Part 10 (1/2)
These obedient daughters to their Capuchin confessors were what Gil de Avila termed a sweet garden of flowers, perfumed by the good smell and reputation of sanct.i.ty, ”_ameno jardin de flores, olorosas por el buen odor y fama de santidad_.” Justice to the land of Castile soap requires us to observe that latterly, since the suppression of monks, both s.e.xes, and the fair especially, have departed from the strict observance of the religious duties of their excellent grandmothers. Warm baths are now pretty generally established in the larger towns. At the same time, the interiors of bedrooms, whether in inns or private houses, as well by the striking absence of gla.s.s and china utensils, which to English notions are absolute necessaries, as by the presence of French pie-dish basins, and duodecimo jugs, indicate that this ”little d.a.m.ned spot” on the average Spanish hand, has not yet been quite rubbed out.
However hot the day, dusty the road, or long the journey, it has never been our fate to see a Spanish attendant use a single drop of water as a detergent, or, as polite writers say, ”perform his ablutions;” the constant habit of bathing and complete was.h.i.+ng is undoubtedly one reason why the French and other continentals consider our soap-loving countrymen to be cracked. Under the Spanish Goths the Hemerobaptistae, or people who washed their persons once a day, were set down as heretics.
The Duke of Frias, when a few years ago on a fortnight's visit to an English lady, never once troubled his basins and jugs; he simply rubbed his face occasionally with the white of an egg, which, as Madame Daunoy records, was the only ablution of the Spanish ladies in the time of Philip IV.; but these details of the dressing-room are foreign to the use made in Spain of liquids in kitchen and parlour.
One word on chocolate, which is to a Spaniard what tea is to a Briton--coffee to a Gaul. It is to be had almost everywhere, and is always excellent; the best is made by the nuns, who are great confectioners and compounders of sweetmeats, sugarplums and orange-flowers, water and comfits,
”Et tous ces mets sucres en pate, ou bien liquides, Dont estomacs devots furent toujours avides.”
[Sidenote: ICED DRINKS.]
It was long a disputed point whether chocolate did or did not break fast theologically, just as happened with coffee among the rigid Moslems. But since the learned Escobar decided that _liquidum non rumpit jejunium_, a liquid does not break fast, it has become the universal breakfast of Spain. It is made just liquid enough to come within the benefit of clergy, that is, a spoon will almost stand up in it; only a small cup is taken, _una jicara_, a Mexican word for the cocoa-nuts of which they were first made, generally with a bit of toasted bread or biscuit: as these _jicaras_ have seldom any handles, they were used by the rich (as coffeecups are among the Orientals) enclosed in little filigree cases of silver or gold; some of these are very beautiful, made in the form of a tulip or lotus leaf, on a saucer of mother-o'-pearl.
The flower is so contrived that, by a spring underneath, on raising the saucer, the leaves fall back and disclose the cup to the lips, while, when put down, they re-close over it, and form a protection against the flies. A gla.s.s of water should always be drunk after this chocolate, since the aqueous cha.s.se neutralizes the bilious propensities of this breakfast of the G.o.ds, as Linnaeus called chocolate. Tea and coffee have supplanted chocolate in England and France; it is in Spain alone that we are carried back to the breakfasts of Belinda and of the wits at b.u.t.ton's; in Spain exist, unchanged, the fans, the game of ombre, _tresillo_, and the _coche de colleras_, the coach and six, and other social usages of the age of Pope and the 'Spectator.'
[Sidenote: ICED LEMONADE.]
