A slightly delayed Thanksgiving dinner for friends has an unexpected complication...and an unexpectedly lovely gift.
As the "Semana de Black Friday" does not involve any actual non-work days, and as my (generally free) Friday was slightly occupied with the Colegio Estados Unidos de America this week, I invited my oldest Madrid friends (the grandparents of the second-grader I know at the Colegio EEUU) to come and have modified traditional Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. All in all, and in spite of one unexpected bump in the road (I think now smoothed out), it was a huge success, and a great joy.
After visiting the school on Friday I devoted the afternoon to shopping for appropriate Thanksgiving ingredients. My lovely local Mercadona nobly provided breadcrumbs (or rather croutons) in a variety of flavors including garlic, handily packaged in 100 gram packets. (For those who are interested, the term is "picatostes" presumably from "picar" - to nibble - and "toste" - toast. So croutons are quite logically "nibble-toasts." I am now going to try to work the made-up word "nibbletoast" into my daily conversation as much as possible.) After finding the nibbletoasts in the packaged bread and cracker aisle, a quick trip to the snack food nook (including corn chips, potato chips, peanuts, pistachios etc.) provided 100 gram packages of pre-roasted and peeled chestnuts. (Also raw chestnuts for roasting, but my fingernails are happy fingernails at the moment, and I thought the extra euro was worth the time and effort, especially since I don't have a chestnut piercer to help open them, and my knives aren't that good for scoring.) Along with the pineapple juice I had purchased a while ago, and an extra bar of butter, the stuffing was thus taken care of.
Somewhat to my surprise, the Mercadona did not have corn flour, at least not yellow corn flour, although it did have something called white corn flour that was "pre-cocido" and is allegedly for arepas. I was unconvinced by this, but fortunately had noted that the always-open alimentación around the corner from me sold proper corn meal by the kilo. I am happy to give the business to hard working local immigrants rather than a huge chain anyway, so corn meal was crossed off the list.
That left the turkey. The pleasant Mercadona employee by the butcher's counter explained to me that one can only order entire turkeys (labeled as "pavo grande" and between 5.5 and 7 kilos) up to December 14 for delivery between December 23 and 31. (Personally, I don't think 5.5 to 7 kilos is particularly "pavo grande." That's just "pavo" size. It's damn hard to find a turkey that's smaller than 11 pounds, and while they exist larger than 15, you really have to be entertaining a lot of people.) You can also order perdices (partridges) as a smaller equivalent of turkey. (I didn't know that partridges were traditional Christmas food here. I wonder if they come with tiny pear trees?) In any case, the only turkey to be had at the Mercadona was either very thin sliced fillets, or frozen drumsticks. Sub-ideal.
As I have found that supermarkets here generally are weak on meat, I went to my local carnicería y pollería after it re-opened at 5:00. (It closes from 2:00 to 5:00, and remains closed on Sundays, because its owners are local and traditional people who take the normal hours off.) The Carnicería y Pollería on the plaza stands on the corner. One side street has the entrance, and along one wall there are supplementary products like olive oil and spices and cans of beans in case you are making something like cocido or fabada. There are two counters, at right angles to each other, the carnicería and the pollería. I have not actually purchased anything from the meat counter, as it seems to be largely variants of pork and sausage and so on, and while it all looks delicious, I don't know enough about cooking it and it seems a waste. (I think if I really want beef here I am going to have to go to one of the numerous halal butchers in the neighborhood. Non-halal butchers have the deep conviction that the best kind of beef cattle are the kind that oink instead of mooing.) I have been to the chicken counter before, though not enough to be recognized by the white haired gentleman behind the counter, who greeted me briskly and said that I should speak up whenever I was ready, as in fact there was no one else there. (It was just after 5:00.) There were breasts piled under