Porrón without any buts

In La teta i la lluna (1994), Bigas Luna invoked three "things that come out of the earth and make me look up to the sky" to describe the Catalan identity of the work: the calçots , the porrón, and the human towers. His film anticipated the audiovisual boom in human tower building, and the success of the calçotades has transformed Valls into the Catalan Bilbao (a calçot from Valls can be planted wherever it wants), but the porrón, alas, is not yet on the 21st-century agenda.

To correct this unforgivable oversight, the journalist Salvador Garcia-Arbós (Besalú, 1962) published Història galàctica del porró (Vibop), a monograph written in a delightful style that reviews the intricacies of this “curved glass container with two joined spouts, one thick, cylindrical and, generally, curved, to introduce the drink and hold it well to be able to lift it, and another conical one with a thin spout through which the liquid flows, to drink from a biscuit.”

Garcia-Arbós compiles a wealth of information and serves it up to us without getting dirty. Titius refers to the ability to raise the porrón and continue drinking while counting out loud, "one titius , two titius ... fifteen titius " without choking. My father was a champion in this discipline, eating breakfast "de forquilla," but Garcia-Arbós adds that today some speech therapists recommend using the porrón (with non-alcoholic liquids) for breathing control exercises. You drink from a small glass, swallow, and breathe.

What happened to the porrón? A monograph on porrón is published that vindicates it.

Joan Amades points to the Greek rhyton as the origin of the porrón, and Garcia-Arbós cites a beautiful first-century fresco from Herculaneum depicting a man drinking from a galete with the rhyton raised. It is housed in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, like so many antiquities preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius.

The geographer and environmentalist Martí Boada (Sant Celoni, 1949) holds the world record for counting titius (160, he counted, without lowering his porrón) and maintains that this long-distance race originates from Sant Hilari (a town invoked in so many toasts). The writings of Baron de Maldà already attest to a long-term drinking of porrón in Sant Julià de Vilatorta in 1808.

George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia (1938), speaks against the porrón. He says that it reminds him of bedbottles with white wine. Josep Pla, Blasco Ibáñez, and my uncle Roig Toqués from Vilanova i la Geltrú, who trained Juanita the carp to stick half her body out of the pond and drink from a small porrón, are in favor.

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Garcia-Arbós argues that the porrón isn't popular today because the wealthy don't want to expose themselves to ridicule, stain their clothes, or expose the inside of their mouths, but he maintains that there's no more hygienic way to consume liquids collectively. The porrón will have to be reclaimed everywhere, even if it means offering porróns of kombucha.