Land Without Chimneys by Alfred Oscar Coffin - HTML preview

CHAPTER IV.
 THE BILL OF FARE.

IF Cicero was right in his De Senectute that old age can be enjoyed only by those who in youth preserve their vigor, then the blessings of Nirvanah are the rightful inheritance of Mexico, and she will never lose that inheritance if bustle and hurry will forfeit it.

The hotels are run to suit the guests. When you arrive, you register, and when you next enter the corridor, you see upon the large blackboard your name, room, title, residence, destination, past history and future prospects and whatever else that will be of interest to the public. Now all of that is a labor-saving machine, and saves nerve tissue and wear and tear.

When the newspaper reporter wants news, he steps into the hotel corridor, and the proprietor silently points to the blackboard and goes to sleep again. The reporter reads the bulletin board and goes off and writes a two-column “interview” upon what Mr. A. thinks of Mexico, and you are saved all unnecessary prevaricating. The system is also very helpful to the police in search of lost friends for whom they have formed strong attachments, and for the custom house officials who have word that you passed a certain station and will bear watching. The bulletin board is a very diverting study in black and white for ordinary people, who look for the names of chance friends whom they do not expect, but who might be there. And the porters and curio vendors scan the list and patiently await your arrival on the street and tell you all about yourself. It is a regular bunco steer, but he is different from the genuine article. The g. a. will enveigle you somewhere and beat you on the sly. The Mexican artist stops in the broad sunlight, right in front of your hotel and beats you to your teeth.

He will sell you curios three hundred years old that he made last month, and has been waiting every day since for a person of just about your state of greenness and inexperience to sell to. As soon as he fleeces you, he kindly offers to find other rare bric-a-brac for you that he does not deal in, and will take you to his pal who is working other pastures. After you return to your friends and proudly show your acquisitions, some one who knows, will solemnly diagnose your head for phrenological knowledge. When he has diagnosed to his satisfaction, he will painfully tell you that your bump of Jack-assedness is abnormally developed. He will advise you to learn that little line of Shakespeare, or some other authentic writer that says: “I was a stranger and ye took me in.”

The hotel Bulletin is a great convenience. When you have found your room, you take an inventory, which will serve you in every other city. If you are in the city of Mexico, the inventory includes glass windows (elsewhere, it will be windows with iron bars) an iron bedstead built for one—which may or may not be inhabited—an iron washstand with iron enameled bowl and pitcher, chair, table, half a candle and candlestick. Kerosene is fifty cents a gallon. The scarcity of wood makes itself felt everywhere. The table, door and chair are the only things made from that precious article. Stone floors forever, which may be or may not be carpeted. The walls are decorated with printed placards giving the price per day, week, or month, sin o con comida—without or with board.

The marvel of the establishment is the door-key. A man with such a piece of iron on his person in the States would be arrested for carrying concealed weapons. It is so heavy they have made arrangements to relieve the lodger from carrying it. In the corridor is a keyrack with numbers, and a man stands all day to receive your key when you go out and to return it to you when you come back. The servant goes to him for it to clean up the room, and I have never known a lost or misplaced article under this system. The lock and key are made by hand at the blacksmith shop, and I think are sold by the pound. They are usually fastened upon huge rough doors made in the carpenter shop, and put together with three-inch wrought iron nails, with an inch or more of the point clinched on the opposite side from which they are driven. Of course there are neither fireplaces nor stoves in any hotel, but one, in the whole country.

The hotels are arranged in quadrangles, with the four sides facing an open court, redolent with flowery fragrance and fruits and bird music. Usually a fountain plays in the center, and in fair weather the table is spread here. Every story has an open veranda which looks upon this court. In the City of Mexico, the thermometer hesitates between 65 and 75°F, so when the rainy season is not on, meals can be had in the patio the year around. In the morning you rise at six or ten or any other hour that suits your fancy. No bells rung, no doors shaken, no noise made—you are simply let alone, and when you come, no frowns for your delay.