the glass counter of the pollería section and when I asked if they were turkey (thinking that they were enormous) he explained that they were chickens, but signaled an even more enormous container wrapped in plastic of turkey. I asked hesitantly if it was a whole turkey breast and he said that it was in dos trozos, but that I could either purchase them separately or the whole thing together, or that they could cut it for me "lo que tu quieras." After a little bit of discussion, somewhat hampered by my having a little trouble with the butcher's accent, and also by my lack of familiarity with certain useful but technical words involving cuts of meat and food preparation, I agreed to purchased the entire 2.5 kilos of turkey breast, and gratefully accepted the butcher's suggestion that as I was going to "hornear" the bird it would be best to put it in "una maya" or netting to keep it together so that it remained moister. (I know hornear because all the Dominican bakeries along Grand Street in Brooklyn used to say "horneamos" or "Tenemos horno" and offer the use of their ovens to local people wanting to make pernil or similar with limited cooking space in their apartments. Who says communal ovens are a thing of the Middle Ages?) The two pieces of turkey breast were thus expertly cut out of their plastic container and then dumped into a cute little machine like the ones used for wrapping Christmas trees on the streets of New York now, only much smaller, and the netting was neatly tied off, and then the trussed turkeys were placed on little styrofoam platters and shrink wrapped in plastic and I was formally presented with them, and wished luck with my cooking. After a quick trip to the bazaar down the block to purchase a roasting pan (and a quick trip back to exchange the big one I'd bought to have room for extra stuffing around the turkey for a smaller one after I found out that it didn't fit in my oven), I was ready for Thanksgiving Dinner in Madrid. I spent Friday evening making corn bread and cookies, so that my little-oven-that-could would be free for the main event on Saturday.
I got up bright and early (ok, maybe around 10:30) on Saturday, and made meringues (on the one cloudy day in the last month - sigh), and prepared the stuffing without incident, and managed to stuff some of it into the mysterious folds in the turkey breast in between the netting, and arrange the rest around the bird. Then I popped it into the oven, and did the soothing routine familiar to me for the last fifteen years of Thanksgivings: I cleaned the apartment dividing my tasks into the chunks of time between intervals of basting the turkey. I had already taken out the garbage, bought fresh bread at the bakery (which ended up not getting eaten as we had too much food), done as much washing up as possible, scrubbed the bathroom and vacuumed the floors, and I had only an hour of cooking and cleaning before the arrival of guests when I opened the door below the kitchen sink to pull out the floor polish....and found that the entire bottom of the cabinet was soaking wet. On a Saturday afternoon (with any chance of finding a plumber slim to nil before Monday). When I already had a roasting pan in the oven, and salad in bowls, and all the plates and silverware set out for guests who were set to arrive.
After a few moments of sheer panic about my plans for dinner being ruined by an emergency leak and no water, I verified that in fact the leak only happened when the sink was turned on, and that when the water was not running it did not leak further. I dried out the bottom of the cabinet, and revised my plan of popping laundry in the washing machine just in case, and decided that the only thing to do was to go ahead and attempt to use the sink as little as possible. I sent an apologetic WhatsApp to my landlord, informing him of the problem, and continued with preparations.
Fortunately, all went according to plan after that. I got a response to my WhatsApp half an hour later saying that the landlord would drop by to take a look at the sink himself on Sunday afternoon (he has since been and gone, and has indeed at least temporarily solved the problem by tightening some loose connections), and in the meantime my guests arrived, and were gracious about having detergent and floor polish and stove cleaner bottles sitting on the kitchen floor on a towel, and we retired to the living room and had a lovely meal, untroubled by leaks.
