The Unsung Genius of Valls

You know that botifarra (the Catalan spelling, pronounced bootiFARah) is a sausage.
Well, for many years I believed that the Campionat de Botifarra held at the Festa Major of the village in the Solson?s where we used to spend our summers was a botifarra eating contest.

Honest!  We were pretty reclusive and lived a kilometre out of the village, and we rarely took part in the activities, but I must confess a sort of morbid interest in trying to imagine how much botifarra one would have to stuff down and in what space of time.  Were the botifarras done a la brassa, and where, and how many?  How many would you have to eat, and in what time frame?  And why was it a separate event from the costellada, which took place in the special barbecue area by the river? Years later I found out that botifarra was a card game popular in Catalunya and parts of Arag?n. 

In fact, if it had been a botifarra eating event, it would have been called a botifarrada. I was reminded of this because I reckoned it was time to blog about the cal?otada, the Catalans’ favourite winter gastronomical bash traditional to the town of Valls. The cal?ot looks like a cross between a leek and a spring onion, and is officially defined as the replanted shoot of a fully developed white onion. The discovery of this delicacy is attributed to a farmer called Xat de Benaiges, who lived in Valls in the late 19th century. The name sounds so romantic. Like the Robin Hood of the Alt Camp and Tarragon?s,  protector of hazelnut farmers, a perfect candidate for the searing epic movie that will definitively put the Catalan cinema on the screens of the whole world. 

What I’m not clear about, though, is exactly what Xat de Benaiges discovered. The Indicaci? Geogr?fica Protegida blurb says he took a couple of onion shoots and put them on the fire (the rest, obviously, being history). But others say he was a leading edge agricultural whizz who developed the whole process: sow onion seeds, pull up the shoots after a few months, leave them in a cool dry place for several more months, cut off the tops, replant, and, as they grow, repeatedly cover the tender green shoots with earth. (In Catalan this action is called ?cal?ar’, which means to put your shoes on, hence cal?ot.)

There’s a really super post here about everything cal?ot, by food writer Sue Style.  I prefer to develop the Xat de Benaiges blockbuster right now. A musical: now that would really rock. You could have the most fantastic Kossack-style cal?ot-eating competition song-and-dance number with all these guys in their espardenyes and barratines leaping over the flames… flourishing their chin-to-knee cal?otada bibs… Oh, and of course you would have the castellers,  sardana dancing, giants and bigheads… Any choreographers or librettists out there?

Valerie Collins is co-author, with Theresa O’Shea, of In The Garlic: Your Informative, Fun Guide to Spain.