He was the obese type of Mediterranean with a little head, voluminous neck and triple chin, seated on the stern of his fishing skiff like a Roman patrician on the throne of his trireme.
His culinary talent suffered eclipse whenever rice did not figure as the fundamental basis of his compositions.

All that this food could give of itself, he knew perfectly.

In the tropical ports, the crews surfeited with bananas, pineapples, and alligator-pears, would greet with enthusiasm the apparition of a great frying pan of rice with cod and potatoes, or a casserole of rice from the oven with its golden crust perforated by the ruddy faces of garbanzos and points of black sausage.

At other times, under the leaden-colored sky of the northern seas, the cook made them recall their distant native land by giving them the monastic rice dish with beet roots, or buttery rice with turnips and beans.
On Sundays and the fiestas of the Valencian saints who for Uncle Caragol were the first in heaven,--_San Vicente Martir, San Vicente Ferrer, La Virgin de los Desamparados_ and the _Cristo del Grao_--would appear the smoking _paella_, a vast, circular dish of rice upon whose surface of white, swollen grains were lying bits of various fowls.

The cook loved to surprise his following by distributing rotund, raw onions, with the whiteness of marble and an acrid surprise that brought tears to the eyes.