A Calçotada in Catalonia

From Mediterranean and more by Antonella Severo

March 7, 2009

My husband and I have been visiting Catalonia since 2000 and as we traveled around the small towns, we saw restaurants advertising calçotadas. Our Catalonian friends explained it was a traditional meal featuring the calçot, a type of local onion that looks like a leek and is roasted over an open fire and eaten with a traditional sauce called romesco. (Some may confuse them with calçat, which means footwear in Catalan.)

For several years the calçotada remained a mystery to me, but it wasn’t until we actually moved to Barcelona a few years ago that we actually experienced a true calçotada in open air. Although we had tried calçots at restaurants, it’s just not the same as we now know after having attended a privately held one. A group of musician friends had a bit of a windfall so they decided to throw a calçotada and invited us. We converged at a farmhouse near Tarragona belonging to the family of one of the members. It even had olive trees on it – which farmhouse out here doesn’t?

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