article
by Catherine Harper
In terms of history, this place we live in is very strange. Of the many ways I might have meant this, right now I am talking about food. We are a people who mostly do not need to exert themselves physically for their livings, a people mostly well-clad against the cold and well-nourished against illness. We have available to us such richness that we have glutted ourselves on the fat of the land, that those who choose to can eat meat at every meal. Milk, eggs and butter are cheap and plentiful. We are so surrounded by such wealth that like the air we breathe we seldom think of it...but unlike air, which we need in great quantity and great concentration, the richness of the food we eat is almost fit to choke us.
So it perhaps shouldn't be any surprise that fat is something seldom kindly spoken of. When it comes to rich foods, we are all too often at war with our own bodies, and our own histories.
Some months ago, discussing the many failings of institutional food, a friend remarked that one of the problems with eating at the work cafeteria is they have too well learned the lesson that the cheapest way to make food taste better was to add fat or sugar to it. How long, I wonder, would one have to turn back the clock before this phrase would have been incomprehensible? Fat, the cheapest option? Our culture, our grandparents, our society and our very bodily hungers were shaped by a very different world. In the last century (how strange it seems to write that) most of these foods were rationed during the wars, a kind of privation that can be difficult to understand for even the relatively impoverished in this country. Not so much further back, the rationing was much simpler -- only the very rich had the option of gluttony. Our very concept of health has turned on its head, the health conscious no longer seeking rich, nourishing food but instead imposing on themselves a kind of voluntary and often expensive privation, a decorous fasting on the lean and the skim.
The language of ritual is symbols. If we try to attune ourselves to the turnings of the earth, if we are going to try and understand the directness of our an-cestors' depen-dence on the earth and how the patterns of the natural world that so predated the existence of humans, much less the rise of human civilizations, shaped their lives, we need to step back from our own perspective. We need to not only recreate or remake their rituals, but we need to understand the content of those rituals, understand when offering milk, honey and yeast to the land where these substances came from, what they meant and what it meant to give them up, or give them back. What can we mean by first fruits when we have not gone without fresh fruit (or at least its familiar grocery store facsimile)? What does it mean to share cakes and ale when food is not plentiful, and the individual's involvement with the production of food much more direct? For if the language of ritual is symbols, in magic those symbols have no leverage without a reference point; a symbol is little without an understanding of the reality that brought it forth.
So a few thoughts, for perspective.
Agrarian societies worldwide have relied on the production of high-carbohydrate food to meet most of their caloric needs. For Western Europe, until relatively late along in things, this was mostly cereal grains -- wheat and its close cousins where you could grow them, oats and rye in other climes, various others depending on where and when you were. (Think "oatmeal for breakfast, oatmeal for lunch, oatmeal for dinner" -- and not oatmeal laden with butter, sugar and cream unless you were living high on the hog an-other of these phrases pointing towards the past wealth signified by fat!) Fruits and vegetables, as locally available, added seasonal variety, not to mention some great health benefits, but cereals were the things for the most part that kept body and soul together. For most people, the additional required protein complement was provided mostly by legumes -- a necessity recognized by the fact that some of the strictest laws (and most frequent lawsuits) related to harvesting and apportionment in many areas of medieval western Europe dealt with peas, vetch and other such protein-laden field crops.
Worldwide, the pairings are famous... beans and rice, peas and bread, beans and corns and squash (especially those squash seeds), potatoes, yams.... You get the idea, and for any one area you'd be lucky to have more than one such happy marriage of food-stuff. Yes, there was meat, but meat was a rarity, and all animal products a thing of trade-offs -- if you milk your sheep, you reduce the quality of the wool. If you eat your lamb, you have less sheep. Land that you graze your stock upon is land that you aren't growing that grain with which you can feed your family... and you can feed a lot more people with a field of grain than a field of cows. In the south, people were blessed with the olive, that source of shade, of wood, of fruit and best of all of a pure lasting edible oil, oil that made your food more filling, more flavorful and more digestible -- and yet even olive oil wasn't cheap. In the North, while other nut and seed oils were available, most of this niche was filled by butter and lard, both falling under the restrictions of animal products in general, neither as easy to preserve, especially since butter can only be made during those months where your animals are giving milk, and most of those months are warm.
Eggs, too, are seasonal. And yet what a marvel, a sweet, fresh egg, rich and creamy. How many meals of oats and beans over the course of a winter would it take before your dreams would be haunted by the thought of those brighter greener days when the hens start laying and the cows giving milk? How in these days of plenty and seasonless food (for good and for ill) can we even understand that kind of hunger, the hunger of even a mild winter when the pantries were full? (One might cynically comment that such hungers are among many well-known in parts of the world.)
But here we are, on the eve of the Vernal Equinox, with the trees budding, and the grass growing thick and emerald. Is there a way we can understand, touch and perhaps then even assuage these ancient hungers?
1 ½ cups whole organic milk
Dollop cream (optional)
3 egg yolks
Honey or sugar
Flavoring (if desired)
Warm the milk and cream in a double boiler (you can do this without the double boiler if you have a thick-bottomed pot and a burner that you trust, and keep an eye on the pot) until it is the temperature of bath water. Whisk in the two egg yolks, and increase the heat, stirring continuously, until the mixture thickens. Add honey or sugar to taste, and flavoring if desired -- the honey has a strong enough flavor on its own, and there's something to be said for enjoying the taste of fresh eggs and sweet milk. But vanilla, or a dollop of your favorite sweet liquor, is also a fine addition.
It's hard to provide a vegan option when the subject of discussion is mostly calorie-laden animal products, but the fat of the land does not always have to be animal fat.
1 ½ cup almond milk*
1-2 tablespoons arrowroot (or cornstarch, in a pinch)
Sweetening according to your taste (sugar or the lighter syrups do a better job in not overwhelming the almond flavor, but then American almonds tend to be tasteless)
Flavoring (as desired)
Whisk the starch into the almond milk, and heat the mixture in a double boiler (or not, as above) until it thickens. Add sweetening and flavoring to taste -- one might add a little almond flavoring if your almonds are bland, or flavor it in a popular medieval fashion with rosewater. Or let it stand on its own.
* You can make almond milk putting a cup full of almonds with 1 ¾ cup water in the blender, blending them on high until smooth and then some, and then straining the mixture. The finer a strainer you use the smoother a milk, but the less rich it will be. I have strained almond milk through muslin with good results, in same way one would strain jelly.
1 can coconut cream
4 tablespoons glutinous rice flour
Sugar to taste
Preparation is same as in above. Beware, this is evil. It will set to the consistency of Jell-O when cooked and can be cut into shapes in similar fashion.
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