The meat named with eel and butter beans as a main ingredient of early paellas was water vole.
Early paella developed around Valencia’s rice-growing landscape, especially near Lake Albufera. Eighteenth-century cooks used ingredients available in the surrounding fields and wetlands, and water vole meat was recorded alongside eel and butter beans in early versions of the dish.
This ingredient can surprise modern readers because contemporary paella is usually associated with chicken, rabbit, seafood or occasionally duck. As living standards changed and paella became a popular countryside meal, those meats increasingly replaced water vole in everyday recipes.
The older custom was also reflected in Valencian literature. Writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez described local water-vole eating in his 1902 novel Cañas y barro, set among the fishermen and peasants near Albufera. The historical reference does not mean water vole is required in modern paella; it shows how strongly early versions depended on local ecology and whatever food was available.