Pilgrim Menu

50 days of walking over 800km requires sustenance and fortification. This comes from the ubiquitous, cheap and rarely changing 10 euro ($15) pilgrim menus that are offered at every cafe, the same for both lunch and dinner. And yes, the portions are huge and the quality variable. Very variable!

A menu of the day includes first and second course, dessert, a bottle of local wine, water and bread. All good I hear you say; however, the one complication is that the stratification between what makes a first course vs a second course bears only general resemblance to what you might expect. Each course on its own could feed a family of four. Here's a sample:

Primer Plato (a huge plate of....)

Mixed Salad (including tuna, egg and white asparagus)
Soup of Vegetables or lentils or beans of some variation
Paella
Bean stew
Spaghetti in tomato sauce


Segundo Plato (a reasonable to huge plate of....)

Pork steak and chips
Beef steak and chips
Chicken and chips
Trout and chips


Postre (actually quite a small, unintimidating helping given what has come before)

Rice pudding
Flan
Santiago almond tart
local cheese and quince paste
Cornetto/Viennetta
Yoghourt/Junket


This is all good but represents an enormous amount of food to eat and down a bottle of wine every day (which we rarely do) Even walking a million steps does not need this calorific intake especially by those trained to eat everything on the plate. We found this out after the initial excitement that a plate of paella the size of my head was an appetizer, and that we were putting on weight even with walking a half marathon every day. It seems that a main course is meat/fish and potatoes (usually fries), and a first course is anything that is not meat/fish and fries.

And sometimes the food is hot, sometimes cold and sometimes lukewarm. Another exciting variable is that not all the menus are written down, so in a fit of panic in the face of very busy wait staff you are making important decisions on the fly as they rattle off up to 20 options! And sometimes this is up to 10pm at night as the Spanish to not like to eat early.

We feel we have conquered the pilgrim menu now. Basic strategies involve not eating lunch (more than one pilgrim menu a day would kill you), being very disciplined with what we eat at breakfast based on the 2000 calories we downed at 9pm the night before, one of us ordering the ensalada mixta with no holds barred on the other choices, and reminding each other that we do not have to eat everything on the plate and drink the whole bottle of wine and eat all the bread or have coffee afterwards.

We are quite looking forward to not eating bread and/or fries again.