Issue No. 03Valencia · Spain
The smoke is an ingredient.
We are an hour west of Valencia, in a village where the orange trees outnumber the people, and a woman named for her grandmother is teaching us that paella is, before anything else, a fire.
She does not measure. She knows the rice the way other people know their children. When the bottom catches and crackles — the socarrat — she lifts the pan an inch and tilts her ear toward it. Escucha, she says. Listen.
(Continued in the letter — including where to eat hers, and the pan we ended up bringing home…)