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:
BILL OF LADING.
BREAKFAST.
Coffee, Bread, Cookies.
DINNER.
1 Soup.
2 Rice, Radishes.
3 Eggs.
4 Beef, Corn, Snap-beans, Cabbage, Parsnips, Gambane.
5 Steak, Potatoes.
6 Sausage, Chili.
7 Brains.
8 Frijoles. (black beans).
9 Coffee, Fruits, Wine, Cigars.
* * * * * * *
SUPPER.
1 Soup, Vermicelli.
2 Mutton, Potatoes, Chili.
3 Mutton Chops, Potatoes, Calabashes.
4 Chicken with Salad, Stewed Bananas, Frogs.
5 Frijoles.
6 Preserves, Fruits, Wines, Cigars.
* * * * * * *
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!
RIGHT
(_Curtain._)