CHAPTER TWELVE + + + NUTS AND NUTS + + + POLYRHYTHMIA

Being shelling the nuts several days in advance. For that is a big job to which many hours must be devoted. After the shell is removes, you still have to take off the skin, not a single bit, is left clinging to the nuts, because when they ground and mixed with the cream, any skin will make the nut sauce bitter, and all of your previous work will have been nothing.
Tita and Chencha were finishing shelling the nuts sitting around the kitchen table. The nuts were to be used for the chillies nuts souse they would be serving as the main course at the next day ‘s wedding. All the other members of the family had gone, deserting the kitchen table on the pretext or another. Only these two indefatigable women were continuing to the bottom of the mountain. To tell the truth, Tita didn’t blame the others. They had given her enough help already that week; she knew quite well that it wasn’t easy to shell a thousand nuts without getting sick of it. The only person she knew who could do it without any sign of fatigue was Mama Elena.
Not only could crack sack after sack of nuts in a short time, she seemed to take great pleasure in doing it.
Applying pleasure, smashing to bits skinning, those were among her favourite activities. The hours just flew by when she sat on the patio with a sack of nuts between her legs, not getting up until she was done it with it.
For her it would have been child’s play to crack those thousand nuts, which required so much effort from everyone else. They needed that enormous quantity because for each twenty five chillies they had to shell one hundred nuts; so it figured that two hundred and fifty chillies, they needed thousand nuts. They had invited eighty people to the wedding, between relatives and close friends, each one could eat three chillies if they wanted, a fairly generous estimate. This was to be quite wedding; none the less, Tita wanted to give a twenty course banquet the like of which had never been given before, and , of course, she couldn’t leave the delicate chillies in walnut sauce off the menu, even though they took so much work- such a memorable occasion surely warranted it. It didn’t matter to Tita if she had black fingers after taking the skin off so many nuts.