I said I knew how to make paella in 2019 and now I can't stop

My name is Herminio Zuazo, I install oil-fired boilers in village houses, and one night in March 2019, at a birthday dinner, I said I knew how to make paella.

I didn't say it to show off. I said it because somebody asked who made it, nobody answered, and long pauses at the table make me as nervous as a boiler that won't fire. I said “me” and fifteen heads turned.

I made the first one on 23 June, for six, on my sister's terrace. I bought the pan that same morning at a discount shop and I had my phone with the video open under a tea towel for an hour and a half. It came out edible. My brother-in-law said you could tell I had the touch. I nodded, which is what a man with no touch does.

Since then there is one every summer and I have never managed to get anyone to take over. Six at that first one. Nine the summer after. Eleven the one after that. This August there were fifteen of us and we had to push two camping tables together.

What I have developed, and I say this with a certain technical pride, is a liturgy. I pass my open hand over the rice, very slowly, as if I were reading the steam. What I am actually doing is looking at the watch on my lower wrist, because the video says eighteen minutes and I never remember when I started. I have also banned anyone from coming over to stir, on the grounds that the rice gets frightened. The rice does not get frightened. I made that up in 2021 and it has worked for five summers.

I have bought a three-ring burner, a fifty-five-centimetre pan and a ten-kilo sack of bomba rice that lives in the garage, next to the circulation pumps. The kit is not vanity: the kit is the alibi. Nobody asks a man with a three-ring burner to explain himself.

The trouble came on 16 August, and it came from the one person in the family who should not have asked anything.

Oliva Pascual, head of the canteen kitchen at a packaging factory, fifty-one years old, two thousand meals a week, got up from the table with her plate in her hand, stood next to me and asked me for the recipe.

I gave it to her. All of it, from memory, with my eyes slightly closed, pausing at the places where people who know what they are doing pause. It was word for word the one in the video. And so that it wouldn't sound like a video, I added a step that does not exist: four minutes of rest, untouched and uncovered, three times, before the pepper goes in.

Oliva made it on 11 September for a hundred and sixty people.

Now, on that canteen's menu, on alternate Thursdays, there is a dish called “arroz a la Zuazo”. She showed me a photo. My surname is printed on a laminated sign, underneath the vegetable soup.

And this morning she rang to tell me the head cook wants me to come and explain the four-minute step, because they don't understand it and because it is the only one of the seven that isn't in any book.

I'm going on Thursday. I've asked for the day off work and I have finally learned the seven steps by heart, which is more than I can say for the seven years before. If any cook asks me why I recite them with my eyes closed, I'll tell him it's because the rice gets frightened.