(Bloomberg) -- Paella, the ubiquitous dish that Spaniards especially love to eat on Thursdays, is costing more to prepare as prices for rice and seafood such as shrimp soar.
Bloomberg’s new monthly Paella Index shows the ingredients for the meal cost 15.2% more than they did a year ago. The price for rice has risen 15.3% in the past 12 months, while vegetables cost 14.6% more, contributing to the surge in the gauge, which crunches data from Spain’s National Statistics Institute to track key components of un clásico of Spanish lunch cuisine.
Details of how much more a favorite staple of their lunch menus is costing to make might leave a bitter taste in the mouth of Spaniards digesting recent headlines saying their country’s inflation rate has been slowing.
Consumer prices eased for a fourth month in a row in November to 6.7% as gasoline and energy prices continued to fall.
But food prices kept soaring at their fastest pace in more than four decades, jumping 15.3% from a year earlier as they notched up their eighth month of double-digit increases. A gauge of underlying prices, which excludes volatile items such as energy and food, ticked up to 6.3%.
Other key ingredients of many paellas, fish and seafood, rose by around 10% in November from a year ago, while the price of olive oil has soared by more than 25%. As food costs keep increasing, some restaurants have raised the price of their daily set menu or cut the number of dishes on offer.
Shallow Pans
Paellas are cooked in a shallow pan, ideally on an open fire ideally fueled by wood from orange trees, if you can get it. While seafood is a popular principal ingredients, a more traditional version of the dish uses rabbit and chicken.
According to the Valencian regional government, which declared the local version of the dish an asset of cultural interest last year, its origins date back to around 330 BC when Alexander the Great introduced rice to Europe.
While debate can, and often does, rage in Spain about the ingredients of a genuine paella, so there are also different versions about the origins of the daily menu, or “menú del día,” and why it customarily features the rice dish on Thursdays.
According to one explanation, the government of the dictator Francisco Franco required restaurants to offer a cheap standard menu as the country sought to embrace mass tourism in the 1960s. As a minimum, it had to include a minimum of a soup, a main course, a dessert, a beverage such as a glass of wine and some bread.
As for Paella Thursdays, one theory is that Franco, who was famously fond of the dish, would often go out on that day to eat lunch at a restaurant. As a result, chefs got into the habit of putting paella on the menu just in case he might show up.
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
‘Paella Thursday’ Costs More in Spain as Rice, Shrimp Costs Jump - BNN Bloomberg
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