Never was a dish so misunderstood, so misrepresented, so abused, as paella. The crimes committed in the name of the Spanish national dish – mostly by Spaniards themselves – are horrible to relate. Even the name is a mystery to most of us. One (English) writer traces the etymology of “paella” to the Arabic word for “leftovers”, which could hardly be further from the truth.

In fact, it derives from the Latin “ patella” – the English word “pail” shares a common root – meaning a cooking utensil made of metal, and, more particularly, iron. It follows that, like “casserole”, “terrine” and so on, “paella” refers originally not to the food, but to the utensil – a wide, flat, shallow iron pan with handles on the sides.

It is the curse of being a Valencian that, wherever you go in the world, people want to talk about paella. In the popular imagination, the paella has come to symbolise not just Spanish cooking, but Spain itself. In its bright colours and hectic but somehow harmonious organisation, this dish seems to encapsulate what nonSpaniards believe to be true about Spanish life and culture in a wider sense.

“I always get asked, ‘Where should we go for good paella?’ ” complained Raul, a chef at one of the typically traditional, family-run restaurants that litter Valencia. “And I have to tell them the places you can find a good one could be counted on the fingers of one hand. There is just so much rubbish about. And the worst rubbish is the paella served to tourists, frozen and defrosted in the oven, with a jug of sangria. It’s a shame, because that paella is the impression they take away.”

There is no gold-standard paella, just as there is no absolutely archetypal quiche lorraine, no Platonic pizza. But, if the tourist industry has messed around with Valencia’s most characteristic dish, it seemed like a good idea to look for it in its original version, or at least as close to this ideal as possible. To this end, I would have to travel a little distance from the coast, for the classic paella valenciana has only been saved from extinction, like some shy wild animal, by careful protection, away from built-up areas.

I made a few phone calls and, next morning, took a train from Valencia’s art-nouveau jewel of a railway station, the Estacion del Norte, to the mountain town of Buñol. These days, Buñol is best known for a mad fiesta called the Tomatina, billed as Spain’s greatest food fight, in which tons of tomatoes are hurled in the streets and the world’s media turn up to watch.

Before the invention of the fiesta in the 1940s, Buñol was an important stop on the seven-day carriage route from Madrid to the coast, and the Venta Pilar was a kind of caravanserai where drivers, muleteers and their charges could stop for the night.

The house is a whitewashed, cuboid warren, more than 300 years old, with a heavy wooden double door where the traffic came in, and sepia photographs hanging in the hall. “In the old days, 100 people might sleep here of a night. It was a tremendous business. But, of course, when the mechanical traction engine came in, the carriage business died,” mused Enrique Galindo Estevez, elderly owner of the Venta along with his son – also called Enrique.

Nowadays, the place functions mainly as a restaurant, the especialidad de la casa being paella made the old-fashioned way, over a wood fire.

“Everyone used to use wood. Then the gas came in. Now almost nobody does,” said Enrique. It could be any kind of wood: pine, olive or almond. But today, it was orange, loved by valencianos for the intense, continuous heat it gives out, as well as its fragrance. In a covered section of the back yard was a long stone platform where paellas were cooked on trivets, each on its own fire. The walls and ceiling were coated with a thick layer of shiny tar, the residue of years of business at the Venta.

Hauling a two-handled pan, almost a metre wide, from a blackened stack in the corner, Enrique laid it on the trivet and poured in a large slug of olive oil. “I do it all by eye,” he said.

First, he fried the chunks of chicken and rabbit, tumbling them in the sizzling oil. The flames licked greedily around the lip of the pan. Then came the beans: a large, pale butter bean called the garrofo, found only in the region, and a flat green bean not unlike our own dear runner. A sloosh of tomato purée, then the rice and chicken stock, the fine threads of saffron toasted and ground in a mortar, and a generous sprinkling of salt.

And that was that. From then on, it was a matter of watching the fire, poking in more sticks as the embers burnt low. The ideal is a constant level of heat that will cook the rice, not so fiercely as to burn it, but just strong enough to leave a crust, the socarrat, on the bottom of the pan – a delicacy that valencianos fight over.

We stood in the courtyard in the spring sunshine admiring the paella as it bubbled appetisingly, waves of aroma billowing out of the pan, along with the clouds of steam and smoke. Enrique mopped his brow: it was hot work. A minute or two’s rest and he was back on the job, busying himself with a second paella, while the first was already on the home straight. It was a Sunday, and the Venta would soon be full of hungry families.

Before long, the day’s first paella was a great, glowing circle of Buddhist orange-yellow. All the stock had been absorbed and there were puffs of steam escaping from little blowholes that had formed in its surface. I tried a forkful. The rice was perfectly cooked, and had sucked up all the savouriness of the rabbit, chicken, beans and saffron. This may not have been the most elaborate paella of all time; it certainly wasn’t the cleverest or the most inventive. It was, simply, authentic. Or authentically simple. Which, as with most of Spain’s best traditional foods, comes to the same thing.

Extracted from A Late Dinner: Discovering the Food of Spain, published by Bloomsbury at £16.99. To buy it for the reduced price of £15.29, with free p&p in the UK, call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

Travel brief

Where to eat: Venta Pilar is at Avenida Benito Perez Galdos 5 (00 34 96 250 0923). If you can’t make it to Buñol, some of the best paellas in Valencia are to be found down at the Malvarrosa – the city’s seaside stretch. A row of half-a-dozen restaurants specialises in rice dishes of all kinds, principally the paella of mixed fish and seafood. Try La Pepica, founded in 1898 (Paseo Neptuno 6, 96 371 0366), La Marcelina (Neptuno 8, 96 371 2025) or Monkili (Neptuno 52, 96 371 0039), all on the same strip.

Getting there: fly to Valencia with Jet2 (0871 226 1737, www.jet2.com) from Leeds/ Bradford and Manchester; EasyJet (www.easyjet.com) from Bristol, Stansted and Gatwick; Clickair (00800 254 25247, www.clickair.com) from Heathrow; and Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com) from East Midlands and Dublin.

There are frequent trains from Valencia to Buñol, 25 miles away. The journey takes about 45 minutes and costs from £6 return.

Where to stay: on one of Valencia’s many central city squares is the imposing Melia Plaza (Plaza del Ayuntamiento, 00 34 96 352 0612, www.solmelia.com; doubles from £65). Or try the HT Petit Palace Bristol (00 34 96 394 5100, www.hthoteles.com; doubles from £60), a hotel behind a 19th-century facade in the old city.