Cervantes Home Cookin’

Also, what is generally printed as one volume these days is actually two separate works, published ten years apart (in 1605 and 1615). I’ve completely read the first book, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but the second one (like many sequels of today) loses a bit of the fresh edge of the first.

Still, the books are surprisingly readable (although this is a contemporary translation, so this may not be surprising after all) and the story is still quite enjoyable. Widely believed to have established the paradigm of the novel, Don Quixote is still a compelling piece of reading besides.

Here’s a short passage that tickled my fancy:

The first thing that caught Sancho’s eye was a whole steer spitted on a whole elm tree, and in the fire over which it was roasting there was burning a good-size mountain of firewood; six earthenware pots that were aound the blaze had not been made in the common mold, for they were six medium-sized vats, and each could hold a whole slaughterhouse of meat. Whole sheep were swallowed up and hidden in them as if they had been mere pigeons. Innumerable were the hares already skinned and chickens plucked, which hung on the trees ready for burial in the pots; countless too were the birds and game of divers kinds hanging from the branches that the air might cool them. Sancho counted more than sixty wine-skins of more than eight gallons each, and all filled, as it afterward turned out, with generous wines. There were also rows of loaves of the whitest bread, like heaps of wheat piled up on the threshing floors; the cheeses, arranged like open brickwork, formed a wall, and two caldrons full of oil, bigger than dyer’s vats, served to fry the fritters, which, when fried, were drawn out with two mammoth shovels and plunged into another caldron of prepared honey that stood nearby. There were more than fifty cooks male and female, all of them clean, busy, blithe, and buxom. In the swollen belly of the steer were twelve tender little suckling pigs, sewn up within to give the meat a delicious flavor. As to the spices of different kinds, they seemed to have been bought not by the pound but by the quarter, and all lay open to view in a big chest. Indeed, the preparations for the wedding, though in rustic style, were plentiful enough to feed an army. (Signet Classics, 2001 Edition, p. 666).

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