Breakfasting

This last weekend we popped over to Murcia to see las Cuadrillas in Barranda. The event is principally a folk music event with bands on every street corner but there's also a big street market.

We were looking for breakfast and there was a stall in the market selling migas. Now migas come in all sorts of shapes and sizes but the ones in Barranda seem to be fried flour and water crumbs with lots of sausages and vegetables mixed in. Because it's broad bean season the beans were offered as garnish; migas con habas. Migas are nice but the stall also advertised Spanish, run of the mill, sandwiches or bocadillos which use the bread we Brits call French sticks. The migas were still being prepared so we were able to queue jump by asking for a couple of the sandwiches. The man serving on asked what we wanted to drink. Tea, the drink of Gods, wasn't an option, in fact options were few and far between. The question was really, "Do you want a red wine?" So we breakfasted on red wine. Early morning wine drinking seemed a little strange to us but we know an elderly couple in Culebrón who would never consider any other breakfast drink. Just stop to think about the area and its history and it's quite easy to see how wine could become the all purpose cheap and plentiful drink. 

We learned something new about coffee, perhaps a more universal breakfast drink, while we were in Barranda. I thought I knew what café de puchero was. I thought it was just poor person's coffee made in a big pan to make the most of the grounds. Another stallholder put me right. It is a poor person's coffee but the Murcian variety is, so we were told, made with chicory and then flavoured with lots of sugar and aniseed. In my youth I knew people who had grown so accustomed to the wartime rationing workaround of chicory essence for coffee that they still preferred it to real coffee.

In an earlier blog I mentioned that I went to see a foundation which curates varieties of citrus fruit. They keep alive, literally, the sort of oranges, lemons, grapefruit and limes that don't sit well with the unblemished, uniform and visually attractive produce required on supermarket shelves. On the day of my visit I arrived a little before kick off time so I popped into a local bar to get a coffee (not a wine). I was surprised to see lots of people tucking into a late breakfast of a bocadillo with salad, monkey nuts and olives. There is a bit of a cultural gap between what we Britons think of as breakfast and the Spanish almuerzo which is the first substantial meal of the day. Breakfast for many Spaniards is a very light affair and almuerzo is more a sort of mid morning fuel stop to make up for that. The almuerzo I saw on that day is called bocadillo con gastos or esmorzaret in the local Valencian language.

Gastos, as an everyday word, means something like an outlay or an expense. The use of the word in the context of food comes from the idea that this sort of almuerzo was paid to the daily farm labourers as a part of their wage package, a fringe benefit. Workers took the sandwich from home but the landowner of wherever you were working threw in the drink, wine, and something that probably came from the land the labourers were working. Apparently the esmorzaret is currently having a bit of a resurgence with lots of trendy eateries which are doing modern versions with big, mixed sandwiches. 

When I was checking up on this I came across a piece which said that these sort of gastos should not be convinced with the traditional picaeta. Now anyone who lives in Pinoso will know that there's a bar here that bears that name, it's closed at the moment but the bar is emblazoned with the name. Picaeta is another Valenciano word and it's, apparently, what the rest of Spain calls aperitivos. The little things that you eat as a preprandial - traditionally a few peanuts or olives, pickled veg, lupins (those yellowy oblate spheroids that look like beans) and suchlike.

As I was checking bits and pieces of this entry I was surprised by the number of articles about breakfast traditions. The way they rub the tomato on the oiled and toasted bread in Cataluña, the grated tomato and toppings on toast in this area, the sobrasada and paté in Andalucia or the propensity for butter and jam in Madrid. I resisted though. Maybe I'll do the same the next time I'm offered wine for breakfast.

And I worked in Community Education for years

Yesterday I went to see the 32nd Encuentro de Cuadrillas in Patiño, an area of Murcia City. Cuadrillas are musical groups made up of between 15 and 20 people. The programme told me that Cuadrillas, are typical of the Murcia Region and first made their appearance during the 17th Century to provide music at many of the annual round of rites and festivals. It goes on to talk about the variety of musical styles and the range of instruments used (many of which I presume are not in common use) and how the repertoire has been handed down orally from generation to generation.

It's not the first time that I've seen Barandillas. On the last Sunday of January in Barranda, a satellite village of Caravaca de la Cruz, they have a Fiesta of Barandillas. I've been there three times and it has always been gloriously sunny. The groups take up positions throughout the village centre so that you can watch one group for a while and then move on to the next. There's also a big market and the town is packed to the gunwales with people.

So, the description of Patiño said something about hot chocolate and churros (pastries) to start, then a mass before the groups performed on a central stage. There was also the mention of "jam sessions" along one of the town's streets. The added incentive was that there was free food at lunchtime. Free pelotas made and given away by the good citizens (nearly all women) of Patiño. Pelotas are meatballs. It's a name that means different things in different areas; basically they are all meatballs but, that said, each town and village, possibly each cook, produces a quite distinct product. In this case the meatballs are quite small and, apparently, made from turkey. The broth that accompanies them is as important as the meatballs themselves. In Pinoso we have meatballs too which are called faseguras (in Valenciano) and relleno (in Castellano) but I think they are made from pork and sausage meat (though I could be wrong).

Anyway. So I'm expecting a central stage but music all over the place. In fact it was just the Cuadrillas on stage, one after another, with chairs for the audience. At the front, between the chairs and the stage, there was room for people to dance and lots of people had brought castanets to click along. There may have been more music on the streets in the afternoon but I cleared off after grabbing my free food so it hadn't happened by a little after 3.30 pm when I left.

I was writing this up in my diary this morning and I wrote that it hadn't been as good as I'd expected. It was a bit of a revelation because, thinking about it, the event in Barranda, with the musicians surrounded by people, with the spontaneous dancing along the streets, with music on every corner has the advantage of being much more participative, much more community like. The Patiño event had performers to be watched and listened to (and maybe danced to) but it was nowhere near as inclusive. Thinking about it all the events I enjoy most are inclusive ones. In some of those the participation is simply as a crowd but where the crowd is so close to the action as to be a part of it and there are others, like the ofrendas, the flower offerings, and the romerias (short distance pilgrimages) where the participants are the event.