RIP editor Judith Jones: She brought us Anne Frank, Julia Child, and many others

[Jones & Child; photo by Boston Globe]

From yesterday's New York Times:

Judith Jones, the editor who discovered Julia Child and advanced a generation of culinary writers that revolutionized cooking and tastes in American homes, and who for a half-century edited John Updike, Anne Tyler, John Hersey and other literary lions, died on Wednesday at her summer home in Walden, Vt. She was 93.

Nearly ten years ago, I reviewed Jones's memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, in [the late] Books and Culture magazine. Her book is still available, and I highly recommend it--especially if you love books, food, and Julia Child. If you like, you can read my review here.

The NYT obit writer and I chose the same wonderful quotation to end our articles. Here's my version:

Quoting an Italian saying, "At the table one never grows old," [Jones] asks, "Isn't that reason enough to come home at the end of the day, roll up one's sleeves, fire up the stove, and start smashing the garlic?"

Garlic, known universally as the stinking rose. Gather ye garlic cloves while ye may...

How to get perfect avocados nearly every time (public service announcement)

California Girl here. Been eating avocados voraciously for over 65 years. Could have started even younger: some of my grandbabies, as it happens, loved them from the get-go.

Not hard to choose. Not hard to know when ready. Do this and you'll rarely go wrong.

1. Buy only rock-hard avocados. If you need something for today's salad, get something else instead. Ripe avocados in grocery stores are almost always bruised and turning brown inside. Maybe even stringy. Yuck. Bonus tip: Trader Joe's avocados are usually the best. Often the cheapest, too.

2. Let your avocado ripen on your countertop, in a bowl, or in a fruit basket, away from direct sunlight. Sometimes it takes only a day. Sometimes it takes a week. Be patient.

3. Check your avocado daily. To do this, apply very light pressure near the stem. When you feel a little give near the stem, the avocado is ready. Don't wait until the whole avocado feels soft.

4. Eat your avocado as soon as its ready. It will keep till dinnertime, but don't wait another day. As Elvis Presley said, Tomorrow will be too late ... it's now or never.

Avocado hacks
If you wait too long and the avocado is a bit too soft inside for your taste, scoop out the meat and mash it up with a little salt and a squirt of fresh lemon or lime juice (not too much). If you like, you can add finely diced tomato, chilies, and/or jicama. Maybe that's what you'd planned to do anyway. It will be fine.

If you cut too soon, stop cutting! You'll know after the initial stab if there's too much resistance. Close up the avocado, bind its wounds with duct tape (really! I am not making this up!), and leave it to ripen another day or two. There's a good chance it will be fine.

You may also want to check this out:
"How to fix an avocado without drawing blood"

How to fix an avocado without drawing blood (public service announcement)

From what I read online, apparently a lot of people are cutting themselves wide open while merely trying to fix guacamole.

This is foolishness, folks.

I am so bad with knives that for years my husband begged me not to take a knife skills class at the community college. He was afraid he'd never see me again.

And yet, though I have eaten avocados several times a week for decades, I have never ever succumbed to the newly popular avocado hand (and by the way, the advice in that linked article about how to cut an avocado is nonsense).

Here's how to open an avocado without inflicting bodily harm.

1. Be pretty sure it's ripe, but not too ripe. If you don't know how to tell, see my post "How to get perfect avocados nearly every time."

2. Use a smallish knife--longer than a paring knife but not one of those big cleaver things. I use a cheap grocery-store knife with a 4½" blade.

3. Slice the avocado in half lengthwise, as in the picture (do not cut the pit). This is not the part of fixing an avocado that sends people to the emergency room.

4. Peel both halves, using your fingers (not the knife). It's much easier to work with a peeled avocado.

Now the plot thickens. How do you get that huge pit out? This is where people stab themselves when they only ever meant to affix the pit to the point of the knife. Resist the temptation: that's not how to do it.

5. Take the avocado half with the pit and slice it lengthwise again (do not cut the pit). You can slice it in half, or you can make a number of thinner slices. Once you have sliced it, the pit is easy to remove.

Bottom line: don't try to take the pit out of the avocado. Take the avocado off the pit.

You'll be fine.

CSA week 3: 8 vegetables, easier prep, mostly tasty meals

This is what came in
my CSA basket Wednesday.

This is what it looked like.

