Note 17 — BOOK I.

Gripes and grumblings, in Spanish duelos y quebrantos; the true meaning of which the former translators have been at great pains to investigate, as the importance of the subject (no doubt) required. But their labours have, unhappily, ended in nothing else but conjectures, which, for the entertainment and instruction of our readers, we beg leave to repeat. One interprets the phrase into collops and eggs; ‘Being,’ saith he, ‘a very sorry dish.’ In this decision, however, he is contradicted by another commentator, who affirms, ‘It is a mess too good to mortify withal:’ neither can this virtuoso agree with a late editor, who translates the passage in question into an amlet; but takes occasion to fall out with Boyer for his description of that dish, which he most sagaciously understands to be a ‘bacon froize,’ or ‘rather fryze, from its being fried, from frit in French;’ and concludes with this judicious query, ‘After all these learned disquisitions, who knows but the author means a dish of nichils?’ If this was his meaning, indeed, surely we may venture to conclude, that fasting was very expensive in La Mancha; for the author mentions the duelos y quebrantos among those articles that confirmed three-fourths of the knight’s income.

Having considered this momentous affair with all the deliberation it deserves, we in our turn present the reader with cucumbers, greens, or pease-porridge, as the fruit of our industrious researches; being thereunto determined by the literal signification of the text, which is not ‘grumblings and groanings,’ as the last-mentioned ingenious annotator seems to think, but rather pains and breakings; and evidently points at such eatables as generate and expel wind; qualities (as every body knows) eminently inherent in those vegetables we have mentioned as our hero’s Saturday’s repast.