Bread, water, clothes and pig slaughter in Valsalobre

Water from a single spring

Until running water arrived, Valsalobre had a single spring from which to carry water home. People had to go with the cántaro, an earthenware water jug, on their head, on a cloth ring or with nothing beneath it, and keep their balance uphill. It was also where boys and girls met: the young men lingered nearby, and sometimes a jug was emptied to go back for another.

At home, water was kept in large earthenware jars and jug stands. Dark botijos, drinking vessels with a spout, were for winter; white ones for summer, because the water came out cooler. There was no bathroom: people washed with a bucket or basin, and the stable or countryside served as the toilet. The streets were not surfaced. The houses, they say, were very poor but clean.

The washing

Clothes were washed in the river. A wash took three days: first they were soaped at home, the next day taken down to the river and spread on the meadow in the sun, and people had to return to wet them three or four times. Almost everything was white cotton, retor, a plain cotton cloth. In winter they had to break the ice and wash kneeling, or on a stone slab. Sheets were changed every eight or ten days.

Clothes were mended. Elbow patches, now worn as decoration, were then a necessity, and a girl would be taught to put on a corduroy patch without the reverse showing. Socks were made at home from sheep’s wool, then dyed blue or maroon. For Santiago’s day, the patron saint, girls were made a dress; the previous year’s became their everyday dress, in winter and summer, because there was no other. In the snow they wore rubber shoes, and their feet got wet all the same.

Bread in the village oven

The oven was communal and stood beside the town hall. Whoever had a sourdough starter kept it from one batch to the next. Flour was kneaded with water and the starter in a large trough; fifteen large round loaves could be made at once, to last fifteen days. In mid-morning they were carried in escriños, straw baskets, left to rise on boards covered with white cloths and put in the oven. Each household marked its bread with a cross or another sign.

The hornero, the oven keeper, was appointed by auction and ran the oven for one or two years: putting in firewood, preparing the oven and taking out the bread. He was paid with a loaf. The oven was also used for magdalenas, ring-shaped biscuits and festive sweets for San Antonio and Santiago. Another woman remembers three people being appointed and taking weekly turns, and that her mother was an oven keeper. When a bakery opened, the communal oven fell out of use, and by then, they say, people were already leaving.

Flour came from the mills on the road to Beteta, beyond a bridge. The miller went round the village with a horse collecting wheat and brought the flour back up the next day, keeping a share as payment. At home it was sifted: flour on one side, bran for pigs and hens on the other.

The pig slaughter

Every household held a matanza, the annual pig slaughter, in winter so the cured meat would dry properly. Some slaughtered two pigs. It lasted two or three days: one for the meal, another for making chorizos. The whole family took part. The guts had to be washed in the river or at the spring, and blood sausages were boiled in a large cauldron. The rest was stored in earthenware jars with oil, the summer store of food when people went harvesting. Hams were hung and bacon was eaten raw.

They also made zarajos, a dish of suckling lamb intestines. For children the slaughter was a celebration: they pulled the pig’s tail, kept the bladder, inflated it through a reed, left it to dry and bounced it like a ball at night. But there is one rule a villager recalls firmly: in winter nobody touched the chorizos or loin, even if they went hungry, because reaping and threshing would come later and they had to keep going.

Eggs and barter

Money was scarce, and hens’ eggs served as currency. They bought oil or sugar in the shop and were taken to Beteta, about six kilometres away, to sell. One man remembers his father packing them in boxes with straw and taking them by mule to Villanueva, where they were put on the roof of the scheduled coach bound for Madrid.

In autumn people came from the Alcarria, from Priego and surrounding villages, with grapes, peppers and olives, and exchanged them for potatoes. When one villager’s father could find nothing to take home, he went with two mules and his ten-year-old son to near Millana, in Guadalajara, to barter whatever he could for oil or wheat, when the Sacedón reservoir was being built. They took three days to arrive and, on the way back, the father, who had been imprisoned after the war, was terrified of the guards on the road. Potatoes, beans and chickpeas grew in the river valley, they say, and each household had a vegetable plot.

Was there hunger?

The testimonies disagree, and that is a good reason to record them all. A woman born in the early 1940s says she did not go hungry: they had pulses, wheat, beetroot and a pig for the whole year, even if there were no desserts. A man born in 1941 says there was hunger in his home. In that same conversation they recall how, when there was no wheat left in May, a mother pickled cucumbers while the father went down to Córdoba with the animals. And almost everyone agrees on one thing: at seven or eight they went weeding, hauling with mules and threshing, and payment for threshing was a ring-shaped bread. They were happy, they say, with what they had.