Daily Camera

MARKETS IN HAVANA
Some of the Interesting Sights Among the Stalls
Crowded at Daybreak when the Dealers from All Colors Arrive

The Havana market is crowded at daybreak by Spanish, French, Chinese and colored cooks of both sexes. Some chefs, who affect the dignity of a coat, are accompanied by their apprentices or scullions, who carry baskets. Spanish cooks, who usually are employed in second-class restaurants, wear flat, red woolen caps, and shuffle along slipshod with their baskets slung over their shoulders, while oblique-eyed Chinese wear all sorts of queer headgear, loose trousers and blouses. Colored women don bandanas, which lend a dash of color to the scene, as they waddle along through the market, their fat sides shaking with laughter, while they boisterously greet their friends as they go from stall to stall, haggling with the market men. Marketing is always done by cooks in Havana, because employers are aware that these can drive a better bargain, even taking into account the perquisites allowed them by tradespeople.

Golden, juicy oranges are symmetrically piled on the stalls, flanked by bunches of luscious yellow and red bananas and nutbrown zapotes which outwardly resemble an Irish potato but contain a luscious pulp inside that atones for their ugly exterior. Mameyes are a rich, dark red fruit, incased in a rind resembling bark. Besides these fruits there are roseapples with the perfume of the rose, fragrant pineapples, pomegranates, fresh figs, red or white guavas, star apples, almonds, tamarinds, anones, mamoneillos, alligator pears and guanabanas. The last have a prickly green rind and a white pulp like cotton wool, with black seeds, a most juicy and refreshing fruit, often used as a refreshing drink.

Cubans are fond of cooling drinks made of almonds, guanabanas, or tamarinds, and rarely take any other beverage for their luncheon.

Green cocoanuts contain a sweet liquid like water as well as a soft white pulp. Other tropical fruits which abound in Cuba are mangoes, chirimoyas and ciruelas, which are juicy and sweet. Fish caught in Cuban waters are especially nice, and the pargo, a species of red snapper, is very toothsome, as is the cherna, which tastes like salmon. No Havana cook will buy fish unless they are alive, and the fish market with big tanks full of fresh fish, with white marble slabs and scales, is very picturesque. The other sea food is also excellent, although the shrimps, lobsters and mussels are somewhat small. The oysters grow on the submerged branches of shrubs and trees on the coast. These branches are broken off and sold in the market, but the Cuban oysters are small and inferior to the American. Terrapin and turtles are very fine, and tortoises have handsome shells, which bring a good price in the market. Sea crabs and land crabs are also good. The latter grow to a large size, and their bodies stand high from the ground on their enormous claws. Landcrabs burrow in holes, and their locomotion is clumsy, sounding like that of a drunken man. Cooks feed these crabs on corn meal for several days before they cook them, as this makes them more palatable.

A favorite way of fattening poultry in Cuba is to put them in barrels and stuff them with walnuts and corn meal for several days before they are killed. Just before Christmas turkeys are driven through the streets in droves of from 40 to 100, from door to door, for people to make their own selection. This custom furnished the Spanish poet, Salvador Rueda, with a theme for a Christmas song. Guineahens, mountain rats and a variety of small birds afford plenty of game for sportsmen in Cuba.

Beef is killed the day before it is used, for it cannot be kept fresh longer than one day on account of the excessive heat.

When the cook returns from the market his presence is made known to the household by squawking ducks, cackling hens or squealing pigs, for all such live stock are brought from the market, and they expostulate angrily on being carried around in such close quarters. And pigeons and doves, with soft eyes, utter a cooing, plaintive note, as though with a sad foreboding of the tragic fate in store for them.

American cookery is almost unknown in Cuba, and the favorite cuisine is French, Spanish or Cuban. Good cooks command high wages. Families require two or more servants, according to their means, because every branch of domestic service is separate. A cook only attends to his kitchen, waitress to her table and a laundress to her department. -N. Y. Sun