Lucky those who have been able to admire in an oil painting a typical kitchen from Puebla from the 19th century with its beautiful talavera tiles; the stove and laundry room; in addition to the utensils of the time with which food was prepared and preserved. Well, it was one of those objects, now extinct, that gave rise to the phrase “one eye to the cat and the other to the doodle”.
The times of Mexican kitchens without a refrigerator or the phrase “one eye to the cat and the other to the scribble”
In nineteenth-century kitchens there was an object known as a doodle, and no, it wasn’t that irregular line on paper, but a utensil to preserve sausages day and night, such as chorizo and cured ham; as well as dried meat and fish.
Let us remember that, in the absence of a refrigerator, human ingenuity developed the doodle, which kept food fresh simply with air currents. This utensil was defined in the Theoretical, Practical, Historical and Geographical Dictionary of Commercewritten by Jaime Boy and published in Barcelona, Spain in 1840 as “a wooden instrument, which the porters use to transport merchandise and other loads, so called because of some little sticks in the shape of scribbles that are on the bottom”.
In the same way, the Royal Spanish Academy defines the scribble as the “iron instrument with a tip in the shape of a semicircle, which is used to hang something, or to grab or grab it.”
Consequently, either as a wooden board or as a metal hook, the scribble allowed food to be held high not only to keep it fresh but also to prevent house cats, or any animal with claws, from getting hold of it. .
Have you ever heard the phrase “with one eye to the cat and another to the scribble”?
This piece is a doodle, it is a hook that is used to hang bags of food and thus, keep them away from the claws of animals.
👉https://t.co/ciAQajW3L0 pic.twitter.com/zmk9jRRkKP— National Museum of Anthropology (@mna_inah) April 17, 2018
The persistence of cats
And it is that anyone who has had a cat as a pet will know that these animals are characterized by their perseverance and not only that, but also by their agility, since they can jump up to seven times their height, that is, about 3.5 meters.
Consequently, despite the doodle, the cooks had to be vigilant to prevent the cats from stealing their sausages.
Finally, this phrase, like many others, was passed from mouth to mouth, generation after generation until reaching our days to refer to the need to pay attention to two things at the same time.