Calçots amb Romesco

Catalan spring onions burnt black over vine cuttings, steamed in newspaper, and eaten standing with romesco

Origin: Valls, Tarragona & Catalonia

From the journey of Spring Onion.

The calçot is the most deliberately manufactured spring onion in the world, and it is the only one with a named inventor. It starts as an ordinary white onion of the Blanca Grande de Lleida type. That onion is grown, lifted, dried, and then replanted the following season, whereupon instead of making one bulb it sends up a cluster of shoots. As those shoots grow, soil is banked up around them again and again, which blanches the stems long and pale and mild. The name records the practice: calçar is to put shoes on. The method is credited to a farmer of Valls in Tarragona known as Xat de Benaiges, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The calçotada that grew around the vegetable is a winter festival rather than a meal, running from January through April. The calçots are laid directly on a fire of burning vine cuttings and left until the outsides are wholly carbonised. They are then wrapped in newspaper in bundles, where they steam in their own heat for twenty minutes and finish cooking. Eating them is a technique and there is no dignified way to do it. You take the burnt end in one hand, grip the green top in the other, pull the charred sheath down and away, and a clean sweet white core slides out. That goes into romesco or salvitxada, and then straight into an upturned mouth, held above the head. Everyone wears a bib. Everyone's hands are black. Two dozen each is normal and a hundred to a table is not remarkable. The sauce is not incidental: romesco of roasted tomato, nyora pepper, almond, hazelnut, bread, and vinegar is what stops thirty onions from becoming monotonous.

Ingredients

Onions

  • 60 whole calçots, or the fattest spring onions you can find

Romesco

  • 4 whole nyora or ñora peppers, dried, stalks and seeds removed
  • 4 whole ripe tomatoes
  • 1 whole head of garlic
  • 60 g blanched almonds
  • 60 g blanched hazelnuts
  • 1 slice country bread, crusts removed
  • 200 ml extra virgin olive oil
  • 3 tbsp sherry vinegar
  • 1 tsp sweet smoked paprika
  • 1 tsp salt, or to taste

Method

  1. Soak the nyora peppers in hot water for thirty minutes, then scrape the softened flesh from the skins with a teaspoon and discard the skins.
  2. Roast the tomatoes and the whole head of garlic at 200°C for thirty minutes until collapsed and blackened in patches. Squeeze the garlic from its skins.
  3. Fry the almonds, hazelnuts, and bread in a little of the olive oil until golden, then drain.
  4. Blend the nuts and bread to a coarse paste, then add the pepper flesh, roast tomato, garlic, paprika, vinegar, and salt, and blend again.
  5. With the motor running, pour in the remaining olive oil in a slow stream until the sauce is thick, glossy, and just pourable. Taste and adjust the vinegar and salt.
  6. Trim the roots from the calçots and remove only the outermost loose layer. Do not peel or wash them properly; the outside is going to be burnt off.
  7. Build a fire of vine cuttings or hardwood and let it burn down to strong flames and glowing embers. Lay the calçots directly across the fire in a single layer.
  8. Cook for eight to ten minutes, turning once, until the outsides are completely black and the calçots are limp when lifted.
  9. Wrap the hot calçots in bundles of ten in newspaper and leave for twenty to thirty minutes.
  10. Serve the bundles on roof tiles or a board with the romesco. To eat: grip the black outer layers, pull down and away, dip the white core in the sauce, and lower it into your mouth from above.

Notes

Real calçots are exported from Catalonia in season and some specialist greengrocers carry them from January to March. Outside that window, use the fattest spring onions or the thinnest young leeks available; they are not the same but the method transfers. Sixty onions for six people is not a misprint. Ten each is a modest calçotada and Catalans routinely eat twenty or thirty. Salvitxada is the sauce Valls itself uses, closer to romesco but with more nyora and no tomato. Both are correct and locals argue about it. A barbecue or a very hot grill works if a vine-cutting fire is out of the question, though the resinous smoke of the vine wood is part of the flavour. The traditional order of the meal is calçots first, standing, then grilled lamb and sausage with white beans at the table, then crema catalana, with young red wine drunk from a porró throughout.

The Gastrographer

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