Entrepà de Botifarra

Someone pricks the sausage before it goes near the fire. A whole coil of botifarra crua, fresh pork pushed into a natural casing and never dried, has water and fat trapped under a thin skin, and a casing that goes onto live coals unpunctured swells and splits and dumps the juice into the embers. So the cook runs a fork along it, lays the coil flat over a grate set high above a wood or charcoal fire, and turns it slowly while the skin tightens and browns and the inside stays pale and moist. Pulled at the right moment and folded into a length of split barra, that coil is an entrepà de botifarra, the plainest grilled-sausage sandwich Catalonia makes and the one most likely to be eaten standing in a crowd.

The whole character of it is in what the sausage leaves out. There is no paprika in the mince, which is the first thing that separates it from the chorizo family and means the rendered fat runs clear and pale instead of staining orange. There is no fermentation and no long dry cure, so the meat tastes of pork and pepper and the woodsmoke it picks up off the fire, not of the tang that cured sausages develop. The seasoning is close to nothing: salt, black pepper, sometimes a little garlic or a few seeds. It is a sausage built to be cooked fresh and eaten the same day, and it asks the fire and the bread to supply most of what reaches the tongue.

Both the sausage and its handling fail in concrete ways. Set the coil over flames that are too fierce and the skin chars black and bursts while the centre is still raw, the fat gone into the fire instead of into the meat. Cook it slack, with the embers gone grey and cool, and the casing turns to a rubbery tube that the teeth have to fight, the interior steamed rather than seared. Skip pricking it and one section balloons and splits, draining the coil dry. The bread has its own way of going wrong: a soft roll collapses to paste under a hot juicy sausage, and a stale one cracks and showers crumb. The version that works is a firm-crumbed loaf, the sausage charred at the skin and just set within, allioli smeared thin enough to slick the bite without sliding the whole thing apart.

You smell it from across the square, woodsmoke and pork fat and the sweet edge of garlic from the allioli before you see the grill at all. The fat drips and the coals flare and hiss, and the cook works a long fork down a row of coils all going at once. The first bite cracks through the browned skin into soft, hot, faintly smoky meat, the pepper landing late, the raw-garlic burn of the allioli climbing up behind it. If the bread was rubbed with tomato first the crumb is stained and a little sweet under the sausage. Fat runs to the fingers, the loaf gives without tearing, and the heat off the coil is enough that the first mouthful is taken a beat sooner than it should be.

It is communal food before it is a counter order. The native setting is the botifarrada, the gathering where a town or a group of friends fires up a long grill, cooks coil after coil of botifarra, and hands it out in bread to whoever is standing there, often at a festa major or after a calçotada in late winter. At the big Barcelona celebrations, La Mercè in September and the Festa Major de Gràcia in August, the smoke off the sausage grills is part of the street, and the entrepà is what people eat between one thing and the next. Ordering is barely a transaction: the sausage is grilling already, the bread is split, the only real question is whether you want allioli, and the board lists it by the filling rather than by any house name.

Its relations sort by what is in the casing and whether it sees fire. The cured embotits sold off the loaf in cold slices, fuet and dry llonganissa, are a different kind of eating that never meets heat. Botifarra negra, dark with cooked pork blood, and botifarra blanca, pale and already poached, can be sliced and griddled but are not the fresh grilling coil this sandwich turns on. Botifarra d'ou, worked with egg, belongs to Dijous Gras at Carnival and is mostly eaten with an omelette rather than in bread. The closest plate is not a sandwich at all: botifarra amb mongetes, the grilled coil set beside stewed white beans, which serves the same sausage on a fork instead of in a loaf.

The coil on the coals

The botifarra reaches a long way back without reaching a single maker. The Catalan name descends from the Latin botulus, the Roman pork sausage, and the type sits in the same family as the lucanica the legions carried, with Roman writers already noting cured pork coming out of the Pyrenees. Raw pork seasoned and pushed into gut is too old and too widespread for an inventor, but the Catalan written record is unusually deep: the late-thirteenth-century Llibre de Sent Soví describes the butchering of the pig and the making of embotits, and Robert de Nola's Llibre del Coch, printed in 1520, carries the tradition forward into the first age of cookbooks. Its most famous partner is far younger than the sausage. The white beans of botifarra amb mongetes are an American crop that reached Catalonia after the fifteenth century, and the bean-and-sausage plate is usually dated to the eighteen-hundreds. The grilling, meanwhile, grew out of the matança, the winter pig slaughter, and the village feast rather than out of any chef's kitchen: a fresh sausage that will not keep is a sausage you cook and share at once, and that habit is what the botifarrada formalizes, the communal grill that turns the day's coils into food for a crowd.

The custom is alive enough that a town built a festival on it. In 2012 La Garriga, north of Barcelona, launched its Fira de la Botifarra on the first weekend of March, and the fair has since made the embotit the town's emblem, filling its streets with grills, artisan stalls, and tasting stands. The smell that hangs over La Garriga that weekend is the one that hangs over every festa major: fresh pork charring on coals, waiting for a split loaf and a smear of garlic.