsula over the following 200 years. It probably flattened out to its current distinctive shallow shape due to a scarcity of firewood: a large surface and a thin layer of ingredients will cook faster. The rice itself arrived in the 8th century, when the Moors conquered the region. Rice with clarified butter was supposed to have been the favorite dish of the prophet Mohammed, so perhaps the very early stirrings (or rather, no stirrings) of modern paella came from that. 

Should a traditional dish ever be modernized? At ArrosQD, Dacosta is trying to answer that question both ways. He has invented a machine to make individual paellas; he uses controversial ingredients. What he doesn't do is call the results paella. 🥘

This newsletter is edited by Katherine Spiers, host of the podcast Smart Mouth.

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