"'To ag'in pick up said narratif,' says Enright, when Tutt subsides,
'at the p'int where Dave comes spraddlin' in with them onasked
reminiscences, I may say that a first source of pleasure to us, if
not of profit, while we stays at the Plaza Perdita, is a passel of
Mexicanos with a burro train that brings us our pulque from some'ers
back further into the hills.'"
"What's pulque?" I interjected.
It was plain that my old gentleman of cows as little liked my
interruption as Enright liked that of the volatile Tutt. He hid his
irritation, however, under an iron politeness and explained.
"Pulque is a disapp'intin' form of beverage, wharof it takes a bar'l
to get a gent drunk," he observed. And then, with some severity: "It
ain't for me to pull no gun of criticism, but I'm amazed that a
party of your attainments, son, is ignorant of pulque. It's, as I
says, a drink, an' it tastes like glucose an' looks like yeast. It
comes from a plant, what the Mexicans calls 'maguey,' an' Peets
calls a 'aloe.' The pulque gatherers scoops out the blossom of the
maguey while it's a bud. They leaves the place hollow; what wood-
choppers back in Tennessee, when I'm a colt, deescribes as
'bucketin' the stump.' This yere hollow fills up with oozin' sap,
an' the Mexican dips out two gallons a day an keeps it up for a
month. That's straight, sixty gallons from one maguey before ever it
quits an' refooses to further turn the game. That's pulque, an' when
them Greasers gathers it, they puts it into a pigskin-skinned
complete, the pig is; them pulduc receptacles is made of the entire
bark of the anamile. When the pulque's inside, they packs it, back
down an' hung by all four laigs to the saddle, a pigskin on each
side of the burro. It's gathered the evenin' previous, an' brought
into camp in the night so as to keep it cool.
"When I'm a child, an' before ever I connects myse'f with the cow
trade, if thar's a weddin', we-all has what the folks calls a
'infare,' an' I can remember a old lady from the No'th who
contreebutes to these yere festivals a drink she calls 'sprooce
beer.' An' pulque, before it takes to frettin' an' fermentin'
'round, in them pigskins, reminds me a mighty sight of that sprooce
beer. Later it most likely reminds you of the pigskin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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