Cold liquids in the hot dry summers of Spain are necessaries, not luxuries; snow and iced drinks are sold in the streets at prices so low as to be within the reach of the poorest cla.s.ses; the rich refrigerate themselves with _agraz_. This, the Moorish _Hacaraz_, is the most delicious and most refres.h.i.+ng drink ever devised by thirsty mortal; it is the _new_ pleasure for which Xerxes wished in vain, and beats the ”hock and soda water,” the ”_hoc erat in votis_” of Byron, and sherry cobler itself. It is made of pounded unripe grapes, clarified sugar, and water; it is strained till it becomes of the palest straw-coloured amber, and well iced. It is particularly well made in Andalucia, and it is worth going there in the dog-days, if only to drink it--it cools a man's body and soul. At Madrid an agreeable drink is sold in the streets; it is called _Michi Michi_, from the Valencian _Mitj e Mitj_, ”half and half,” and is as unlike the heavy wet mixture of London, as a coal-porter is to a pretty fair Valenciana. It is made of equal portions of barley-water and orgeat of _Chufas_, and is highly iced. The Spaniards, among other cooling fruits, eat their strawberries mixed with sugar and the juice of oranges, which will be found a more agreeable addition than the wine used by the French, or the cream of the English,--the one heats, and the other, whenever it is to be had, makes a man bilious in Spain. Spanish ices, _helados_, are apt to be too sweet, nor is the sugar well refined; the ices, when frozen very hard and in small forms, either representing fruits or sh.e.l.ls, are called _quesos_, cheeses.
Another favourite drink is a weak bottled beer mixed with iced lemonade.
Spaniards, however, are no great drinkers of beer, notwithstanding that their ancestors drank more of it than wine, which was not then either so plentiful or universal as at the present; this subst.i.tute of grapeless countries pa.s.sed from the Egyptians and Carthaginians into Spain, where it was excellent, and kept well. The vinous Roman soldiers derided the beer-drinking Iberians, just as the French did the English _before_ the battle of Agincourt. ”Can sodden water--barley-broth--decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat?” Polybius sneers at the magnificence of a Spanish king, because his home was furnished with silver and gold vases full of beer, of barley-wine. The genuine Goths, as happens everywhere to this day, were great swillers of ale and beer, heady and stupifying mixtures, according to Aristotle. Their archbishop, St. Isidore, distinguished between _celia ceria_, the ale, and _cerbisia_, beer, whence the present word _cerbeza_ is derived. Spanish beer, like many other Spanish matters, has now become small. Strong English beer is rare and dear; among one of the infinite ingenious absurdities of Spanish customs' law, English beer in barrels used to be prohibited, as were English bottles if empty--but prohibited beer, in prohibited bottles, was admissible, on the principle that two fiscal negatives made an exchequer affirmative.
[Sidenote: WINES OF SPAIN.]
CHAPTER XIII.
Spanish Wines--Spanish Indifference--Wine-making--Vins du Pays--Local Wines--Benicarlo--Valdepenas.
The wines of Spain deserve a chapter to themselves. Sherry indeed is not less popular among us than Murillo, in spite of the numbers of bad copies of the one, which are pa.s.sed off for undoubted originals, and b.u.t.ts of the other, which are sold neat as imported. The Spaniard himself is neither curious in port, nor particular in Madeira; he prefers quant.i.ty to quality, and loves flavour much less than he hates trouble; a cellar in a private house, of rare fine or foreign wines, is perhaps a greater curiosity than a library of ditto books; an hidalgo with twenty names simply sends out before his frugal meal for a quart of wine to the nearest shop, as a small burgess does in the City for a pint of porter. Local in every thing, the Spaniard takes the goods that the G.o.ds provide him, just as they come to hand; he drinks the wine that grows in the nearest vineyards, and if there are none, then regales himself with the water from the least distant spring. It is so in everything; he adds the smallest possible exertion of his own to the bounties of nature; his object is to obtain the largest produce for the smallest labour; he allows a life-conferring sun and a fertile soil to create for him the raw material, which he exports, being perfectly contented that the foreigner should return it to him when recreated by art and industry; thus his wool, barilla, hides, and cork-bark, are imported by him back again in the form of cloth, gla.s.s, leather, and bungs.
[Sidenote: WINES OF SPAIN.]
