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One of the best meals I ever had was on a strip of beach near Barcelona’s port, in a seafood restaurant built on stilts. Barceloneta, as the area is called, housed a collection of such places, each with a barker outside and breezy nautical dining rooms looking out to sea. Most had tables set in the sand below, too. (This vanished when the city later remodeled for the Olympics and it became a boardwalk.) All fish, all day was the motto, and indeed it was the very freshest.
Having visited the eye-poppingly beautiful fish stalls at La Boqueria, the vast ancient market hall in the city, I was prepared to feast. What I wanted was a potful of real fish soup. This was the Mediterranean after all, fish soup central. Cooks there understand it on a cellular level; they were raised on it. In Catalunya perhaps this is especially so.
The relatively simple Mediterranean approach to fish soup usually involves a few, if not all, of the following: garlic, olive oil, herbs, saffron, tomato and hot pepper. Next, a few wild mussels, clams large and small, shrimp, the meaty bones of large fin-fish, tiny two-inch “soup fish,” a stalk of fennel and a prudent amount of water. After a period of simmering, this intensely flavorful broth is strained to use as the base for the fish soup proper, then new mussels, clams and fish are added and cooked for the final dish.
Don’t get me wrong. That fish soup was a marvel. But perusing the room, I noticed someone eating a bowl of noodles. Ah, that is fideus, the waiter said, very delicious. It turns out there is another use for the broth: They sometimes use it as the liquid in which to cook pasta. But instead of boiling the noodles Italian-style, the Catalan way is a sort of cross between risotto and paella.
Fideus noodles (they are like short spaghettini) are first browned in olive oil, then simmered in a low wide pan. Broth is added at intervals as it is absorbed, and in the end, the pasta is imbued the concentrated essence of the sea. I know, because I ordered a plate immediately. It came to the table without fanfare in a rustic earthenware dish, with a dab of garlicky allioli, the Spanish version of aioli, to stir into the savory juices.
Recipes: Catalan Fideus | Allioli
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