Fewer plastic bottles and more jugs. Carol Yepes (Getty Images)
Beverage can, portable coffee mug, cardboard birthday glass. The juice straw attached to the Tetra Brik like a spear of bengal. The ubiquitous plastic bottle, the crystal glass for the beer, the jug or the pint, the hundred models of glasses for the arrogant wine liturgies. When we drink, we put all kinds of objects made of tasteless materials in our mouths, but they touch our lips and tongue, they touch us and affect the enjoyment of the liquid we drink. Sometimes for the better, sometimes less: some beer cans taste of metal. Have you tried pouring the same can into a jug? Do it. The taste will be different.
This is not a nostalgic article about the lost Arcadia of the “rural world”. The porrón, the boot and the botijo, ancient artefacts, icons of the past, share a way of consumption, individual and collective, with a special pleasure worth embracing in these angry times.
First, they allow you to drink without intermediaries, squirting, bouncing the liquid in the mouth, making the drink a surprise and forcing you to concentrate, increasing your alertness and therefore pleasure. A double pleasure, because these three village paraphernalia also invite you to play: lifting them over your head involves considerable risk; The mouth becomes a basket, a guide to punching – not choking – which takes a little courage and some skill. How many stains on clothes, how many streaks running down the chin, down the neck and suddenly onto the chest. How many coughs and how many laughs promise these ancestors of the bottles.
Some social tools
The second virtue of this Trinity is precisely this: it brings people together. They are meant to be shared, they have no owner, they are common in the broadest sense. The botijo is placed on the threshold to receive the neighbor, the porrón is placed on the table so that they pass one by one. The boot is slung over the shoulder to offer to fellow passengers. It’s impossible not to be distasteful when talking about three inventions that are undeniably beautiful alongside their utility, or precisely because of it. Three crafts – pottery, glass and leather tanning – which over the years have been reduced to decoration and whose purpose at first becomes blurred. Regaining that use isn’t old-fashioned posturing, but another way of repositioning food as a social act, rather than a celebration that brings us closer. The porrón, the boot and the botijo refresh, just what we need.
“The truth is that with the heatwave we are selling more,” says Javier Real, promoter of Bootijo, a company that has been selling pieces by Bailén (Jaén) potters online for the past three years. Their website is a small encyclopedia of historical milestones: “The oldest jar in Spain is kept in the Archaeological Museum of Murcia and is more than 3,500 years old.” Development in history.” “There is no product on the market that can match it in terms of performance, reliability, simplicity and price.”
Less easy than we thought
Those of Bootijo are right: in 1995, in the American journal Chemical Engineering Education, the professors of the School of Industrial Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), Gabriel Pinto and José Ignacio Zubizarreta, published an article on the cooling system of one that we paradoxically always considered prosaic: “You are simpler than the mechanism of a jug,” goes the saying. The porosity of the clay acclimates the water with amazing efficiency, lowering the ambient temperature by up to 15 degrees, thanks to a system similar to human sweating. But of course you have to know how to deal with this tone: “We sell red and white clay jugs and have given both the website and the packaging a more modern image: I am a graphic designer and I was sorry that we heard something like that because we looked old,” Javier recalls.
“It’s true that the traditional is no longer used,” agrees Toño Naharro, a potter for 40 years and who has been running the Alma de cántaro workshop in Navarrete (La Rioja) for the last 20 years. There he makes commissioned works and trains future potters. Or rather the future, because girls generally sign up: “Out of 50 female students, only three are men.” Toño sells traditional pieces, “which I give a little twist: a jug without a handle, another with three handles.” A jug with one the history written on it… they are faithful and numbered pieces.” However, it invites you to use them, fill them up, grab them and offer them. “If you fill a pot and don’t use it for 24 hours, the water gets hot,” he recalls.
preserve the traditions
Like the jug or the boot, these containers give life when they receive it, when they are part of your routine. “In Catalonia we still keep the porrón tradition alive. “The small one for dessert wine, for example with its small plate for dried fruit,” says Pepi Granell, wife of Ramón Nualart, one of the last masters to draw glass with a pen, marking the outlines with gold and filling in with paint. Ramón embellished hundreds of porrones throughout his life, “especially from the Spanish city where there were many blowers”. In fact, some researchers see the birth of this invention in the once-thriving Catalan glass industry.
