So alright. Now we’ll talk about paella. What exactly is it? It depends on who you ask. Put two Spanish cooks together and you’ll likely get three paellas. All will agree that a paella contains short grain rice, garlic, parsley, olive oil and saffron. The popular image of paella is a pan of saffron-coloured rice bursting with shellfish, known as paella de mariscos. Most people will agree that the original came from the field in the mid to late 19th century and was made with such things as snails, rabbit and chicken. You won’t see such paellas very often in restaurants. Rice is cheap, rabbit is cheap. They just can’t charge you very much for the dish. But throw in those red jewels called lobsters and crayfish, and they can really make you pay. And then they can save themselves a good bit of money by skipping the saffron and using yellow dye number 2. And since they are giving you a bastardised dish it’s no big deal to cook it too fast or insufficiently, giving you grains of rice that go ‘crunch’ when you bite them or that turn into a mush in your mouth.