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DON QUIXOTE.
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
WHICH TREATS OF THE CHARACTER AND PURSUITS OF THE FAMOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA.
In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind,[1] there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing. An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays,[2] lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income. The rest of it went in a
- ↑ See Introduction, p. xxxiii.
- ↑ The national dish, the olla, of which the puchero of Central and Northern Spain is a poor relation, is a stew with beef, bacon, sausage, chick-peas, and cabbage for its prime constituents, and for ingredients any other meat or vegetable that may be available. There is nothing exceptional in Don Quixote's olla being more a beef than a mutton one, for mutton is scarce in Spain except in the mountain districts. Salpicon (salad) is meat minced with red peppers, onions, oil, and vinegar, and is in fact a sort of meat salad. Duelos y quebrantos, the title of the Don's Saturday dish, would be a puzzle even to the majority of Spanish readers were it not for Pellicer's explanation. In the cattle-feeding districts of Spain, the carcasses of animals that came to an untimely end were converted into salt meat, and the parts unfit for that purpose were sold cheap under the name of duelos y quebrantos—"sorrows and losses" (literally "breakings") and were held to be sufficiently unlike meat to be eaten on days when flesh was forbidden, among which in Castile Saturday was included in commemoration of the battle of Navas de Tolosa. Any rendering of such a phrase must necessarily be unsatisfactory, and in adopting "scraps" I have, as in the other cases, merely gone on the principle of choosing the least of evils.
- Vol. I.—1