You ask when is the breakfast hour. “When the señor wishes.” If you go to the table at six the servant brings hot coffee and rolls, as though the whole establishment was wound up to start at that minute. Should you sit down at half past nine, the Señora would declare by all the saints as witnesses that you are just in time and she was looking for you at that moment. You feel that you might be discommoding the establishment, so you ask for the dinner hour. The answer will be graciously given, “From twelve to three-thirty we shall be honored to serve you, and if not at those hours, when the Señor wishes.” Finally you learn that there is no dinner hour, the bell is never rung, the table is never set, but whenever you choose to eat, the servants are to serve you. An ordinary dinner lasts two hours and these meals are what the people live for. The following, for one day may be termed an average:

The stars stand for certain dishes that only Mexicans call for and their name and flavor would never be known to a foreigner. The coffee is grown in the state of Vera Cruz and is excellent, and is made strong and thick. The usual method of serving is to half-fill your cup, and add an equal quantity of milk. It is sweetened with little cubes of white sugar, or the native brown article, called pilonces.

The bread used for breakfast is a species of cooky that represents the baker’s highest art. Nothing approaching it have I found elsewhere. Prosquitos de la manteca it is called, and is made into rings, loops and bows. It is brittle, crisp and sweetened, but not so much as a doughnut. Another kind is prepared in spherical segments and crescents, and is built of numbers of exceedingly thin layers of dough with fruit between, and so frail, that when once broken it falls to pieces in crisp fragments like Prince Rupert’s Drops, the glass phenomena the teacher in Physics used to astound us with. How they can give it the tension to fly to pieces was one of the things that a layman in the cooking art does not imbibe freely. This fabric is very appropriately called pastel. The distinctive feature of the meal is, they give you only one thing at a time in the order I have numbered them, and they come in serials as unchanging as the seasons.

After a few meals you become quite expert in guessing what will come next.

If there are ten plates stacked by you, you know there will be ten courses of one dish each. You have already learned that soup, rice and eggs are the first three, and the next to the last is always beans with coffee closing, so you have only five to guess. Mirabile dictu, the national dish and universal dessert is beans, just ordinary beans, but the people don’t know enough to say ‘beans,’ they spell it frijoles and pronounce it free-hole-ahs. You will notice that they spell better than they pronounce. As a labor of pure love and charity to my fellow countrymen of Boston, I say to them, beware! Your prestige is in danger. As a race of bean-eaters, the Mexicans have about three hundred years the start of you and they have about nine different varieties to practice on, and a different aroma of garlic to fit each one. Besides all that they eat beans. There are thirty-five tribes of Indians in Mexico, speaking one hundred and fifty languages and dialects, but they are all united on frijoles, and they have entered the contest to beat Boston or eat up all the beans.

The national dish is a trinity, composed of frijoles, tortillas and chili. The tortilla is of common stock but aristocratic in association. You sit at the table as a foreigner, and baker’s bread will be set before you, and the Mexican at your left will be the governor of the state and the waiter brings him a stack of tortillas.

The tortillas reduced to United States’ talk is just corn batter cakes. The architectural plan of their building is simple. The corn is put in lime water over night to soak and soften, and the next morning is put on a hot stone, and the women take another stone and pound it into meal; then they take water and make it up into cakes and half cook on a stone and stack them. No salt or grease or any thing but water is put with it. They look like circles of brown sole-leather and, when about three days old are about as tough and tasteless. This is the bread of Mexico, the staff of life. The approved method of eating it, is to spread it out, put on a spoonful of frijoles and roll it into a cylinder, then eat it as though it were a banana.

