Mexico does not breakfast. When people go into the restaurants and
order a breakfast the waiters look at them in wonder, and inform them
in the most polite terms in the world that they have but coffee and dry
bread for breakfast. It is asserted that to eat breakfast will cause
a heaviness and dullness for the entire day, but whether this is true
or otherwise, it cannot be stated, for since our arrival in Mexico we
have been unable to find any other than as before mentioned--and black
coffee at that. Every family takes their coffee in their bedrooms. It
takes at least two hours to get through an ordinary dinner.
A description of dinner in a private family will, no doubt, prove
interesting to most readers, especially if they understand the
difficulty of obtaining admission into a family. A Mexican will be all
politeness, will do anything for you, will place his house at your
service, but he and his family will move out. He will do anything but
admit you to the secrecy of his house. So this experience is rare.
Dinner was announced and the gentlemen, in the most courteous manner,
offered their arms, and we walked along the balcony to the dining-room.
The lace-hung doors were swung open, and there before us was the table
with plate, knife and fork, and a penny loaf of bread at each place.
We sit down, take our napkins, and the waiters--always men--fill our
glasses from the elegant water bottles that grace each end of the
table. One dish, containing, perhaps, cold meat, salad, red pepper,
radishes, and pickled beans, is served on plates, and the first ones
taken away from us, although not used. After endeavoring to swallow
some of this nauseating stuff, which the natives devour with relish,
the servant removes the dish, our plates, knives and forks, and another
equally strange and equally detestable dish is brought on. Thus the
feast continues, meanwhile breaking the penny loaf in bits and eating
without a spread.
Butter, which commands $1 a pound, is never seen from one year's end
to another, and jelly is an unheard-of dish. The last dish, and one
that is never omitted from dinner or supper, is frijoles--pronounced
free-holies--consists of beans, brown ones, with a sort of gravy over
them. If a Bostonian were but to visit this country his intellectual
stomach, or appetite, would be sated for once. Sliced orange, covered
with sugar and cinnamon, is dessert, after which comes chocolate or
coffee; the former superb, the latter miserable. With the coffee the
ladies and gentlemen smoke their cigarettes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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