Land without chimneys; or, the byways of Mexico

by Alfred Oscar Coffin

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.”