This is what I did - or am going to do - with it.

• The green leaf lettuce went into two hamburger buns, two side salads, and two dinner salads.
• The radishes went in a baggie, with salt, to my neighborhood playground. My daughter ate them as we watched her children play.
• The broccoli is in my refrigerator's vegetable drawer. There's a good chance we'll eat it tonight, with salmon.
• The beets, wrapped in aluminum foil, went into the oven at 400 degrees for an hour. After spending a day in the refrigerator, they joined the green leaf lettuce, a couple of oranges, some goat cheese, and a few slices of red onion in a dinner salad.
• The beet greens are likely to show up under tonight's salmon, after I've chopped them and wilted them in olive oil.
• The kale stared at me defiantly until I repeated the process I described last week. We always have potlucks to go to. And actually, the kale bread is so good that I'm making a little extra so we'll have some at home too.
• The romaine is in the vegetable drawer waiting for an avocado to ripen. It will soon join a black bean / cheese / bell pepper / chopped tomato / sliced avocado salad.
• The arugula threatened to get even more bitter if I didn't use it immediately. I found a salad recipe in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, a book you should own if you frequent farmers' markets or subscribe to a CSA, and made the salad the day the kale arrived. If you're desperate to use up some arugula, you don't have to wait to buy the book: the recipe is here.
• The zucchini is with the romaine and the broccoli in the vegetable crisper. I'm planning to dice it, sauté it lightly, and toss it in pasta, probably rotini, with diced roma tomatoes and last week's garlic scape pesto.

Whew. I think it will all be used up by next Wednesday, when the next CSA portion arrives.

Kale-cheese bread; or, taming the green-leafed monster

This is me, cowering behind this week's allotment of kale.

I do not like kale, cooked or raw.

I do not like to have to gnaw

On greens so tough you need a saw

To cut them, or they break your jaw.

I would not like them here or there,

I would not like them anywhere.

But I don't like to throw things out, either. It occurred to me that bread can improve almost anything, and cheese can improve it still more. So I tried this experiment.

KALE-CHEESE BREAD: SHORT VERSION

• Make a filling of cooked chopped kale, cheese, egg, onion, and garlic.
• Make dough for French bread.
• Spread the filling on the dough, roll lengthwise, and bake.
• Cool before slicing.

KALE-CHEESE BREAD: PAINSTAKINGLY DETAILED VERSION

1. Fix the kale. I washed mine, removed the hard stems, chopped the leaves into smaller pieces, and simmered it, uncovered, in water. When most of the cooking liquid had cooked down and the kale was soft enough to eat, I drained the remaining liquid, stirred in maybe half a cup of my awesome leftover garlic scape pesto for flavor, and spun the greens in the food processor until they were finely chopped, though not yet a paste.

(There are lots of ways to prepare kale. You could also sauté it in olive oil with onion and garlic, adding liquid and simmering it for awhile if the sauté alone doesn't get it soft enough. Different kinds of kale respond to different treatment. Just cook your kale one way or another until it's edible, if not tasty.)

2. Make the filling. Grate about 6 oz of cheese: Cheddar, Gruyère, Emmenthaler, Comté, Manchego ... take your pick. Stir it, plus one beaten egg, into the kale slurry (or give the mixture a short whirl in your food processor). Set aside.

3. Make bread dough. Easiest way in the world: Put 1 lb white bread flour, 2 tsp salt, and 1 1/2 tsp rapid-rise yeast in the food processor. Spin for 5 seconds. While it's still spinning, pour 1 1/3 C warm water into the tube with a little hole in it, so it is added in a small steady stream. Spin for 30 more seconds. Pour a little olive oil into a medium-sized mixing bowl and use your hands to slosh it up the sides. Put the bread dough in it, turning it several times so it's covered with oil. Cover with plastic wrap or a dish towel and put it in a warm place for 2 hours or more to rise. (Tasty variation: instead of using 1 lb flour, use 14 oz flour and 2 oz corn meal or polenta.)

4. Shape the dough into a rectangle. Sprinkle a little flour on your countertop and work the dough into approximately this shape. (The dough in the picture is approximately 12" by 15".) If the dough is too elastic to shape, wait another 15 minutes and try again.

