A Spanish breakfast

Breakfast goes like this in Spain.


If you, like me, stay in places where the price is too low to include breakfast, you walk out into a crisp cool morning and your brain already perks up a little. Especially inland, even at the height of summer, you will get a cold night. You go to any of a number of similar looking cafes. There will be a counter where coffee drinkers sit on stools and pay a little less. But like me, you want more substantial than café solo or café con leche so you sit at a table and the waitress will come around. The standard deal is coffee, a piece of pastry, and a glass of zumo de naranja, freshly squeezed orange juice. The orange juice will be extracted by a machine with a name like Zummo. This machine will have a hopper where oranges run down a chute to be sliced and squeezed by the machine and the juice will run into a waiting jug. The orange juice is usually tart so they give you an extra sachet of sugar, in case you must have it sweet. The pastry you get to choose between various bollerias, such as a croissant or an ensaïmada, a pastry of Majorcan origin. The croissant is not made from puff pastry by the way so it's fairly solid, more like a brioche.


You get a carbohydrate hit, a sugar hit, a caffeine hit and a Vitamin C hit. Now you are prepared for whatever the day can throw at you. All's well with the world!


Ah, but there is always a flaw in any perfect picture. Those pesky Spanish smokers! ¡Malditos fumadores!