Paella – the Spanish dish of rice, meat, seafood and vegetables – is named after the pan used to make the dish – a wide, shallow pan that cooks the rice evenly and can take a fierce heat.

Though you’ll find paella all over Spain, its home is Valencia, where rice has been farmed since the Moors introduced the crop over 1,500 years ago. Hungry farmers prepared their lunch in the fields, chucking rice and whatever else they could find into the pan and cooking it all together over an open wood fire. The farmers would tuck in, eating straight from the pan, each using their own wooden spoon. As rice production increased, the dish was refined and ingredients changed. Coastal paellas used an abundance of fresh seafood, chicken became commonplace and saffron was added for flavour and colour.

I have eaten paella many times, but on a recent trip to Casa Carmela, a wonderful old restaurant on the beach in Valencia, I was introduced to the real paella valenciana, made to what is considered to be the original paella recipe. In its small kitchen the paella was cooked over a wood fire in the traditional pan. A mixture of rabbit, snails and butter beans was used to flavour the rice – the same ingredients that the farmers would have found in the rice fields all those years ago.

Once cooked, the magnificent paella was served in the pan at the table, with a traditional wooden spoon for each person to use. The flavour was incredible – rich and meaty, but with a really earthy note from the beans and the snails.

• Calle Isabel de Villena 155, +34 963 710 073, casa-carmela.com

John Gregory-Smith, founder of online magazine eattravellive.com