Without having tried one, it’s hard to imagine that a vegetable akin to a spring onion, charred on a fire and served at a simple wooden table with nothing more than a sauce, could be an appetising prospect. Yet that is the main ingredient of a calçotada, a feast where family and friends get together to consume large quantities of calçots—a long, straggly, green vegetable that is a cross between an onion and a leek.
The calçot was first cultivated in the late 19th century by a farmer called Xat Benaiges in the southern Catalan town of Valls—the place also credited with being the birthplace of castells, the towers of people seen so often at festes majors.
Following Benaiges’s success, it soon became customary in Valls and the surrounding Alt Camp region to celebrate the approach of spring with noisy and boisterous winter gatherings, the focus of which was the humble calçot. Over the past 20 years, the popularity of these get-togethers has spread and millions of calçots are now consumed at events throughout Catalunya.
To mark the official start of the calçot season, Valls holds the Gran Festa de La Calçotada on the final Sunday of January. Rafael Castells, secretary of the Valls Chamber of Commerce, which organises the event, said it was first held in 1982 and now attracts more than 30,000 people to the town.
“The festival is really well established and continues to grow,” he said. “While calçotades are now held in other parts of Catalunya, Valls is where you can experience the authentic, typical and traditional calçotada.”
Castells said that like most locals, he attends numerous calçotades every year; to satisfy the demand of the revellers, there are around 40 growers in Valls producing an estimated 5 million calçots annually.
The growing process is a long and complicated one, beginning with onion seeds being planted and then plucked from the ground once they’ve formed a bulb at the base. They are then dried out in a cool, dark place before having their tops sliced off and re-planted at the end of the summer under a thin layer of soil. The shoots that quickly sprout from the onion bulbs are then repeatedly covered with earth, which has the effect of blanching and sweetening the shoots. By the end of the year each onion should have produced a bunch of thin-stemmed calçots.
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Calçots near Barcelona
Posted by Julia February 06, 2010 12:35:41