But 30 years later, crafts like those of Nualart in Castellar del Vallès (Barcelona) are not making enough money: “My husband is already retired and only makes pieces for friends. We have a 32-year-old daughter, but she saw that it wasn’t a way of earning a living, even though there were eight people working here in the end. We also made glass jugs, the normal one and the pentagonal one… Today you see them in the flea markets, from the emptied floors, with their stopper and their silver chain and no one knows what they cost”.
A handmade pitcherNUALART
There is a paradox in this forgotten memory in the roadside junkyards: 60% of the orders Toño receives at Alma de Cántaro come from “Michelin-starred restaurants” in search of exclusive, artisanal, signature tableware. When we switch to gourmet mode, customers value these “old” items because they take root in the foods they support in indescribable ways. We see them elegantly in restaurants, but we don’t think of buying them for home use.
Put a pitcher, pitcher or boot into your life. With the botijo you get life-giving water. With porrón, calimocho or beer. The trunk will be the home of your everyday wine. The three containers will give you decades of pleasure, they will open you up to the joy of language, you will laugh with the people you love and your purchase will support dwindling professions.
The art of the boat
“In Spain there are only five or six boatmen left who can do all the work involved in a boat and we are all fifty years old. It will be over when we retire,” laments Ismael Pérez of Botería Mairal, which was founded in Sariñena (Huesca) in 1898 and has been in chains for four generations. “This botería was opened by grandfather Luis Mairal when he returned from the war in Cuba.” A competition for which the Spanish government specifically mandated that assigned soldiers be given a wineskin as part of their regular gear. The design of these military boots was the work of Catalan Juan Naranjo, who standardized the shape.
“Botteros follow the same process as back then. In Sariñena there were many olive trees and the oil was transported in bowls that came back broken or punctured. These skins were tanned and boots were made from them. This is how Mairal works now, with goatskin, more flexible and ideal for grip on the pitch, the resinous mixture that makes the boot waterproof and allows the wine to be preserved. “We also make them with split leather, a derivative of calfskin, and for some years also with synthetic materials.” They can be put in the fridge and filled with bubbles, in the case of the lemonade that brightens the wine in summer and that of the traditional one Doesn’t tolerate leather boots.
They maintain the company with varieties of this type, but also with screen printing to personalize their products. And here’s another paradox: “We started writing by hand the names or the sentences that we were supposed to apply. But a lot of customers complained, because if they asked for more than one, they wouldn’t all be exactly the same, logically.” Because the value of craftsmanship lies precisely in this distinction: no two pieces are alike. Contempt for this chance springs from the same idiocy that makes us choose the box of identical tomatoes over the green-red or dented ones. “Ultimately, it comes down to knowing the value of things and the work behind them,” says Pepi Granell.
It’s not just about what we drink, but how we drink it
In his insightful essay “Gastrophysics,” psychology professor Charles Spence examines the number of neurological determinants that influence our perception of taste beyond taste. Analyzing the drink, he concludes that most modern packaging prevents enjoyment of the smell and reduces brain satisfaction. The cans, the straws or the voyeur slit on the coffee lid, a drink “that offers one of the most appreciated flavors in the world” but that we lose when consuming it in capsules so that it doesn’t spill while walking in our haste to caffeinated and orfidal.
How to calm down How can we give back to our tongues and noses what plastic, brass and cardboard steal from them? You can make the water, beer or wine crackle in your mouth. May the botijo refresh our neighborhood, may the jug replace the single bottle, and may we pull out of the trunk what no Riedel glass will ever achieve: a communal drink.
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