“I like mine crispier”, to quote TheNavigator.

We’re standing in a line surrounded by children, considering the offerings of the chocolatería across the way.
Churros y Porras. The former I know as a deep fried, oil soaked extruded dough of no determinable food value and a calorific score that shatters the scales. They’re forever ingrained as a memory from an earlier journey through Al-Andaluz. We must have wild-camped, as we were cycling in the early dawn. We were certainly cold. A giant lenticular cloud like a pink UFO hung over the village chapel and the bright spectral glow from the bar’s door and the churro stand the only animation of life’s colour. An order of churros is placed, the brandy-laced hot chocolate rejected. Maybe because it was a Sunday, a fiesta day. What arrived was not as expected. Not the half dozen bread-stick like workaday churros depicted on the board, but a caracol, a snail’s spiral that fills a pizza box. Freshly cooked and hot. The memory is of that hot, that sweet, that instant gratification. Remarkable what hot oil and melting sugar can do for your soul.

The hot chocolate and brandy combination that we forsook has its own PB lexical name: ‘holy cow’. A ‘mondogreen’, a mis-hearing of ‘cola cao’, the patriotically branded Spanish equivalent to Cadbury’s offering.

That was ‘churros’, but what are ‘porras’? The Navigator hunts through brainrot. com, and I’m grateful that audio diction is disabled, given our present circumstances; surrounded by parents with clear eared children. Transpires that she inadvertently retrieves the Portuguese translation: slang for ‘sexual congress of an intimate nature’. The Spanish is only slightly less problematic: a joint or spliff. (In Italian it’s visually similar, only more prosaic, that member of the allium family; the leek).

But what are ‘Porras’, apart from being a bit risqué and verging on innuendo?
The answer seems to be a modification on a theme of deep-fried dough. It’s a Madrileños’ modified churro, only a bit fatter and more flaccid. Hence TheNavigator’s unintended double-entendre.