Because they are my friends, my guests were kind enough to listen to my explanation of the Thanksgiving legend, but really their interest was the food, which is of course as it should be. They were deeply impressed by the turkey stuffing, and the general preparation by oven, which is something quite foreign here. (As one explained, she never turns on the oven in the summer -- for very obvious reasons since it is hot in Madrid in the summer, and their apartment is not air-conditioned -- and by the time it's winter she can't remember how to do all the oven recipes.) The cookies received the ultimate compliment of any Thanksgiving host "if I had known there was going to be dessert I wouldn't have eaten so much meat." Perhaps best of all, they acceded to what I assured them was also a sacred Thanksgiving tradition, namely, the guests going home with leftovers. I gave them some turkey and the stuffing they had so much enjoyed, as well as the last couple of meringues and a few cookies. This means that I now have the absolute joy of having all of my unfinished Thanksgiving turkey leftovers fitting into one relatively small plastic container (what is known in Spain generically as "un tupper" although I think it's actually a local brand, not technically tupperware) which is perhaps two dinners worth of turkey and stuffing. I finished the tiny amount of salad for dinner last night, and the last of the cookies this morning for breakfast (Spaniards "desayunan dulce" so I figure cookies for breakfast counts as cultural adaptation), so all that's left is some of the cornbread and the extra bread I bought that turned out to be unnecessary. (My friend helpfully suggested making French toast or "pan pizza" with it by topping it with something and baking it briefly. It was warm and fresh from the bakery yesterday, so it won't go to waste.) I didn't have time to make the butternut squash due to the sink issue, but it's on the agenda, and squash keep. So all in all, a bounteous but not overly wasteful Thanksgiving.
After a lovely gossipy meal, and a brief couch siesta, my friends departed a little before six, saying that they should go home before it was fully dark. I offered to walk them to the metro, since I hadn't been out all day (except about 100 yards to buy bread and take out the garbage), and so we headed out together into the twilight, which was actually cool but not too cold, and still and silent as it tends to be on a Saturday evening at the end of siesta.
On our way to the lively Calle de la Oca (where the stores were open after siesta and everyone was out on the final Saturday of Black Friday) I mentioned that I was shortly going to be entertaining friends from New York, and that I had told them that of their three days in Madrid they must spend one in Carabanchel. My Madrid friends laughed at this (as I had intended, since my Complutense mentor finally was comfortable enough to ask me why on earth I had chosen to live here since "I've lived in Madrid for more than forty years and have never been to that neighborhood"), but then one of them said, "you know, the oldest church in Madrid is here in Carabanchel. Santa María de la Antigua. Have you seen it? And the Plaza de Carabanchel Alto?"
As I had not seen (or heard) of Santa María de la Antigua previously ("you can just see the tower from the number 17 bus"), my friend suggested that we walk a little further and go to see it, and added that the Plaza de Carabanchel Alto was also worthwhile, as it was where the old municipal building of Carabanchel had been, when the place was an independent town, and around which the wealthy people of Madrid had built their summer villas. (Another one of the mysterious parallels between Madrid and New York that make perfect sense to citizens of both is the tradition of country houses in the mountains surrounding the city for anyone who could possibly afford them. Anyone who has spent July in either city without air conditioning will likewise understand why this tradition is perfectly logical.)
I have yet to explore the plaza, but we headed toward the church (officially the "Ermita") of Santa María, which also known as the church of the cemetery of Carabanchel, through lighted streets, crowded with evening shoppers, and happy with bright lights. We ended up taking a route past where my friends first lived as newlyweds, so I got to hear a little of the urban archeology of the city that anyone who lives in the same place for forty years carries in their heads: the giant "Plaza China" housewares store that was the local movie theater (and still has its marquee, if you're looking); the "fábrica de pizzas" that was a "tienda pre-natal" where my friends bought cradles and baby carriages and such; the giant red brick multistory and multi-building urbanización that was all vacant land and "monte" forty years ago. People's mental maps of their homes are updated considerably less frequently than Google maps, and even when they are updated a site is usually tagged as "the place that used to be X." I am interested in the capital H history of Madrid, and know some of it, but getting to access the personal history of a city not your own is a rare gift, and I was grateful, because it makes otherwise nondescript streets definite and clear, even if they may look like other streets in other parts of the city.
And then of course there was the Ermita de Santa María la Antigua, and the little cemetery of Carabanchel, which is more in the nature of capital H history, though even there my friend explained that while she has seen the outside of the church, which is a rare example of perfectly conserved Romanesque-Mudéjar architecture, she has never been inside because it's always closed except for either the first or last Saturday of the month (she couldn't remember which) when there is a "misa de difuntos" for the family members of those who are buried in the cemetery, which she knows because a colleague who has lived in Carabanchel de toda la vida attended one for a family member. The cemetery is thus a "working" cemetery (as it were) though limited to local residents, and the church is therefore as much of a "working" church as can be expected in a country where actual religious observance (as opposed to overwhelming cultural practice) is fairly minimal.
