Viva Mallorca!: One Mallorcan Autumn by Peter Kerr

Author:Peter Kerr [Kerr, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Sociology, Majorca, Customs & Traditions, Travel, Spain & Portugal, Essays & Travelogues, Oranges, General, Majorca (Spain), Rural, Farm life, Spain, Social Science
ISBN: 9781592286188
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2005-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

COMING HOME, OR GOING HOME?

them up, we still have to pull all their jackets off by hand like this, nut by single nut.’

‘A bit hard on the fingers,’ Sandy remarked, having a go at de-husking an almond himself. ‘Jeez – must be a machine for doing this, no?’

‘No doubt,’ I said, ‘but hardly worth it for us to spend good money buying one, not for the few sacks of almonds we’ll finish up with.’

‘Even so, it’ll take ages doing it by hand.’ Sandy placed his newly-hulled almond on a rock, picked up a large stone, cracked open the shell and flicked the plump kernel into his mouth. ‘Hope it pays at the end of the day.’

I answered with a shrug, knowing within myself that all the work of harvesting the almonds, de-husking them, spreading them out to dry in the sun, then gathering them up in sacks would prove not to be worth the bother financially. It’d probably be a waste of time and petrol to take such a small quantity all the way to the almond mill run by the farmers’ co-operative near Consell over in the middle of the island. By the same token, Mallorca’s renowned international trade in almonds was hardly likely to founder for want of our insignificant input. So, instead of taking them to be ground down for culinary purposes, or to end up in some of the thousands of packets of delicious sugared almonds that are sold on the island every year, we’d probably just store ours in the almacén for our own consumption, with any surplus being used, like most of our kakis, for bartering purposes. We had already learned how handy the dry husks and shells are for kindling the fire during the winter, and it’s surprising how many almonds you can consume when they are as fresh-from-the-tree good as Sandy had just discovered them to be.

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