5. Spread the filling on the dough. Leave a 1" border all around.

6. Roll the dough and filling lengthwise. Seal the ends and bottom by pinching the dough together. Now you have a nice loaf, ready to bake. Put it on a cookie sheet or in a French bread pan. Let it rise for an hour.

7. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Squirt water into the oven. Put the bread in. Squirt more water. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes.

Uh oh. Why did the filling leak out the sides? Why does the bread feel fragile? Is this going to be a grand disaster? Will it fall apart when I slice it? Will the bread get soggy? Will I have to throw it out and sneak in to the potluck and pretend I brought something? 

8. Relax. Let the bread cool. Wrap it in aluminum foil and refrigerate it overnight.

9. Slice and serve.

Now then, that wasn't so bad, was it?

In fact, I took this bread to the church potluck, and even avowed kale-haters said they loved it. 

Chard: The gateway green

If you've been following my CSA posts, you know that this week's delivery flummoxed me. But things are turning out okay. Thursday night I made a salad that included

• the romaine lettuce; 
• the turnips and the kohlrabies (which I sliced thin and roasted); 
• garbanzos marinated in olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic scape pesto; 
• thin sliced tiny yellow bell peppers; 
• and a diced roma tomato. 

It wasn't bad.

Last night I fixed the chard. Chard is not one of your giant gnarly greens. It's a little crisper than spinach and has a slightly sweeter flavor. It's worth trying even if you aren't a fan of the more serious greens such as kale, collards, or mustard greens.

I washed the leaves, removed the largest stems, and tore the chard into smaller pieces. You can eat the stems if you like a bit of body in your greens, though it's a good idea to cook them for at least five minutes before adding the leaves.

I cooked the chard uncovered in about a cup of vegetable broth, stirring frequently. In about 20 minutes, it was soft enough to eat. Toward the end, I added a spoonful of garlic scape pesto for flavor (that is seriously good stuff!). The whole pile of leaves cooked down to two large servings!

I served the chard with Trader Joe's Pizza Greco-Roman, one of the tastiest frozen pizzas you can buy.

And now all I have to face are the enormous lacinato kale leaves and the second installment of garlic scapes. I'm going to make more garlic scape pesto in just a minute, and I'm working on the kale. Stay tuned.

Redeeming mustard greens

[Today's CSA portion. It will be a very green week.]

I recognized the lettuces, the kale, the turnips, the kohlrabies, the chard, and even the garlic scapes. But what was that pile of disparate weeds in the middle? Some looked like oak leaves. Some were fairly large and looked like chard. Some were small and ragged. Most were green but some were almost black. The CSA list identified them as "assorted mustard greens." I had my doubts. And then I tasted one, and doubt turned to despair.

Well, I paid for those weeds, and I figured I had to do something with them. Amazingly, it worked.

Here's what I did. It's hardly a recipe for you to follow, because you don't have my leftovers. But perhaps it will save you from despair some evening when you have more nasty greens than you can manage (they don't have to be mustard greens). Your own leftovers will be fine.

1. Wash the greens and tear them into smaller pieces. Put them in a large pot. Cover with liquid: I used a combination of water and vegetable stock.

2. Bring the greens and liquid to a boil. Do not cover the pot. Let them boil, uncovered, until the greens are soft enough to eat. Mine were ready in about 15 minutes (some tougher greens could take up to an hour).

3. Let the greens cool for 30 to 60 minutes.

[Scary green slurry]

4. Drain the greens, reserving the liquid. Put the greens in a blender. Add enough liquid to cover. (You will probably have to do this in more than one batch.) Whiz the mixture until it's smooth. If it's thicker than you like your soup, add more liquid and whiz again. Hint: save the leftover liquid to use the next time you have to transform weeds into something edible.

Intermission: At this point I looked in my refrigerator and found a leftover serving of chard with pancetta (diced bacon). I dumped it in the blender with the soup and whizzed it all again. I then looked in the refrigerator again and found garlic scape pesto left over from last week. I added a spoonful and whizzed yet again. The pesto made a big difference to the flavor. 

Recommendation: Look in your refrigerator or pantry or spice rack or herb garden and think about what might improve the flavor of your watery green slurry (garlic usually helps). Give it a try.

5. Taste. I put a few spoonsful into a small bowl and microwaved it for a few seconds. I then stirred in a small spoonful of sour cream - the real stuff, not the imitation low-fat stuff that should really call itself something else.

