Eats shoots and leaves

You don’t know your onions till you’ve had a calçotada! Gemma Elwin Harris puts on a bib at a Catalan onion restaurant. Photography by Tim White.

“The world is just a great big onion, something something, oh baby,” I forget how it goes. I’ve got Marvin Gaye’s The Onion Song in my head. It’s a bizarre ditty and it’s been a bizarre, rather wonderful, great big oniony kind of morning. An hour ago we were standing round a roaring fire in a shed in the Catalan countryside – two chefs, our photographer Tim and a couple of hundred onions. Now we’re in a farmhouse restaurant, elbow-deep in charred onion skins. Our faces and hands are covered in soot and sweet, smoky onion juice is dripping down our chins.

When I say onion, I actually mean calçot, a special Catalan onion that looks more like a very long, thin leek and tastes somewhere between a leek and a mild spring onion. When you sit down to a pile of flame-cooked calçots, usually with 10 or 20 of your closest family members, you’re having a calçotada – a popular Catalan tradition.

La Masia del Pla, a large, rustic restaurant outside the small town of El Pla de Santa Maria, specialises in calçotadas. On an average weekend between November and April, they’ll cook up some 12,000 calçots. “We have about 300 people in for calçotadas on a typical Saturday or Sunday during the season,” says manager Juan Mestres. “They come in big groups of 10, 12, 20, mainly from towns and cities like Barcelona and Tarragona. It’s a social thing. You eat, chat, drink lots of wine. If you’re from around here, though, you’re less likely to go to a restaurant for a calçotada. You’d have it at home with your family, with a sauce made from your grandmother’s recipe.”

An hour or so before Tim and I dig into our own calçotada, Juan shows us outside to a concrete lean-to, around the side of the restaurant, where his chef Siscu Benajes is preparing the meal. On the way, Juan points out a salmon-pink mountain ridge rising above the fields in the distance.

“There’s a saying that you should only eat calçotada with the Serra de Miramar in view. There are restaurants that do calçotadas in Barcelona and even Madrid now, but I wouldn’t trust a calçotada in the city,” he says. “How would they cook it – indoors on a grill?”

At the back of the shed, Siscu is lighting a large pile of vine cuttings. Several bundles of onions are propped up on a rough wooden workbench, and scores more have been topped and tailed and stacked on a brazier in neat overlapping rows, ready to cook.

“It’s very Catalan to make use of everything – even the pruned shoots from last year’s vines,” says Siscu. The Catalan waste-not, want-not approach is the reason calçots came to exist at all. In the late 19th century a local farmer is said to have "invented" the calçot by replanting an onion and discovering that many shoots sprouted from the single bulb. Though it was only in the 1970s that the peasant tradition of growing and eating these onions, dipped in a sweet and tangy pepper sauce, became more widespread through the region.

As the fire gets going, Siscu lowers the brazier laden with onions into the flames, and rakes the crackling heap of twigs with a large stick, sending cinders flying into the gloom. On the workbench, he shows us the ingredients for the dipping sauce, a type of romesco typical to Catalan cooking: dark-red, dried nyora peppers, toasted almonds and hazelnuts, and olive oil from Siurana, a wildly beautiful hill town in the mountains to the west. The tomatoes and garlic have also been roasted on the brazier, giving the sauce its barbecue flavour, and the medium-hot nyora peppers add a piquant smokiness.

After 15 minutes in the fire, our onions are blackened and steaming, and the shed is thick with savoury fumes. Back in the restaurant, a waiter hands out large bibs and delivers a terracotta tile heaped with calçots. He shows us how to hold up the calçot by its leaves and tug gently on the charred outer skin with finger and thumb, peeling it off to reveal the pale, silky onion beneath. There’s something rather rude about the way the skin slips off the limp legume, trailing a creamy, translucent membrane.

Eating the thing is even more suggestive. You trail the calçot in garlicky pepper sauce, throw back your head and dangle it wantonly down your gullet, spattering lips, chin and dining companions en route. There’s also the wine to negotiate – supposedly poured straight from the decanter to the back of your throat. But it’s easy enough to get an earful.

About halfway through our pile of calçots, we’re looking like extras from Oliver!. Somehow I’ve managed to smear my cheek, forehead and wineglass with soot, while the bib remains relatively unscathed. Tim throws down his napkin and surveys the carnage. “This has to be the muckiest meal ever,” he says.

As it turns out, onions are merely the first course. Next comes a plate loaded with white and black blood sausages, lamb cutlets and beans, and a bottle of cava.

Later that afternoon, we take our bellies for a walk in farmland near the sleepy town of La Masó, about 10km south of onion capital Valls. In a field bordered by hazelnut plantations, workers are sorting calçots into EU-regulated sizes. We meet veteran calçot farmer Sebastià Banús, who shows us the steeply ridged furrows, explaining how calçots are cultivated to produce tall, white stems by heaping soil high around them as they grow.

I ask him why calçotadas suddenly became popular in the 1970s after almost 80 years of farming. Did it just become hip to sit round dipping onions at dinner parties, a bit like fondue? “Calçotadas have never been cool,” he corrects me. “Not even in the 1970s.” And he removes his Ray-Bans for emphasis.

“You know, it’s not just about onions. It’s about friends and family. Once a calçotada was a meal, now it’s a party. But more than that, too,” he adds. “You eat with your hands. People enjoy it because it’s something primitive.”

Back at the hotel, I discover my face is still streaked with cinders, my nails are stained black and my hair smells of bonfire. I’m a dead ringer for neolithic woman, but the farmer’s right. Who doesn’t like to get a little bit smutty once in a while?
RESTAURANTE MASIA DEL PLA, CARRETERA DE VALLS C-37, KM 19, EL PLA DE SANTA MARIA, TEL: +34 977 630 511, WWW.MASIADELPLA.COM