Luis Angel Munoz Zuniga
Western Daily Special
Ten years ago, in 2013, it was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Nation, that old Cali custom of godparents who congratulate their godchildren by giving them flower pots. According to oral tradition and the accounts of some chroniclers, Dorotea Sánchez, an Afro-descendant woman who lived in San Antonio, who was humble to the point of not having enough money to buy her son a gift on his birthday, disclosed the luck of having received a miracle granted by Saint Peter and Saint Paul, who after attending to his request taught him to prepare alfeñiques for the celebration. The pots are made of maguey rafts, adorned with figurines molded with sugar dough and colored ribbons.
On June 29, the people of Cali celebrate godchildren’s day in a particular way, since for more than half a century, godparents have adopted the flowerpot as an icon. This gift for godchildren has a background in the ancient national gastronomic art of preparing sweets and in the flattering custom of giving sweets, rooted in tradition and recorded in literature. But the Cali celebration, which took as its emblematic object a maguey pot decorated with sugar dough figures, called itself a borrowed word, since this term was coined earlier and represents the custom derived from gardening, consisting of giving plants in small pots (pots).
Before referring to the pots from Cali, let’s review “Los maderos de San Juan”, a children’s round that we once chanted with the verses of José Asunción Silva, which pay homage to the alfeñique, that is, the figures in the pot. In “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, Úrsula Iguarán begins her own business in Macondo, producing figurines of caramel animals. These two literary examples show that delighting children, and why not, also adults, is a social custom that dates back to the past. Hence the title of this Culture report, in homage to the poem “La Dulzada” by Ángel Cuervo, and the chronicles about the custom of giving flower pots, narrated by Raúl Silva Holguín.
the sweet
Don Ángel Cuervo, brother of the linguist Rufino, was born in Bogotá in 1838 and died in France in 1896. La Dulzada is an epic poem of caramel, smiling and burlesque, -says Eduardo Guzmán Esponda-, where the wafer becomes the Elena, from this Iliad of alfeñique, deals with the struggles between confectionery and gastronomy, between the traditional and the new coming from France, England and the United States, from Bogotá in the 1960s. Gastronomic humor has been joined by historical humor”. La Dulzada”, published in 1867, in the printing house of Don Nicolás Gómez, reads in its prologue: “La Dulzada, jácara without salt or sweet, for those who do not pay the six reales for her copy. Poem in eight songs and an epilogue, by the last man from Santa Fe”. A century later, in 1973, the Caro y Cuervo Institute rescued the work and, then, published a second edition. All the sweets parade, from those that tempt children at the school gates, to those that sweeten banquets as desserts.
wimps and candies
“Sawdust/ Sawdust/ The maderos of San Juan, / ask for cheese, ask for bread, / those of Roque/ alfandoque/ those of Rique/ alfeñique/ Those of triqui/ triqui, tran! (The logs of San Juan. José Asunción Silva)
“In that extravagant house, Ursula strove to preserve common sense, having enlarged the business of little caramel animals with an oven that turned out baskets and baskets of bread all night and a prodigious variety of puddings, meringues, and biscuits, which vanished in no time. few hours through the twists and turns of the swamp.” (One Hundred Years of Solitude, page 53).
sweetest harmony
“La Dulzada” is a poem made up of eight songs, each with more than twenty verses. Ángel Cuervo, its author, composed verses of singularly sweet harmony, which stimulates elation, pleasure and joy: “Come, then, sweet geniuses of my childhood / To flap those delicious wings / With which you sweetened the little room / How many He gave me precious hours./ Come and let my pen without boasting/ Commemorate those things to the world/ That haughty time wants to bury/ In the abyss where everything dies/. The panuchas, meringues and cocadas/ the friar ears and the wafers,/ the yolks, caramels and curds,/ Alfeñiques, tomatoes and sprinkles/ I looked around with quick glances,/ Without being able to fix my ideas/ About which of those sweets it would be for me / Tastier and longer would last”.
Cali tradition
“On the eve of the Sánchez brothers’ birthday, the mother did not have a single real to celebrate it and she only had a little sugar for bread and decided to prepare canned sweets for them, thinking she could find figs and lemons in the orchard. But when looking for them, there was nothing in the lot. However, she made a fire in all three of the tulpas and put the copper pan that she had inherited from her grandmother Martina in them and poured water and sugar into the container. And while she heated the mixture, she reflected: But I don’t have cinnamon, or cloves, or sweet pepper. Geez, just sweetwater… It can’t be. If Saint Peter and Saint Paul came to help me… And she named them the second godparents of her children. This is how the legend of the pots was born. (Traditions from Cali. Raúl Silva Holguín).