WOW! It's a miracle! The hideous, bitter, menacing mustard greens had turned into a really delicious soup!

OK, I guess if mustard greens can be redeemed, so can lacinato (dinosaur) kale, and possibly even turnips. I'll get back to you.

Kickin' collard greens (to the curb)

I confess: I panic when I encounter large, leathery leaves that look like they could have been plucked from prehistoric bats.

This is a collard leaf on a sheet of 8.5" x 11" paper.

And yet I know people who truly love kale and collard greens and other such aberrations. Some of these people are even related to me. Besides, collard greens are reputed to be exceptionally nutritious. And anyway, my CSA portion included a hefty handful of them, so--naturally--I asked Google what to do.

I liked the name of this recipe--Kickin' Collard Greens--and it didn't look too challenging, as long as I wasn't planning to go anywhere for a couple of hours.  I modified it to fit what I had in my kitchen, so that I actually used about 2 tsp olive oil; 2 oz pancetta; half of a very large onion; 3 small cloves garlic; 1/2 tsp salt (possibly more than was needed, as it turned out); 1/2 tsp pepper; 2 cups vegetable broth; 1 pinch red pepper flakes; and maybe 11 oz collard greens, much of the stem removed, cut into small pieces.

This is 11 oz of collard greens cut into smallish pieces.

First I washed, trimmed, and cut the greens. I used scissors, since the greens were a bit tough for a knife. Then I followed the recipe's directions for what to add when.

I browned the pancetta...

and added onions and garlic.

I wilted the collard greens...

and cooked the livin' daylights out of them.

I seasoned them and simmered them in vegetable broth, covered, for close to an hour before they seemed tender enough to eat. There was still plenty of liquid in the pan, so I raised the heat and reduced it a bit. Finally the collard greens were ready to serve.

Dinner is served:
collard greens with roasted sea scallops
in a tomato/onion/basil coulis.

OK, dinner was better than I expected (I hadn't expected to enjoy the scallops). But I really didn't want to face the leftover half of the collard greens another night. So I put it in the blender, added water, spun it madly, heated it, added cream, divided it between two bowls, sprinkled it with chopped chives and pepper, and ended up with this:

Cream of collard greens soup

"This is the best possible way to fix collard greens," said my husband after his first mouthful. He may have been damning with faint praise.

The Great Scape: or, what to do with yet another weird CSA vegetable

This is a garlic scape.

It is the stem of the garlic flower. Farmers often cut it off so that the garlic bulb, the papery-covered thing we buy in little red-net packages at Trader Joe's, will grow bigger. I don't know what most farmers do with the scapes. I had never met a scape until last Wednesday.

My CSA portion included a fistful of scapes. Naturally I turned to Google, since I had no idea what to do with them, and I found "The Crisper Whisperer: 7 Things To Do with Garlic Scapes." Bookmark that link: you will need it, should you ever encounter a garlic scape.

I decided to make garlic scape pesto. I immediately encountered a problem, though: how much of each scape should I use? See that slight pale protrusion about a third of the way in, with its long tapering tip? Is that the flower? Is it the part to use? Should I use only the part that looks like a green onion? Or should I use both?

Only way to find out: eat some. OK, the long pointy ends of my scapes were not very chewable. The green tubes, were, however. And yowie! Did they ever assert themselves!

These are the ends I cut off and discarded.

So I cut off the flower ends, and then I took the long green tubes and chopped them into short pieces. I put the chopped-up scapes into my food processor along with the other ingredients the pesto recipe calls for (do check the link) and chopped everything further before adding the olive oil in a slow stream.

This is the finished garlic-scape pesto.

Cyberspace does video and audio really well, but this pesto must be tasted to be believed. One sample taste and I was a true believer. I stirred about 1/3 of the pesto into 4 ounces of cooked spaghetti and served it for dinner, along with leftover Brussels sprouts mixed with leftover marinated garbanzos (see yesterday's post) and tiny sliced bell peppers for color.

This was dinner.

If it looks good to you, I'm sorry: I have no idea where you'll find garlic scapes. But do start looking immediately. They must be harvested young, in late spring.

Oh, and one small caveat: Remember that this is garlic. If you eat it, probably everyone else in your household should too. Not that it will be hard to persuade them.