Chili is the third member of the trinity and is everything else but chilly—it is hot. It includes every kind of green, red and yellow pepper, and is cooked with nearly every article of food, and is cooked by itself and is eaten raw, but is hot always. The natives eat so much chili that it acts as an antiseptic, and I was told by a man who ought to know that in the Mexican war soldiers left on the field lay dead for weeks and could not decay but dried up. That is true now, but it is not chili but altitude that prevents dissolution. Fresh meat cannot spoil nor can vegetables rot. I can stand chili in broken doses, but when they gave me a big green pepper as large as an apple and stuffed with stuffing and dressed with dressing and swimming in an innocent looking sauce and disguised with a name I never heard of before, do you blame me if I thought I had struck a new tropical fruit and cut a respectable quarter of it off and made its acquaintance? Did I raise a howl? Ask of the winds that far around with fragments strewed the sea.

If ever I catch that girl outside of the state of Vera Cruz I shall teach her a lesson. Her name was Guadalupe, but she lacks much of being a model follower of the good saint by that name. She gave me green gourds stewed with water cress or some other green thing I never heard of and called it calabash, and I knew no better. Then she gave me cabbage boiled with bananas and bread fruit, and said that was all the style in Vera Cruz, and finally she invented this other villainy. She thinks I am not accustomed to fine living, but I hope yet to have my revenge. If she crosses the river into Texas, I mean to get her into a railroad eating-house there and compel her to eat some of those terracotta images they sell for ham sandwiches, and when lock-jaw sets in, she will have to keep her mouth shut as long as I had to keep mine open with that loaded green pepper.

When these people get hold of any meat, they roll it up in the tortilla and call it enchilada. They cook light bread after the pattern of a naval torpedo. The loaf is about the size of a Mason’s fruit jar, pointed at both ends like a torpedo, and baked to a crust half an inch thick. Such a loaf would do you bodily injury in the hands of your enemy. I saw so many curious things brought from the invisible work-shop. I found my way back there and told the cook I was in pursuit of knowledge and wanted to see, and veni vidi—I learned. No stove, not an iron or tin or metal vessel of any kind was visible in the land without chimneys.

A wall of earth and masonry is built up, waist high, like a blacksmith’s forge. All around this are port-holes in which the charcoal fire is made, and all over the top of the forge are holes for the cooking vessels, which are made of unglazed earthenware, and this is all. The charcoal makes no smoke, so there is no need of chimneys. Necessity is the mother and grandmother of invention, and these people have jogged along five hundred years without iron vessels, and they cook about as well as some folks I know.

The servants are models of their kind. With their sandaled feet they glide about without noise and do their work without murmur. You leave your soiled linen in their charge and find it on your bed as white as snow. They receive your gratuity with a thousand thanks and profound obeisance, stumble over their own feet to do you some unnecessary service, and as soon as off duty they offer to guide you about the city. They are rarely off duty until they have put in sixteen hours of hard work, then the blanket and stone floor make the only parenthesis between his day’s grind and tomorrow. The serving class is more servile than can be found anywhere. They take more abuse and less wages. Five dollars a month, Mexican money, is high water mark for female servants, and that reduced to American money means forty dollars a year. When spoken to by a superior, they must always answer in a deprecating manner as: “Ever at your service;” “Yours to obey;” “At your command,” etc.

All pretentious houses and hotels are built in quadrangles, with a carriage driveway entering a huge gate to the open court. At night this is closed by a pair of tall gates or doors twelve or fifteen feet high, like those in front of our fire companies, and a servant must lie there all night to answer a summons or to admit a belated lodger. Without changing the clothes he has worn all day, he lies on the soft side of a stone pavement night after night with his zerape or a piece of straw matting under him, and a stone for a pillow. In the interior, women servants often lie on the floor in hallways, in order to be handy should a guest need light or water during the night, or to admit lodgers to upper floors after closing time, and they also sleep in the clothes they wear during the day.

Travelers on the ocean either lose or gain a day in crossing the line, depending upon which direction they are going, and in Mexico you either lose a meal or gain a surplus name for one you did not get.

The morning lunch of bread and coffee is called deseyuno. The breakfast proper, from twelve to three, is almuerzo. From four to eight is the principal meal called comida, dinner, or cena, supper, whichever you choose to call it. I tried faithfully to keep up with them all, but I always felt that I had lost something in keeping tally on four meals and only remembered eating three. I believe there is a trick in it.

