Flageolets with chorizo

This is similar to bacon casserole with flageolets minus the tinned tomatoes.

Ingredients:
3 or 4 cooking chorizo, chopped roughly
1 medium onion chopped finely
1 stick celery chopped finely
2 carrots chopped finely

1 tin of flageolet beans, drained and rinsed
1 teaspoon thyme
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 glass white wine

Gently heat the olive oil then turn up the heat, add the chorizo and fry until well cooked. Add the onion, turn down the heat and allow the onion to soften without burning. Add the celery, the carrot and the beans and continue to cook without adding any water but making sure the contents do not burn. Allow to simmer for half an hour (adding a little white wine if contents in danger of drying out) and serve.

Missing

If, in a restaurant, there is a vital ingredient missing from an item on the menu, it is incumbent on the waiter to warn the diner in advance of bringing the dish to the table. I once shocked my aunt by cross-examining a waiter about the absence of chorizo in the starter at a pub in Hemmingford Grey.

The opposite once occurred in Leamington Spa when I was staying with my old headmaster who was taking me out for dinner in a French restaurant. I felt awkward; I forgot that a la carte meant the opposite of a set menu and my polite attempt to opt for the less expensive option - "I prefer a la carte" merely sounded greedy. I saw something that I had not heard of - a salad involving chicken "julienne". But the waiter, trying to put me at my ease, heard "salad" only and when my starter arrived, there was no chicken to be found. I did not dare complain.

Chorizo

Traveller's food, mouth-burningly comforting and solid.

Paella

I agree with Elizabeth David on this one: this is an overrated dish. Perfectly pleasant but never spectacular in the way that a perfectly cooked risotto can be. It sounds almost insulting to say it is good street food because that is to imply that good street food can never be spectacular. Nevertheless, a good paella, served out of one of those colossal, slightly pretentious, pans: yellow rice, chorizo, chicken, mussels and prawns, to be gobbled in a market.

The village in Southern France where we spent summers in the nineteen eighties had a café (the "Café de la Paix"). When we moved there, it was known by some of the ex-patriots as Lenin's Tomb, so dour was the service; the first time I went in with my parents, nervously, wanting to practise my French, the man behind the bar affected not to understand my request for "Deux cafés et deux Oranginas". Later the place was taken over by a younger couple who offered food in the evenings, advertised on a blackboard outside. But it never seemed to change. Every evening as we drove past the "Café de la Paix", the cry would ring up: "Plat du Jour? Paella!" We never tried it.

Chorizo roll

Brindisa in Borough Market do something called a chorizo roll. It consists of a roll drizzled with olive oil, a split in two grilled chorizo, a red piquilla pepper and some rocket. You can either have a single or a double (quantities of chorizo and pepper). Having a double appears much better value. The queues for them normally snake quite a way out of the covered section where they are sold. Today, people had to huddle inside, out of the rain. Still, they sold like hot cakes. Seriously good.