But what will you do with the kohlrabi?

That's what several of my friends wondered when I posted this picture on Facebook. It shows the contents of this season's first delivery from One Straw Farm's CSA (community-supported agriculture) program.

This is the second time I've signed up with a CSA. You pay a local farmer an agreed-upon fee up front, and then you get weekly assortments of incredibly fresh food throughout the entire growing season. One big plus is that you get to try foods you probably wouldn't have bought (or even seen) at the grocery store. One big minus is that you may not like some of the foods you get.

I had no idea what a kohlrabi (kohlrabus?) tastes like. (It's the bulbous thing on the right. There are two of them.)

More knowledgeable friends suggested roasting them and serving them with a sauce, or shredding or slicing them and using them in a salad. I like salads. Not only because they taste good, but also because I can put just about anything in them. Here's what I put in last night's salad.

1. Several hours before dinner, I made a salad dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, Dijon mustard, chopped chives, minced garlic, and a little salt. I then opened a can of garbanzos, rinsed and drained them, and set them to marinate in the salad dressing.

2. I prepared the red-leaf lettuce that I got from my CSA. I washed it, spun it, tore it into bite-sized pieces, and drained it further on paper towels. Eventually I put some of it in this bowl.

3. Next, having no idea what I was doing, I attacked the kohlrabies (yes, that is the plural: I looked it up). I removed the leaves (I hear they are edible, but I didn't want to get carried away). I sliced each bulb as fine as I could with my large chef's knife. I took a smaller knife and removed the outer rind from each slice. I noticed that some slices were woody, and I either removed the woody core or discarded those slices. I cut the slices into little triangles. I ate a few triangles to see what I was getting into. They tasted sweet and spicy with a slightly bitter undertone; they felt like crisp apples or jicama.

4. Since some small bell peppers in my refrigerator had no plans for the evening, I sliced half a dozen of them and popped them under the broiler until a few of them started to blacken.

I then dumped the garbanzos and dressing, kohlrabi slices, and slightly blackened peppers onto the lettuce and used my hands to toss them.

Finally, I divided the salad between two pasta bowls ...

5. ... and topped each salad with about half an ounce of shaved Parmesan cheese.

6. Et voilà - dinner for two!

The kohlrabi slices were delicious. Their flavor was mild, but they added a little zing. Their crunchy texture worked well with the softer lettuce, garbanzos, and peppers. If I get more kohlrabies next time, I'll try to slice them thinner. The food processor slicing blade might work, or a mandoline slicer.

Let's talk about food: The body of Christ at the nursing home

[Pieter Breugel the Elder,
Portrait of an Old Woman, 1563]

Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength.

--Book of Common Prayer, from Eucharistic Prayer C

I would like to finish this series of posts with a story about what the Eucharist meant to me during a difficult time about 20 years ago.

My mother had suffered a series of small strokes. She had Alzheimer's Disease as well, and she was seriously depressed. I had moved her into a nursing home near my house so I could visit her frequently.

At that time I was going to Mass almost daily. I needed the solace of the quiet half hour every morning. When my parish offered to train people who wanted to become ministers of communion (parishioners who help distribute the bread and wine), I signed up.

Holding up the consecrated bread and saying "The body of Christ" was easy, as was handing the cup to each person in line so they could drink from it. But some parishioners prefer to have the bread placed directly in their mouths, and that's trickier. The idea is to put it gently on their tongue without getting bitten.

We practiced with one another, the pretend communicant opening her mouth and, ideally, sticking out her tongue; the pretend minister of communion laying the host on it. When we got the hang of it, our training session concluded, and I drove directly to the nursing home to visit my mother.

It was dinnertime at Sandalwood. Mother was in a wheelchair at her table, unable to feed herself, able to swallow only with difficulty. I was not good at getting her to eat, but no attendant was available. So I sat down next to her and picked up a spoon.

I dipped the spoon in the strained spinach and held it up for her to see. She opened her mouth. I put the spinach on her tongue.

I almost said, "The body of Christ."

As I think back on that moment, I see layers upon layers of symbolic meaning. I'm not going to list them or explain them. I'll just say that as I fed spinach to my mother, I suddenly understood a lot more about what I'd been doing in church just 30 minutes earlier.
____________________________

This is the last in a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I led or will lead conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I posted about food every weekday between September 13 and October 4. The first post in the series is here.

