Pilar's calçotada: “If you buy calçots, make sure they have the PGI of Calçot de Valls, which are sweeter”

"Welcome to Clos de Ca Gras. I invite you to a calçotada and I'll make the sauce for you," she tells us. It's Pilar Dolç, a surname—what sonorous surnames, Catalans!—that seems to have predestined her in the kitchen. She's the daughter of farmers and now, at seventy-eight, she's still going strong.

The calçotada is a Catalan tradition that lives on, uniting young and old, and which, like all our cuisine, stems from resourcefulness. At the time we harvest the calçots—these spring onions we "roof"—we've also pruned the vineyard. The vine shoots, or round ones, left piled up in the field are used to make the flames, the flames that will char the calçots on the grill. Then, while we eat them standing up (and without gloves, please), dipping them in the sauce, the meat will be grilled. We'll eat the meat sitting down. While we're grilling them, we'll laugh, drink from a porrón (a traditional Catalan wine pitcher), and chat. Then, we'll wrap them in newspaper so they finish cooking in the heat. Note that the newspaper that serves this noble purpose is ours: AHORA. The subscribers who make our writing possible should also know that they make our calçots possible. We'll serve them, if we have one, on a tile. And while we eat them (looking at the sky, as is fitting), we'll do something very Catalan: a contest to see who can eat the most. The winner's digestion will be like a python's. For three days.

But first of all, we prepare the sauce. The mystery of every calçotada. This is our wise woman's recipe:

Ingredients for Pilar Dulce's calçot sauce for four people.

• Four or five hanging tomatoes. Before refrigeration, tomatoes were hung up to last through the winter. Today, we can find them in greengrocers or at the market.
• A head of garlic.
• A lady.
• One hundred grams of almonds. We note that Pilar uses the dialectal, but perfectly correct, term "almonds." orwhich, sometimes colloquially, becomes a d or a n It only indicates that this m It is geminate. We pronounce almonds.
• 30 grams of hazelnuts bought, like the almonds, at the Vila-rodona cooperative.
• Homegrown olive oil. It's called Parada Rodona and it's made from Arbequina olives from the Camp de Tarragona region.
• A mini-blender or a blender, as some wise women call it.

"Before, my grandmother used a mortar and pestle," Pilar explains. "But now we've modernized; everything has..." advanced"And we use the electric immersion blender." We like this idea from the cooks, which is a recurring theme. They don't give up modernity to continue offering us tradition.

"At home, we used to grow a lot of tomatoes. When I was little, my father grew a lot," she explains. And then she goes to the dried red pepper. "I've soaked it in hot water to soften it. I'll remove the pulp; it needs to soften because it's a dried pepper that's been saved from the summer. It gives a really good flavor. I'd say that's the best part. We grind the almonds and hazelnuts and set them aside. Let it sit so it's not too liquidy. Add the garlic, the dried red pepper, and blend everything together. Pilar tastes it and approves. We approve. And that sauce with endive is also very good. My husband likes it better with endive. It all varies from house to house. Some add parsley, raw garlic, if they like it spicier... Some add pepper; it depends on each family's taste."

While the young and not-so-young prepare the calçots, we talk to Pilar, who, first and foremost, asks the cleaners to close the door so the warmth doesn't escape.

"Many generations have lived in this house. Three. My sister, my son, along with the young woman and the three girls. And some time ago there were four of us, because my mother was here. I married a man from Vilabella 55 years ago. And I went to live in Vilabella. We lived there with my three children—because I have three: Xavi, Núria, and Laia—and my six grandchildren. And the children grew up between Vilabella and Les Gunyoles. And since my husband was a farmer, we would go down to help him. And, of course, I practically never left the area. And we were always like this, up and down and down and up."

I smile. "You seem very much in love," I tell her. Because we've seen the farmer, Anton, walking around proudly with her. "Yes, always. We celebrated two years," he tells us, "and now we've been together for fifty-five years!"

And this word, now obsolete, "celebrate," seems so modern to me.

"I spent a lot of time in the countryside. Gathering hazelnuts, we had chickens... This helped, because farmers have always been a bit frugal, and the animals helped out. Then my mother would make me go and sew. And I really liked to sew. I made the court"And I made clothes for my whole family. For my daughters, I made their First Communion dresses." I ask her if she's ever owned a Singer sewing machine, and she says yes. And I explain that when we used to read the advertisements for sewing academies... cutting and sewing, who promised to use the "Martí system," I never knew what that was. She did. "Yes, yes. You made the patterns, took the measurements..." And she smiles, explaining a sign of the times. "I never made anything for the cleaning ones, because the buttons, the fabric... were already more expensive."

Cooking comes from her grandmother. "Grandma Guadalupe was the one who cooked, and I learned because I watched. My mother went out more. She did the laundry... She had other things to do. And when Grandma got older, she started cooking for my mother. That's what the children remember. Grandma María. What my granddaughters perhaps remember. The veal we make for holidays. I've never gone hungry; quite the opposite, and a vegetable garden, and fruit trees."

"The onions planted in summer are now grilled, tied up, and made into calçots. Always in winter. And we use the round ones to make the fire and the smoke. And you've seen how well they cook."

"I used to work hard. We tied up a lot of calçots. I counted them in bunches of fifty. And I harvested them. But now everything has changed a lot. Now we use tractors, cultivators, and these seats they invented... But it's still very manual. I really enjoyed tying up calçots. And being a farmer, yes, I enjoyed it."

Don't miss, readers, the ritual of the calçotada, the passport to being a good Catalan. With or without a bib, with or without a porrón, with white wine for the onions and red wine for the meat. With crème brûlée for dessert. And with a secret sauce that Pilar's sweet touch has shared with us today.