Caldereta

No time to blog yet, but I thought I'd add a post about a typical village celebration, the caldereta. This comes from the word caldero, which is a big metal (traditionally copper) cooking pot. The caldereta is an event that harks back to the days of yore when many of the villagers were shepherds and spent the winter months accompanying the sheep in greener pastures. They brought along their pots, and ate stewed sheep meat (would that be mutton, in the way that pig meat is pork and cow meat is beef? Or is mutton something else? In any case, I think the most appropriate way to describe this particular type of meal is "sheep meat," given the givens.)

So, in this celebration, the people --many of whom grew up in the village but moved away to find work when they grew up, and many of whom are the now-grown children of those who moved away many years ago but still come back in the summers-- gather around pots of stewed sheep meat and eat it as the shepherds used to, with no plate, just a hunk of bread to balance it on. The meat is cooked elsewhere and then the pots are brought in and set around the plaza on the ground, and people bend over to spear chunks of the meat with their forks. There are also long tables laden with plates of Spanish omelette, strips of cured ham, spicy sausage, and slices of cured sheep's milk cheese. Not to mention the potato chips, which is about all my kids ate-- they positioned themselves in front of the basket of chips at one of the tables and went to town. Oh, and drank copious amounts of orange Fanta. Oh well. The adults drank wine or limonada, a delicious drink involving wine, sweetened carbonated water (gaseosa), and some liquor-- yes, it sounds terrible, but it's really good. There might be some lemon Fanta in there, too. Who knows. Then there is lots of watermelon and honeydew melon for dessert.









Anyway, every year I think about taking pictures and blogging them, but it was only this year that I got the nerve to take out my camera and actually do it. So, enjoy!