Have you ever had a good glass of porron? You can look up at the sky, turn your head and receive a new stream of wine or beer. This should be as good as Marcel Proust’s happy cakes, but no one has ever sung the praises of porron as brilliantly as it deserves. It’s not something I have found.
Josep Pla, the universal peasant only mentioned it once, and in passing, in his book El que hem menjat (What we ate, 1972). A book called “Viaje a pie” (1949) describes how Catalan fishermen screamed for a jug wine when they arrived in port. It was passed from one person to another and enjoyed as many times as you like, no matter who was consuming it. Pla says that the porron was part “a way to be generous and cheerful” that was lost 70 years ago to make way for a society that was more individualistic and boring.
The porron can also be used by proxy. It was created to be used in groups, so that people can share drinks in a safe and practical manner. The porron was created in an era when people ate from one pan. Slices of bread were used as plates and cutlery as they did not exist or were just as valuable as being able to carry them around and leave them as an inheritance.
Vases weren’t common at the end 14th century when the oldest known porron was made. It is made of blown glass, and it is small in size. However, it was not designed to be used as a jug, but rather to contain and administer medicine.
There were many artifacts with a porronil appearance in the pharmacy at the Cistercian monastery Santa Maria de Poblet (Tarragona). The Poblet porron is a famous drinking vessel, but it was probably used to measure or even to give enemas. The shape of a porron is not what makes it authentic. It’s the use. 600 years ago, the glass was too costly to be able make the popular cut utensils.
Drink to the throat
This is all told in the book El Porro: De Poblet A Nova York (Josep Mari Rovira 2019, 2019). If you notice that there are many Catalan names in this story, this is because porron is closely tied to Catalonia’s cuisine and folklore, and also has its historical origins in the Aragonese kingdom. Although it isn’t clear where the porron was created, we know that it came from Catalonia and Aragonese lands 200 years ago.
It was a tradition for centuries to drink with a biscuit, or neck. This is a simple way of letting the drink flow from the neck of he bottle to the inside of your mouth, without touching the lips. You drink from the boot with a biscuit, and the same goes for the jug. These containers will soon be adored and become the holy trinity of Iberian hunger.
We find the antecedent of all the vessels the rhyton, or rhyton in Antiquity. It was a cylindrical vessel made of animal horn or zoomorphic and had a hole at the tip for drinking from the neck. The eruption of Vesuvius preserved in Herculaneum a fresco depicting a man drinking from an rhyton. This is the exact same image that was recorded in the mind of one of the first visitors at Pompeii. It helped to establish the rhyton porron.
George Downing Whittington, an English travel historian and art historian, was born in 1803. After visiting the Herculaneum ruins, he set out on a journey from Genoa to Barcelona in March 1803. He was eager to explore the beauty of Spain and Portugal. His peninsular adventures were published three years later in the book “A tour through Portugal and Spain’s principal provinces”. There is a paragraph about the unique way the Catalan farmers drank wine. […] As you can see in the Herculaneum frescoes, this way of drinking was classic and ancient.
It is difficult to drink from a porron. Alejandro Dumas (the great French writer) was not able get it right when he visited Spain 1846. It was so embarrassing that he kept it alive until the end. He wrote that it was “one of the most unexpected hot flashes encountered by travelers in certain regions of Spain, particularly in Navarra or Lower Aragon”. You don’t want it happening to you, just like Dumas.
