1. Seafood paella

To visit Spain and not try paella means offending the people of this country! You can eat the most delicious in the coastal cafes of small towns or villages. There, the dish is served in paellera, a huge pan with a diameter of 20 centimeters to a meter!

It is believed that men cook the dish best, perhaps because there is a version of the name. Legend has it: a man, trying to impress the girl, cooked seafood rice for his beloved. In slang, pa’ella means to her.

The first and most famous Valencian rice is mentioned in a Benedictine monastery cookbook at the end of the 18th century as Valencian rice. Products that were at hand were added to the cereal: rabbit or chicken meat, snails, beans.

Today, there are many variations of “Valencian rice” and it is cooked all over Spain. The most famous types of paella are:

Valencian — traditional,

from seafood,

meaty,

vegetarian,

with seafood and chicken;

black – rice is colored with cuttlefish ink.

Real paella can be identified by its main ingredients: round rice, olive oil and a set of spices — saffron, turmeric, rosemary and paprika, and the delicious crust that is obtained in a pan during cooking. Gourmets scrape it off the bottom with spoons to finish lunch.

2. Bouillabaisse with prawns

From French, the name of the dish is translated as “hot soup stewed on fire”, “slow cooking”. Today, bouillabaisse is served in expensive restaurants as a delicacy, and not so long ago it was brewed by fishermen in the port of Marseilles from the remains of the catch and called it fish soup for the poor. As expected, the history of the dish has a second legend of origin. Bouillabaisse cooked Hephaestus for her husband Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. She would add sleeping pills to her soup to make the fire god fall asleep so she could go on a date with the war god Ares.

The main feature of bouillabaisse is its spices! Saffron, fennel seeds and orange peel are always added to the soup.

Bouillabaisse is cooked from a large number of different fish, and pre-roasted vegetables are added to the rich broth. Any seafood is put in the soup: shrimps, mussels, squid. Soup is usually served with hot baguette slices, hard cheese and garlic sauce.

3. Clam chowder with sea cocktail

This soup split America in half. But first things first.

Clam in English means any bivalve mollusks suitable for eating. Chowder is a soup. This seafood soup was often cooked by the poor, and to make it more satisfying, they added a lot of vegetables to it. From the very beginning, there were two variations of the clam chowder: with the addition of cream, “Boston” and “white” soup. And the second one is “red”. Tomatoes are added to the soup, and they call it “New York”. Americans and clam chowder fans around the world are divided into two camps: some like red seafood soup, others with a creamy taste. The dish is served with oyster crackers or in sour dough bread.

4. Moqueca

The generation that watched Slave Izaura remembers Genuaria, a servant who was an excellent cook of this dish and kept the secret recipe in her cookbook.

Moqueca, pronounced “mukeka”, is a traditional Brazilian dish that is somewhere between a very thick soup and a fish and seafood stew. Spicy, slightly spicy. Fish and seafood for moqueca are stewed in tomato sauce, always adding coriander and some rice. This is the basis of the recipe, but in some regions of Brazil they put annatto, the seeds of the fondant tree, into the stew, while in others they add coconut milk.

Moqueca is most often served at a festive table and taken out to guests in a large open clay pot so that they can smell its aroma, and then placed on deep plates. In Brazil, they say about the dish like this: “A kiss in every spoon.”

5. Stuffed squid

The legend of the origin of this dish came to us from Crete. A simple girl fell in love with the god Apollo and decided to seduce him. Her mom stuffed squid deliciously, and her father often joked that he only married her because of this dish. And Chloe — that was the beauty’s name — decided to set a seafood table and call her beloved.

Apollo loved good food and couldn’t resist the offer of a beautiful girl. Without knowing it, after tasting a lot of aphrodisiacs, he fell in love with Khloe.

Today, Greek-style squid is served in almost all restaurants in the country. True, they are filled in different ways, but most often they are Spanish onions, mushrooms, rice, tomatoes, spinach. Squid is served, cut into rings. The dish is accompanied by tomato sauce.

6. Mussels in white sauce

In the Middle Ages, mussels were called “oysters for the poor”, fried on street fires and eaten with bread. When they reached a new gastronomic level and wealthy people fell in love with them, the chefs began to figure out how to make the dish more aromatic and delicious in taste. This is how clam sauce came about. For the first time, mussels in white sauce were served to Leopold I, King of Belgium, on Christmas Day.

Now you can eat bivalves in all restaurants, and Belgians consider clams to be the hallmark of their cuisine. On the menu of any cafe in Belgium, you will find at least 15-20 dishes with this seafood. Half of them: mussels with different sauces.

Sauces are prepared on the basis of wine, tomatoes, cream, lemon juice, cheese with various spices. But, of course, the most popular type of sauce is “white” — “Belgian creamy”. It is made from cream with the addition of white wine, shallots and basil. Some cooks add different types of cheeses to the sauce.

Mussels in sauce are served in special portioned enameled or ceramic pots with a lid. The mussels are accompanied by white bread toasts and french fries. At the end of the meal, the bread is dipped in the remaining sauce.

7. Scallop spaghetti

Seafood pasta is a traditional Italian dish. And this, too, was not without the legend of “poor rich”. In the first version, fishermen came up with a hearty hot dish: they added freshly caught scallops and other “seafood” to the pasta. In the second, delicious seafood pasta was prepared by chefs in the kitchens of rich people.

Sea pasta is best cooked in Southern Italy with tender freshly caught scallops and various sauces. Linguini or spaghetti is served as a first course in large “hat” plates. Wide fields and a groove are needed so that the pasta does not cool down and the sauce does not splash when the pasta is wound onto a fork.

By the way

Grated parmesan is not served with this paste. It is believed that cheese does not go well with this type. It is enough to sprinkle spaghetti with spices. Tarragon, lemon balm, basil can be added not only as a seasoning, but also in the form of fresh herbs.

Source: https://food.ru/

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