What Catalan tradition gives us the excuse to drink before lunch?


A typical spread for the hour of the vermouth. Photo by JaulaDeArdilla.
A typical spread for the hour of the vermouth. Photo by JaulaDeArdilla.
A typical spread for the hour of the vermouth. Photo by JaulaDeArdilla.

Lunch happens late in Catalonia, 2pm at the earliest, so you might get a bit thirsty or peckish.

Older Catalans, however, will let you in on a wonderful tradition that solves this problem (though it has unfortunately been dying out a bit over the last few decades): fer el vermut, or the hour of the vermouth. Around noon, especially after mass on a summer day, men gather in a café or outside on a sunny terrace to have a glass of vermouth with a bit of carbonated water and lemon. With this one eats various canned preserves (olives, anchovies, artichokes, cockles) or simple fried foods — squid, patates braves (fried potatoes with a spicy sauce), or perhaps cheese and fuet (a type of cured sausage). This may sound similar to the Basques’ evening-time tapas, but at the vermouth hour one generally eats less elaborate snacks, and they’re not served on little pieces of bread.

While young Catalans tend to be ignorant of this tradition, they do sometimes have a midday, pre-lunch snack sans vermouth, especially on Sundays, called simply the aperitiu.


Thanks for reading our treatises on cross-cultural boozing and boinking. On rare occasions, this site contains automatically monetized affiliate links.  As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

No Comment

Leave a reply

applications-internet.png

Comments Policy

We read the comments; useful additions and corrections are quite welcome, and articles are frequently updated based on comments from readers. • We do our best to delete ethnocentric, xenophobic, and other useless comments. • Offended? Think we've got your culture all wrong? Nationalism (or regionalism, patriotism, whatever) is an understandable reaction; it’s also boring. Disagree with something? Tell us what you think joking, flirting, drinking, sex, dancing and other debauchery in your culture is really like. If you don't like these things, or want to pretend that your culture doesn't have a unique take on them, you're really in the wrong place. • This site, like any cultural anthropology, deals in generalizations. Of course not each and every person does blah, blah, blah... • And finally, before you go thinking this is all about you, you may want to bounce around the site a bit and learn about the ridiculous ways we screw, drink, and dance in other parts of the world.
 

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.