The Episode of Home (made stock) Away from Home

Dear Tamar:

I’m currently travelling in Spain, with three weeks to go. I’ve been staying mostly in places where I can cook my own food as I’m a coeliac and eating out isn’t always easy. A few days ago I roasted a chicken and veggies with full bulbs of garlic, congratulating myself on buying and cooking local produce. To further add to my self congratulatory indulgence, I made chicken stock out of the leftover roasted frame. Here is my dilemma - what to do with it? I fear I will transfer it into a finished bottle of orange juice, then carry it around in my cooler bag for the next three weeks, transferring it from car to fridge over and over again, without actually making anything of it because I fear that whatever I cook won’t be ‘local enough’ or ‘good enough’. Help!

-Home (made stock) Away from Home

Dear Home (made stock) Away from Home,

Oh, the number of rented and borrowed houses I’ve made stock in. Oh, the number of times I’ve carted home ice-blocks of lobster stock, fish stock, lamb stock. Oh, my joy at finding my blocks of stock weepy but mostly intact at the end of a long car ride spent coddled in all the insulating jackets and sleeping bags I could locate.

I even battled with the first stock I made after moving to Spain last summer. The most obvious use is chicken soup, but in Madrid in summer, the air one breathes is a kind of chicken soup. I puzzled over the stock and the weather before remembering that the soul of a good stock is its ability to add immense flavor to something simple, even bland. It’s why so much of the world’s peasant food—whose basic formula is a starch + stock made from bones + anything else that’s available—relies on the stuff.

This brings us to your travels in Spain. I can’t tell from your letter where you’ve been so far. (I’m delighted to hear you have three weeks! You have escaped from the American juggernaut. Enhorabuena!) But I can tell you haven’t been to Valencia. I considered holding off on replying until you had. But Valencia doesn’t make enough greatest-hits lists for me to feel confident I could let the fates play out.

I have four notes to share about Valencia: 1) It is the birthplace of Spanish rice production, where the grain was planted by Moors, who brought it to Spain with them around the 8th century. 2) It is the birthplace of paella, the glorious rice-and-stuff dish that is probably the most famous food in Spain. 3) Paella Valenciana—the version invented in Valencia—does not contain seafood but chicken and rabbit, plus beans and either snails or rosemary (more on this in a moment.) It is made with the local variety, Bomba rice, which is unique for reasons I’ll also explain below. 4) This is entirely unrelated, but in the Cabanyal neighborhood of Valencia, you will find a 25-year old marionette theater that will renew your faith the goodness of humankind.

Because it was not Valencian fishers but Valencian farmers who first thought to simmer rice in a large flat pan with flavorful stock over live fire, the dish relied on stock from farmyard animals—chicken or rabbit. The Bomba rice for which Valencia is famed is unique for the amount of liquid it can absorb: three times its volume in stock, compared to most rice, whose ratio is 1:1 or 1:2. When Bomba rice has been fully cooked in stock, it is deeply flavored with it, more stock than rice. Stock used in paella not end up being carted from one rental house to another in an empty juice bottle. It will, rather, be the very essence of the dish.

Other than snails. Or rosemary. There are been several funny essays written about the odd and repeated prescription in old Valencian paella recipes for using one of the two ingredients, but never both. Jeffrey Steingarten has one in The Man Who Ate Everything. Coleman Andrews revisits the advice in this LA Times piece. The answer at which both arrive is that snails in Valencia feed on rosemary—or if domesticated will have been fed it—so that their main contribution is rosemary’s woodsy herbiness. In the absence of Valencian snails, or simply to streamline things, a few sprigs of rosemary accomplish the same basic effect.

Dear cook, you can certainly follow the vegetarian paella recipe in Coleman Andrews’s piece. Or you can find an old Valencian recipe. Or you can do what I did with my first puzzling batch of home made stock in my new home-away-from-home. Cook rice in it, and serve that next to chicken or rabbit or beans or snails, or nothing but sliced tomatoes and a handful of good olives, feeling comforted and both home and away.