In planning for this trip with my midwives, I agreed to three nutritional conditions:
1) Drink enough water, to the point of preventing thirst. Which is to say, do not get dehydrated. To ensure I do not, I’ve been carrying between 1.5-2 liters (three to five pounds) of water a day.
2) Avoid hunger, which is to say, try to keep up with calories, which I estimate to mean, shoot for at least 3,000 a day. After a few hungry days in the beginning of the trip when many anticipated cafes and restaurants were closed, I’ve been carrying snacks and/or an “emergency” sandwich, and doing my best to eat something every 90 minutes.
Lastly, 3) Get enough protein, ideally at least 60-100g a day. Normally a veggie-pescatarian, this has required me to relax into general flexitarian status. When available, I order chicken or fish. Otherwise, I eat what’s served, unless it’s beef. To hit my protein target, I usually have to eat a big lunch and dinner, get at least one serving of Greek yogurt, and have at least one portion of Spanish tortilla, a kind of quiche-omelette of potatoes and eggs available at most any time of day in most bars across Spain.
I thought I was doing quite well. That is, until early last week when I had an unexpectedly bad food day.
It was a confluence of factors. I woke up in a tiny town without a grocery store where the lone coffee shop only had a Spanish tortilla for breakfast. Don’t get me wrong—I love me some egg and potato omelette in the morning. But in the last three weeks, I’ve eaten more than a dozen slices of tortilla for either breakfast, lunch, or dinner. I’ve learned it’s not quite enough food to fuel the day. This one was still cold from having been refrigerated, despite being heated in a toaster oven. To its credit, it came with two slices of toast instead of the typical hunk of bread, and I asked for butter (though not traditional) in hopes of adding a few extra calories to the meal.
Between the tortilla and my next stop, I walked seven miles, mostly uphill, and arrived in the town of San Juan de Ortega, which turned out to be a village of 200, home to a large monastery, currently closed to pilgrims, and not much else. I encountered two small bars with tiny menus that seemed to consist primarily of eggs. I ordered a cheese omelette and a “raccion” of asparagus, in season in Spain right now, but this bunch were, unfortunately, canned. I asked for mayonnaise to go with the asparagus, ate all the bread that came with the omelette, and prayed for a good three-course dinner at my final destination.
I walked into the small town of Atapuerca at 4:30pm and asked my hosteleros about dinner. They didn’t provide it, but said there were three good restaurants and a bar in town, all of which should have dinner options. Around 7:30, I set out for the restaurant I’d selected to find it closed. I made the rounds to the other two and found the same: all closed on Mondays. I walked into the bar to find the owner smoking a cigarette inside, watching TV. His menu, too, consisted primary of fried eggs, French fries, and various cured meats. I knew another meal of eggs was not what either me or the baby needed and I wasn’t prepared to eat blood sausage (a specialty of the region) for dinner. Nor was I going to sit for an hour in a cloud of secondhand smoke. I thanked him and left.
I called one of the hosteleros and informed him that the restaurants were closed.
Could I buy some supplies from the little shop in their albergue to make my own dinner? I asked.
I had caught him out of town so it took him 20 minutes to get there.
For €4, I bought a bag of rice, a box of creamed vegetable soup, and a can of white beans. I asked him about the head of garlic sitting on the shelf behind him and he offered me a few cloves for free.
The kitchen was small simple: two induction stovetops with a few odd-sized pots. I put the rice on to cook while I figured out what to do about the beans. They had clearly been jarred a good long while—they stuck together badly as I tried to free them from the jar. I rinsed them thoroughly and cooked them in oil, salt, and garlic and hoped for the best. I heated the soup as a “first course” once the rice had finished cooking.
By the time I sat down to eat, it was after 9 (ironically “on time” for Spanish dinner, but late for a pilgrim) and I was hungry. It turned out, I had over-salted the beans for fear of them being flavorless, which was unfortunate. While the meal seemed meager compared to the three-course menus I’d become accustomed to eating regularly, I realized it had been nearly three weeks since I had cooked anything at all. It also felt bizarrely strange and nostalgic to be eating beans on a Monday, albeit of a completely different variety, the same night we typically would at home.
During the early months of the pandemic, I started cooking black or red beans regularly as an easy way to make a large quantity of food that could be eaten over several days. When I was a child, my babysitter, Joyce, had always made large pots of red beans and I worked to recreate her recipe from memory, using fresh cilantro and a variety of other savory spices, including paprika, cumin, chili powder, and coriander as well as onion and garlic.
We soon discovered that black beans and rice were a fan favorite with the kids, so Mondays became “Mexican Monday” on which either Andy or I would prep a pot of beans in the morning, giving them time to cook on low heat for most of the day for maximum flavor and tenderness. Before I left, we marked our last night of rice and beans together as a family, knowing it would be at least seven weeks before we ate them together again.
As I sat alone eating my white beans and rice, I thought of how many meals I’d eaten alone over the last two weeks. A few times, I’d enjoyed the company of other pilgrims, either at a meal provided by an albergue, a coordinated meet up, or a random encounter. But the vast majority of my meals had been alone.
