Paella

Country: Spain

Manufactory: Lladro

Date of establishment: 1993

Sculptor: Juan Huerta

Size (cm): 33*73

Limited Series

Porcelain Story

It is not by chance that I decided to present one of the most beautiful porcelain compositions created by Valencian sculptors in my column on the World Cook's Day. Over the years, in different countries, I had a chance to taste a huge variety of dishes - from the most traditional in Western Europe to the most exotic in Southeast Asia and Africa. I will say right away: the brain of a living monkey, sentenced to a painful death by eating the insides of the skull by sadistic visitors to specific Asian restaurants, has not been on my menu. But snakes, spiders, scorpions and other fried reptiles were. And more than once.

Out of all the European dishes, I will probably never forget the Manchester pudding, which we were served a few years ago by a long-term friend of ours named Stuart. A rare connoisseur of English football and the Liverpool Beatles, Stewart once decided to shake our imaginations with a culinary delight that has been legendary for centuries in his native Manchester. And shooked us pleasantly!

When this famous dish was served to us in the oldest restaurant in the city and we opened the stuffing baked in a huge dough pie with a knife, the smell of a hundred thousand instantly emptying cows instantly filled the halls of the old establishment. It seemed to us that without gas masks it was simply impossible to withstand this torture with an incredibly peculiar smell from mixing different types of baked meat and the entrails of different animals. It turned out, perhaps... We didn’t eat the Manchester pudding - to the delight of Stuart, who was simply glowing with happiness, who quickly dealt with several puddings at once...

I really love the real Valencian paella - a traditional Spanish dish that is cooked and served in pans, sometimes reaching a diameter of 1-1.4 meters! Chicken and seafood cooked with rice over an open fire can be fabulously delicious. If all this is done by a great chef. For the unique porcelain composition presented today (pay attention to its large size), I once had to hunt for more than one year. And I found it, by the way, in Valencia. This work wants to be considered more than once and for a long time. It is inexhaustible in details. And... the smell of real delicious Valencian paella emanates from it.