The most celebrated and perfect wines of the Peninsula are port and sherry, which owe their excellence to foreign, not to native skill, the princ.i.p.al growers and makers being Europeans, and their system altogether un-Spanish; nothing can be more rude, antique, and unscientific, than the wine-making in those localities where no stranger has ever settled. But Spain is a land bottled up for antiquarians, and it must be confessed that the national process is very picturesque and cla.s.sical; no Ariadne revel of t.i.tian is more glittering or animated, no bas-relief more cla.s.sical in which sacrifices are celebrated
”To Bacchus, who first from out the purple grape Crushed the sweet poison of misused wine.”
Often have we ridden through villages redolent with vinous aroma, and inundated with the blood of the berry, until the very mud was encarnadined; what a busy scene! Donkeys laden with panniers of the ripe fruit, damsels bending under heavy baskets, men with reddened legs and arms, joyous and jovial as satyrs, hurry jostling on to the rude and dirty vat, into which the fruit is thrown indiscriminately, the black-coloured with the white ones, the ripe bunches with the sour, the sound berries with those decayed; no pains are taken, no selection is made; the filth and negligence are commensurate with this carelessness; the husks are either trampled under naked feet or pressed out under a rude beam; in both cases every refining operation is left to the fermentation of nature, for there is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we may.
[Sidenote: VALDEPENAS.]
The wines of Spain, under a lat.i.tude where a fine season is a certainty, might rival those of France, and still more those of the Rhine, where a good vintage is the exception, not the rule. Their varieties are infinite, since few districts, unless those that are very elevated, are without their local produce, the names, colours, and flavours of which are equally numerous and varied. The thirsty traveller, after a long day's ride under a burning sun, when seated quietly down to a smoking peppery dish, is enchanted with the cool draught of these vins du pays, which are brought fresh to him from the skins or amphora jars; he longs to transport the apparently divine nectar to his own home, and wonders that ”the trade” should have overlooked such delicious wine. Those who have tried the experiment will find a sad change for the worse come over the spirit of their dream, when the long-expected importation greets their papillatory organs in London. There the illusion is dispelled; there to a cloyed fastidious taste, to a judgment bewildered and frittered away by variety of the best vintages, how flat, stale, and unprofitable does this much-fancied beverage appear! The truth is, that its merit consists in the thirst and drinking vein of the traveller, rather than in the wine itself. Those therefore of our readers whose cellars are only stocked with choice Bordeaux, Xerez, and Champagne, may sustain with resignation the absence of other sorts of Spanish grape juice. If an exception is to be made, let it be only in favour of Valdepenas and Manzanilla.
The local wines may therefore be tossed off rapidly. The Navarrese drink their Peralta, the Basques their Chacolet, which is a poor vin ordinaire and inferior to our good cider. The Arragonese are supplied from the vineyards of Carinena; the Catalans, from those of Sidges and Benicarlo; the former is a rich sweet wine, with a peculiar aromatic flavour; the latter is the well-known black strap, which is exported largely to Bordeaux to enrich clarets for our vitiated taste, and as it is rich red, and full flavoured, much comes to England to concoct what is denominated curious old port by those who sell it. The fiery and acrid brandy which is made from this Benicarlo is sent to the bay of Cadiz to the tune of 1000 b.u.t.ts a year to doctor up worse sherry.
The central provinces of Spain consume but little of these; Leon has a wine of its own which grows chiefly near Zamora and Toro, and it is much drunk at the neighbouring and learned university of Salamanca, where, as it is strong and heady, it promotes prejudice, as port is said to do elsewhere. Madrid is supplied with wines grown at Tarancon, Arganda, and other places in its immediate vicinity, and those of the latter are frequently subst.i.tuted for the celebrated Valdepenas of La Mancha, which was mother's milk to Sancho Panza and his two eminent progenitors; they differed, as their worthy descendant informed the Knight of the Wood, on the merits of a cask; one of them just dipped his tongue into the wine, and affirmed that it had a taste of iron; the other merely applied his nose to the bung-hole, and was positive that it smacked of leather; in due time when the barrel was emptied, a key tied to a thong confirmed the degustatory ac.u.men of these connoisseurs.
[Sidenote: THE BEST VINEYARDS.]