As the grandchild of an Italian-American grandmother, I was raised in the cult of “food is love,” but I’ve come to understand that the love translates best when it’s shared. Eating alone is an exercise in calorie consumption—am I meeting agreements 2 and 3? But eating with others nourishes both the body and the soul.
Without any other food options, the next morning, I ate the leftover rice and as much of the beans as I could stomach for breakfast and hit the road by 8. Later that afternoon, I arrived in Burgos, a large university city with plenty of food options, determined to make up for my missed calories and protein. Over the next 36 hours, I treated myself to three large and (relatively) expensive meals.
My first night, I went to one of Burgos’ best restaurants, La Fábrica (which didn’t open for dinner until 9pm) and was shown to a table for right right in the middle of the restaurant. I resisted the urge to bury myself in my phone and instead people-watched as I relished every bite of my meal: cod fritters, fried artichoke, lobster cannelloni, and house-made frozen yogurt with red fruit coulis.
The next day for lunch, I had a three-course menu del día of stewed lentils, fried bass, and flan. For dinner, I had stewed artichokes, recommended by the server, that were the most delicious artichoke I’ve ever eaten, followed by lamb chops I’d been dreaming about for all of the past week, served with French fries, and Spanish cheesecake for dessert.
I left Burgos satisfied that I’d overcome both my protein and calorie deficit, but resolved to make sure a bad food day didn’t happen again. For the next week, I made reservations exclusively at albergues that offered a community dinner or had a restaurant on site. The first night, I sat with more than a dozen people for a community dinner at an albergue aptly called Meeting Point and enjoyed my first paella of the journey, one of my favorite Spanish foods. The next night, I landed at an albergue owned by a Korean hostelera who prepared miso soup and tofu bibimbap for her guests, which felt strangely like a taste of home. The following night, I stayed at an albergue called “Juntos” (together) owned by a Dutch couple who prepared Indonesian-style fried rice and curried tofu for the six pilgrims staying there. A Spanish pilgrim was celebrating his birthday on the Camino and we all sang happy birthday and shared a brownie together after the meal in celebration.
The next night, I took a risk and booked a bed in a monastery without a dinner in Carrion de los Condes, a sizable town with plenty of restaurants. Walking through the town’s main plaza, I was flagged down by a pilgrim I had met a few nights before. She was sitting with others I’d met the previous evening. An Italian pilgrim rallied the group to a pizzeria, so even in a place where I might have found myself once again eating alone, I was surrounded by new friends.
The next night was Monday, a week since my dinner of white beans and rice in Atapuerca. I arrived at my albergue to find Dorothy, a Canadian woman I’d met almost two weeks prior. I expected her to be well ahead of me by now, but she’s fallen ill and been forced to take a rest day.
I caught a glimpse of myself in a bathroom mirror and remarked on how pregnant I looked.
“You definitely look more pregnant than the last time I saw you!” she said emphatically.
There was some comfort in having a witness to my gradual yet constant physical transformation.
That night, we ate dinner together in the albergue restaurant, inviting a Danish pilgrim who walked in at the same time to join us. As lone travelers, both Dorothy and I were sensitive to the benefit of eating with others.
That day I also passed the halfway mark, leaving only 19 nights, 20 days, and some 220 miles in my journey.
Tonight, I’m staying in a Benedictine monastery in the midway town of Sahagún which offers both a pilgrim mass and a potluck community dinner. As I sat in the chapel, listening to Padre Ángel celebrate the mass, I marveled at being inside a place that has witnessed the communion of pilgrims for more than 1,000 years. I shed a tear as I held the pilgrim candle and received the priest’s blessing, feeling the weight of the ritual.
Later that evening, three Benedictine brothers, including Padre Ángel, an albergue volunteer, and five pilgrims gathered for dinner. The food was an interesting collection of things: roasted potatoes and tuna, empanada, crab salad, Spanish tortilla, Camembert cheese, and of course bread. After everyone had eaten their fill, Ángel clinked his glass to call for silence to say a few words. He thanked us for choosing the Santa Cruz albergue for our night’s stay, explaining that without the pilgrim, there is no albergue. He hoped that we had enjoyed the shared meal, finding in it nourishment of both body and spirit. He wished us well on our journey, inviting us to send him a selfie in front of the Cathedral upon arriving in Santiago to add to their collection slowly beginning to spread across a facing wall. He wished us all an easy walk tomorrow and a good night’s sleep.
Pilgrimage is at its heart a solitary march into the unknown to more fully understand ourselves. But there, in the deepest, darkest moment of solitude, we discover: we are never alone.
So often the nourishment we need is found in being together.
blackbeans with steamed vegies in garlic sauce all made by me in solitude except the garluc sauce.
love your writing
hugs to you and baby
in Light and peace
i am walking vicariously.
tonight's meal (having eaten it hours ago) included black-eyed beans with green sauce : )