Land without chimneys; or, the byways of Mexico

by Alfred Oscar Coffin

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.