Salt meats are never seen except in American restaurants, and they sell at fifty cents a pound. Pork is always dressed by skinning the animal and not by scraping. No person needs to go to market. Everything is brought to your door by peddlers. The table is usually set in the court among the flowers, and it is a very common occurrence for peddlers to go to the head of the table with a basket of fruit and dicker bargains with the hostess during the meal. This method makes the meat supply very precarious except on Monday. After the bull-fights Sunday afternoon, all the slaughtered bulls are sold to the market.

On Monday when the proprietor asks me how I liked my steak, I always feel like giving him some American slang and saying, “It was bully.” The fruits are the very best, and as the season is perpetual, you can secure them fresh every day, such as strawberries, bananas, pine apples, mangos, figs, limes and agua cates or bread fruit. The lime is larger than the orange, but not so sweet and is used in the place of lemons. It is at the market place where you see the fruits in all their profusion, and are tempted to eat your dinner under the unusual surroundings.

Here you eat by faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. I hope no one will accuse me of irreverence for using these words, but they just suit me in this particular.

A suitable motto for the general market eating houses ought to be tacked over the entrance, and, with suitable apologies to Mr. Dante’s Inferno, that motto ought to read: “Who enters here leaves Soap behind.” The cooking is done while you wait, and chief among the things you eat by faith is the hot tamale—twice hot, once by pepper and once by steam. The vendor has a large tinned bucket enclosed by a blanket to hold the steam, and the whole contained in a willow basket. If your faith is sufficient, you call for a dozen tamales and the vendor fishes from its steaming, greasy depths, an article wrapped in sections of corn shucks. On dissecting the article you find about equal parts of corn meal, chili and bits of meat. And the meat! Aye, there’s the rub! If we only knew. There are tamales and tamales. All kinds and conditions of meat are said to find a last resting place in the tamale. Carlyle calls the process Sartor Resartus, or the tailor made over; the great American faith article of the same vintage is plain “hash.”

Beef, pork, chicken, frogs and armadillos are all known to the trade, and dark hints or innuendoes to that effect, say that the fat prairie dogs and the Chilhuahua pups make prime tamales. The prairie dog is always fat. The Chilhuahua pup is only a vest-pocket edition of dog that weighs about two pounds, and the other genus or species of Mexican dog that I know has a blue skin and no hair except on the end of his tail. The ordinary tamale is anonymous, and it is well, for, like the boarding house hash, it is better in cog.

The tunas from the prickly pear and the algæ from the canals and irrigating ditches also enter into the bill of fare. With conscious pride in my ability to grapple with the unknown, I made a foolish boast that there was nothing in the Mexican market that my stomach had bolted at, although my taste and my stomach had some pretty lively debates concerning the editorial fitness and filthiness of certain things.

But in an evil hour I boasted. I believe the good book says pride goeth before a fall. I was proud. I had bearded the Mexican lion in his den and had eaten through the lines. I had met the enemy and “they were our’n,” and I boasted of my cast-iron stomach.

My friend said: “Have you eaten any Gusanas de la Maguey? No? Well, come with me.” Now gentle reader, “If you have tears prepare to shed them now.” You have seen a tomato-worm. Well! the word gusana means worm, and this particular gusana is built on the order of a tomato worm, but he lives in better pasture on the maguey plant, and grows a little larger and a little fatter than your middle finger, or say the size of a cannon fire-cracker.

As we approached the market my knees got weak. I had had my pride, and was now going for my f—gusanas.

I felt that a volcanic eruption was about to take place in my immediate neighborhood, and remarked that nature was very kind to these people. My friend neither stopped nor made a shadow of turning, but marched straight to a sorcerer he knew and said, “Señora, my friend is anxious for some gusanas de la maguey at my expense.”

She slowly fished up a dozen stewed, and I fainted! (Curtain.)