Sacred Food: Cooking for Spiritual Nourishment - Hardcover

Our ancestors found the world a terrifying place, and with good reason. How much more terrifying if the world was all there was. How else than by a Creator to explain the raw stuff of human existence—birth, death, famine, plague, the scary, and the unknown? By transforming the sacrifice through the skill of the cook, the offering becomes something more than it was. By creating a new thing—the transformation of water into wine, grain into bread, dead flesh into roast meat—humanity can take on a little of the nature of the divine.

Our ancestors saw the propitiation of the gods as a serious business: it was all that stood between the cave mouth and wild wood. In modern times, when so many of the festivals that marked the changing year have turned into municipal events, the primitive purpose of the celebration—the passing of winter storms, the return of the sun—may be airbrushed out, but the shadow remains, a ghost at the table. Although the gods of nature have mostly lost their place at the feast, the founding fathers of organized religions—whether Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Jew, or the humanist belief systems of the East—had the good sense not to ignore them completely. Certainly, the priests of the new order preached against the old—but they made sure their festivals did not change out of all recognition, remaining rooted in what had gone before. It is to this adaptability that the festivals owe their strength in the face of those who look for a rational explanation, their survival against all odds.

In an age when every schoolchild is aware of the structure of DNA, when our scientists are unraveling the skeins of the life itself, why should we need to mark the flowering of a cherry tree in some long abandoned garden? Or celebrate the gathering of harvest, when our larders—at least, those of the Western world—show no difference between summer and winter? Still less, count the passing of centuries from the inaccurately recorded date of the birth of a baby to a pair of unknown Palestinians in a stable in Judea? Traditions, whether religious or secular, are like spiders’ webs—impossible to unravel without destroying the fabric. In this far-from-comprehensive glance—history would claim too great a scope—at why and what we cook when we need to nourish the soul, I have looked to the spirit rather than the substance. The instinct that propels a Muslin to mark the birth of a baby or mourn the death of a loved one is in no way different from the sentiment that draws joy or sorrow from the devout Christian or the worshiper of the animist gods of the ancients.

Certain foods have universal significance but without requiring explanation from professors of ethnology. Seeds, nuts, fruit, eggs, and grains, signify renewal; new life from old. Blood, shed or shared, is a metaphor for sacrifice. Sweetness, sugar and honey, makes the heart glad. Wine and strong drink, together with some hallucinogenic substances extracted or obtained by one means or another, are useful to the priesthood, since they allow men to believe they are gods. These foods—presented and prepared in a million different ways, or absent and marked by regret at their absence—are to be found at the heart of all our rituals.
Kerala Wedding Coconut Curry
A delicately spiced dish of mixed vegetables colored with turmeric and enriched with yogurt, as prepared by the wedding cooks of Kerala, a southwestern coastal state. Many Indian vegetables, a smight be expected of a nation so dependent on the fruits of the earth, are gloriously unfamiliar outside the region. Among them are all manner of gourds both bitter and mild, drumstick beans, jack-plum seeds (a little like chestnuts), mangos and bananas eaten green, weirdly shaped and oddly flavored leaves, roots, and tubers of every shape and size. More familiar, but also in unusual shapes and sizes come onions, tomatoes, potatoes, carrot, eggplants, zucchini, celery, pumpkin, squash peppers, beans, okra—any or all of which can find themselves in a wedding curry.
8 to 10 servings
2 cups / 500 g freshly grated coconut
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
3–4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
2–3 green chilies, de-seeded and chopped
Salt
4 pounds / 1.8 kg mixed root vegetables, chopped
6 curry leaves, or 2 teaspoons curry powder
2 teaspoons ground tumeric
4 pounds / 1.8 kg mixed green vegetables, chopped
2 large plantains or 4 unripe bananas, peeled and chucked
2 green mangos, peeled and cubed
To finish:
2 cups / 500 ml plain yogurt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil (coconut, for preference)
Generous handful cilantro/coriander, chopped
1. Drop the grated coconut in the food processor with the cumin, garlic, chilies, and a little salt, and process to a paste. Or pound everything up in the mortar with a pestle. Reserve.
2. Put the root vegetables in a pot with the curry leaves (or powder), stir in the turmeric, add 1 teaspoon salt, bring to boil, turn down the heat, and simmer gently for about 15 minutes.
3. Add the remaining vegetables in the order of how long each needs to cook. Lastly, add the plantain and mango, bubble up, and simmer for a few more minutes to soften the fruit.
4. Just before serving, stir in the pounded coconut paste and the yogurt. Reheat gently (don’t let it boil), and finish with a swirl of oil and a sprinkle of cilantro/coriander.