THE CITY OF RICE
The prawn’s head is wedged between my finger and thumb, its pink-red antennae flitting in the hot salt breeze like blood-stained ribbons. I slurp the shell dry, and it tastes of the sea mixed with saffron and garlic. It’s the taste of southeastern Spain; the taste of my childhood.
I don’t remember the first time I ate a prawn head straight from a paellera (a large, circular paella pan). I grew up in a dusty beach town 30 miles north of Alicante, where Sundays were spent sitting on plastic chairs, toes buried in the sand, eating yellow rice bulging with seafood plucked from the Mediterranean. The image of a child chomping on a prawn’s head, mouth saffron-stained like a crazed clown, sounds like the stuff of nightmares. But to me — a toddler who’d often choose olives over ice cream and alioli over chocolate — it was heaven on earth.
Decades later, I’m sitting in Restaurante Pocardy, on Alicante’s two-mile-long San Juan beachfront, devouring the head of the single gamba roja — the priciest prawn species in the Alicante region. It’s positioned atop my arroz mar y montaña, a surf-and-turf-style rice