Recently, I talked to a Spaniard who mentioned that after her last visit to Paris she had sworn never to visit Notre Dame again because it was such a horrible experience, involving being shepherded into a queue and only allowed in through one side door and out through the other, and being passed through the interior as if going through a line at airport security, surrounded by people snapping selfies with selfie sticks. She said she preferred her memories of visiting the place decades ago, when it was dark and echoing and empty, but felt "algo espiritual." We were discussing the problems of mass tourism in many places. (Venice and Bruges have surrendered completely, Barcelona is fighting but losing the battle, and Madrid and New York are teetering close to the dangerous edge.) Still, I thought of what she said specifically about Notre Dame when we approached Santa María, because it was as far as you can imagine from the world of selfie-sticks and tour buses.
We were following the route of the number 17 bus (it's a good route), and turned off the road toward a long, low, glass-paneled building that seemed in the dark to be sitting in the midst of a giant empty space, that my friends explained was the metro stop Eugenia de Montijo. The metro sits about a hundred meters from the street, in the midst of a park which slopes down between a large high school on one side and a gigantic urbanización with five or six high rise apartments on the other. (My friends explained with pride that they had been part of neighborhood demonstrations demanding that the abandoned TB sanatorium on the site be turned into a school, since there was at the time only one high school in the neighborhood, and it was filling with young families -- not to mention the thousands of apartments in the urbanizaciones built since.) Most parks in Madrid, unless they are very carefully cared for, consist of steep slopes with scrubby pine trees, and a mixture of sand, pebbles, and pine needles underfoot, sometimes marked off into pathways that are sandy pebbles and "lawns" where some tough, scrubby, grass fights the drought, and is gently padded by a carpet of decomposing needles. The park beyond Metro Eugenia de Montijo is no exception. The paths are more or less marked out by street lights at night, but the expanse of non-path had the aspect of a "descampado" as my friends put it, although further down the slope nearer the apartment buildings and the children's playgrounds people were doing evening walks with their dogs, and around the metro obviously there were people coming and going.
We wandered half on and half off the not terribly marked path and descampao toward a wall that in the dark merely loomed like a wall (though by daylight it's full of grafitti), and on our way back one of my friends commented that this was an area with a bad reputation to walk alone in at night. I would completely walk alone there. As I say, there were plenty of people exercising dogs and small children in perfect sight and hearing distance, and violent crime is practically unknown here. But it was a bit spooky, and without there being anything particularly violent going on, I can well believe that the darkened expanse lends itself to some discreet prostitution and drug use, if the occasion arises.
After crossing the park we reached the opposite street (the Calle Monseñor Oscar Romero), and headed up the hill around what was now obviously a cemetery wall, because even in the dark the streetlights and the moon made it possible to see the silhouettes of crosses and stone angels above the walls. On the left hand side my friend pointed out the marble and granite masons who make the statues and headstones, and have their workshop conveniently across from the cemetery. A polite sign on the cemetery gates (which were closed) explained that the cemetery was open Monday to Saturday from 9:00 to 15:00 and 16:00-18:00, and on Sundays in the mornings, and above it was another sign reminding people to please update their address and contact information at the office because plots without contact info would be considered unclaimed.
And then, looming up out of the dark, was the church. There were some lights on it, enough to see a rather annoyingly disfiguring grafitti tag on the ancient bricks, and to notice the window in the solid wall with its typical horseshoe arch, and the candy cane brick pattern, that has been repeated (with variations) for centuries by all the peoples touched in one way or another by the tradition of Al Andalus (though a good deal more modest than the flamboyant creations of Andalucía itself, or the neo-Moorish fantasy of the Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue). Going around the corner, we saw the facade and main entrance, leaning rather outwards in the manner of buildings that have had a few centuries of roof tiles added and are starting to bow under the extra ceiling weight. It is an impressive facade, although not completely perpendicular to the (admittedly slanting and shifting) ground.
