Madrid Community Food & Traditional Cuisine

This is rice country, and it takes the subject seriously.

Paella was invented here, in the fields around the Albufera, as a field labourers’ lunch cooked over orange wood in a wide shallow pan. The authentic Valencian version contains chicken, rabbit, flat green beans, butter beans, tomato, saffron and rosemary — and no chorizo, no onion and no seafood. Valencians hold this position strongly and it is best not to argue.

But paella is only one of many rice dishes: arroz a banda, arroz negro, arroz al horno baked in an earthenware dish, and the soupy arroz caldoso.

Beyond rice there is excellent seafood, the oranges the region exports across Europe, and a distinctive local drink made from a tuber.

Alicante province adds its own traditions, including some of Spain’s best rice and a strong turron industry.

Paella valenciana is the original: rice, chicken, rabbit, garrofo butter beans, flat green beans, tomato, saffron and rosemary, cooked over wood in a wide pan until the base caramelises into the socarrat — the crisp layer that is the point of the whole exercise and is scraped up and fought over. Eaten at lunch, never at dinner, and traditionally straight from the pan with a wooden spoon.

Arroz a banda, rice cooked in fish stock and served separately from the fish it was made with, from the Alicante coast.

Fideua, the same idea made with short noodles instead of rice, invented on a fishing boat near Gandia.

All i pebre, eel with garlic and paprika, the Albufera’s own dish.

Horchata and fartons, the tiger nut drink with long sweet buns for dipping.

Also: esgarraet, salt cod with roasted pepper; turron from Jijona at Christmas; and coca flatbreads.

Mercado Central in Valencia is one of the largest working food markets in Europe, in a modernist hall of iron, glass and tile, with around a thousand stalls selling fish, meat, vegetables and the day’s oranges. It is a functioning market, not a food court, and it closes in the afternoon.

Paella is lunch. Ordering it in the evening marks you as a visitor, and the good places will tell you so. It is usually made for a minimum of two people and takes half an hour, so it is ordered ahead.

Horchaterias serve horchata de chufa with fartons, and the ones in Alboraya, where the tiger nuts grow, are the reference.

Eating hours are Spanish: lunch from two, dinner rarely before nine.

Almuerzo, the mid-morning second breakfast of a filled roll, a beer and a spirit, is a genuine Valencian institution.

The Valencian Community has three denominations and a viticultural history that goes back to the Romans, and it has spent the last twenty years climbing out of a bulk-wine reputation.

Utiel-Requena, inland at 700 to 900 metres, is the largest and is built on Bobal — a thick-skinned local grape long used for blending and bulk, now increasingly bottled on its own from old bush vines, giving dark, acidic, genuinely interesting reds.

Valencia covers the areas nearer the coast and is known for Moscatel, both as sweet wine and dry, along with Merseguera and Bobal.

Alicante makes Fondillon, a rare aged sweet red from overripe Monastrell that was drunk across Europe in the eighteenth century, nearly died out, and is now made again by a handful of producers — it must age at least ten years in cask.

The region also produces Agua de Valencia, a cava, orange juice, gin and vodka mix invented in a city bar in the 1950s, and Cariñena-style vermouth is drunk before lunch.