Bull Fights and Pult

A bull fight in Puerta Vallarta (courtesy, John Belshaw)

On our run last Friday, my colleague and friend John Belshaw had lots to say about his recent holiday with his wife Diane to the Mexican west coast resort of Puerta Vallarta. Westjet, a Canadian airline company, has been making runs from Canadian cities to Puerta Vallarta directly for a few years now, and John said that the local entrepreneurs have adjusted to the change in tourist demography in dramatic ways.  Instead of vendors hawking blankets on the beach, they now sell ponchos with 'Saskatchewan Rough Riders' stitched onto the back, or 'Vancouver Canucks', or 'Calgary Flames'.  Pubs sell Molson Canadian beer, and Labatt's Blue. 

John and Diane also went to a bull fight.  Happily, the bull had been drugged to reduce the chances of yet another Picador getting gored.  The stands were filled with both locals and tourists.  John and I discussed that this was kind of odd, because in the mother country of Spain, bull rings have been replaced almost completely by soccer stadia.  Cesc Fabregas and other Spanish soccer stars are the new Matadors and Picadors.  In Puerta Vallarta, the locals are hanging onto something Spanish, perhaps because they want to maintain such cultural links to the 'home' country, or perhaps because they are accommodating tourists' stereo-types of things Mexican.  If I close my eyes, I can picture row upon row of tourists with really big sombreros and ponchos with 'Saskatchewan Roughriders' sewn on their backs, cheering while drinking far too many Molson's Canadian beer.  Later on that day one of them just might go back to that hotel gift shop and buy the really special onyx chess set, the one with stone work on the back in the shape of a maple leaf.

The accursed pult

And this all reminded me of 'pult'.  Pult is a Swedish dish that my mom made when we were kids in a bid to celebrate the Swedish heritage of my father's side (see previous post).  As I remember it, pult was kind of like a dumpling, and like so many things Swedish and Christmas-sy, almost devoid of any taste or texture.  Another winner was Luttfisk:  herring cured in lye so that the tissues are broken down to the atomic level (an un-Swedish uncle once described it as 'boiled snot').  Imagine a plate full of tasteless dumplings and Luttfisk: Christmas dinner at our house was special. 

Luttfisk (on the right) is another Swedish culinary delight

I was on an archaeological expedition in Jordan three times with Lisa Soderbaum, a Swede with a great sense of humour.  One day I told her about pult, and how we ate it every Christmas when I was a kid. She informed me that her grandmother had eaten pult when she was a child, but that no-one in Sweden had eaten the stuff in probably three generations.  Like so many else, immigrants to a new country will hold onto cultural things and freeze them in time, while the mother country's culture continues to change, embracing new things, discarding other things. (I think there is a word for this: if you know it, please let me know in a comment to this post).

Perhaps in the same way that some Mexicans continue to slaughter bulls for fun, long after the mother country has found a little white ball far more interesting, we continued to eat pult generations after real Swedes had said goodbye to all that.