The road dead-ends by the church and the cemetery gates, and turns into a dirt track, which eventually leads to the Avenida de los Poblados, and the famous Comísaria where I received my identity card and which I learned from my friends sits in the middle of desolate undeveloped land because it is all that remains of the infamous Carabanchel Prison, ripped down in 2008, but definitely not forgotten. (The thought occurs that the vacant lot between the church and the former prison may also be a cemetery of a kind, but at least officially it's not.)
In any case, while the church and the cemetery were both shut up tight for the night, it was kind of cool to be able to walk right up to what my friend said was a twelfth century building (though online I see that the consensus is thirteenth century with "elements" of the twelfth century in its construction) and wander around it in the deserted darkness. A plaque on the side of the building says that it is on the site of an earlier church were San Isidro Labrador (the patron saint of Madrid) prayed "when he worked these fields" and while there are certainly some dubious legends surrounding San Isidro, I find that contention more convincing than the one about the miraculous statue of the Virgin discovered on the site of the Catedral de la Almudena. These were certainly fields (up until the late twentieth century), and some of the online sources I found when researching the church today say that it seems to be on the site of a pre-Roman settlement (hence the name "Vía Carpetana" and the metro station Carpetana, with its paleolithic remains and mammoth pictures. The "carpetos" are allegedly the people in the neighborhood before the Romans.) So if you were an eleventh-twelfth century serf in medieval Madrid, you might well travel this far from the city in the course of a work day (it would be a longish walk to the Puerta de Toledo, which was more or less the end of Madrid proper, but not beyond what people would regularly do in the country). And if you were a praying serf, you might well stop if there was some kind of church or shrine in the area.
After wandering around the building we headed back the way we had come, toward the metro station (and my friends' home). A wind had sprung up, and was blowing in our faces, but it wasn't too cold, and there were actually a few droplets of rain that tickled our hair and cheeks, and the wind seemed to brush the skin rather than mercilessly dry it out. There was cloud cover too, so I got to see the reddish glare of city lights off of clouds that makes the night lighter, and that I have missed here, where the stars are always so high and clear and far away. It was a lovely ending to a lovely afternoon and evening, and when I walked home after thanking my friends for their company and for showing me Santa María I joined the shoppers on the Calle de la Oca, and stopped to purchase dishwasher detergent (in light of my cooking adventures and temporarily unusable sink). I am happy to report that my dishwasher works well.
So that was my happy, slightly belated, Thanksgiving. In some ways very similar to what I do at home (the pattern of cooking and cleaning and eating and then going out afterwards to walk at night), and in some ways it had wonderful variants (a medieval church!). While I miss the people I normally spend Thanksgiving with (I send hugs to all you guys), I couldn't have asked for better friends (or better eaters) here. I am lucky.
Today, after getting the sink fixed and doing the laundry that I didn't do yesterday due to plumbing issues, I retraced my steps from last night in the brilliant afternoon sunlight (alas, the promised rain slipped away in the night and it is once more clear and cool), and took some pictures of the Ermita Santa María de la Antigua and its environs in the yellow side-lighting that makes everything look pretty. I include them below, for your enjoyment.
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| The park and urbanizaciones looking toward metro Eugenia de Montijo. There was no way to avoid including the photographer's elongated shadow at this time of day and with this light. |
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| Tinkly boleros playing from a stereo speaker by this group of friends made this an idyllic afternoon scene. |
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| The granite and marble workers shed and truck, ready for work on Monday. |
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| The entrance to the cementerio de Carabanchel |
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| The first view of Santa María la Antigua - note horseshoe window at left. |
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| See, I wasn't kidding about the shadows. I should say for accuracy's sake that it was about 13 degrees C (55 F) when I took these, and I was wearing a warm coat. It may look warm, but it isn't really. |
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| Horseshoe brickwork, with modern graffiti. I do not find the graffiti picturesque, but I did write a seminar paper about sixteenth century graffiti in older churches, so perhaps in a few hundred years it will be part of the scenery, if the species lasts that long. |
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| Shadowed portal...or portal with shadows |
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| Detail of Mudéjar window in Romanesque construction. |
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