Let's talk about food: Practicing the Presence

[Jordaens, The Supper at Emmaus, 1645]

And now back to food as sacrament--what we'll be talking about this Sunday at St Barnabas. In Monday's post I wrote, "A sacrament points to something beyond itself, but it is more than a sign. It has multiple layers of meaning, but it is more than the religious version of a symbol. A sacrament is a special kind of symbol that actually makes present the reality it evokes." The sacrament of bread and wine, then, in some way makes Jesus Christ present.

How does that work?

Catholics still use a medieval explanation called "transubstantiation." Lutherans speak of  "sacramental union." Calvinists talk about "spiritual presence." Other Protestants use terms like "holy mystery" or "real presence." Orthodox Christians like the word "mystery" and, as far as I know, don't try too hard to explain it. Many evangelical Christians celebrate the Lord's Supper but don't really believe in sacraments at all (my husband once referred to their theology as the "real absence"). Anglicans, as John Cleese wittily pointed out in his "Consumers Guide to Religion," have a democratic spirit--"if you want transubstantiation, you can have transubstantiation. If you don't want transubstantiation, you don't have to have transubstantiation. All you do is go down the road to another Church of England church and not have it."

I'm not going to argue for or against any of these positions. I rather like the quatrain that probably originated with John Donne but is usually attributed to Elizabeth I:

’Twas God the word that spake it,
He took the bread and brake it,
And what the word did make it,
That I believe and take it.

Whatever our theology about sacraments, most Christians agree that

• eating together fosters community
• the Christian community is "the body of Christ" (1 Corinthians 12:27)

The earliest Christians "devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2:42). Somehow when they broke bread together, Jesus was present with them and in them, and they were present in him.

Bread and wine are dynamic symbols. Sharing bread and wine is a powerful sacramental act. All explanations inevitably fall short, as the disciples on the Emmaus Road discovered. Only when they broke bread with the stranger did they realize who he was.
_______________________________

This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

Let's talk about food ... and wine!

[Caravaggio, Bacchus, 1596]

A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine.

--Brillat-Savarin, or maybe an Italian proverb

 

I enjoy wine. But I readily acknowledge that some people should not drink wine: recovering alcoholics, of course; drinkers who don't realize they're alcoholics; people taking certain medications; people who are about to drive cars or pilot airplanes; children; and so on.

To be fair, there are people who shouldn't eat bread, either, though not as many.

Yes, wine can be dangerous. In scripture and other literature, it can indicate evil and punishment and terror.

In the Bible, wine sometimes accompanies wickedness and judgment. For example, the Psalmist writes that "in the hand of the Lord there is a cup with foaming wine, well mixed; he will pour a draught from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs" (Psalm 75:8).

St. John of Patmos says that Babylon--herself a symbol of corrupt governments and multinational corporations--"has made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication" (Revelation 14:8; 18:3).

In "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Julia Ward Howe uses wine production as a double symbol, evoking both the Last Judgment and the American Civil War: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored."

But more often, wine brings to mind abundance and contentment and friendship.

Hear Moses' final blessing on his people: "So Israel lives in safety, untroubled is Jacob’s abode in a land of grain and wine, where the heavens drop down dew" (Deuteronomy 33:28).

And the Preacher's summary of a good life: "Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do" (Ecclesiastes 9:7).

And the delightful quatrain by Hilaire Belloc:

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino.

A drink that can evoke friendship and anger, blessing and corruption, joy and addiction, holiday relaxation and highway death, family harmony and family destruction--what a symbol!

In Prince Caspian, Book 2 of The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis describes the Pevensie girls' reaction to a wild party with river gods, forest goddesses, maenads, Silenus, and Bacchus himself:

"I wouldn't have felt safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we'd met them without Aslan," [said Susan].

"I should think not," said Lucy.

 ____________________________

This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

Let's talk about food: What does bread mean?

[Salvador Dali, Basket of Bread, 1926]

Bread is an especially rich symbol (see yesterday's post about how symbols have many layers of meaning).

Imagine

● a freshly baked, crusty baguette
● a thick slice of heavy brown bread, warm from the oven
● two loaves of challah at the beginning of Shabbat dinner
● scones with clotted cream and jam

--or, on the other hand,

● a dry crust
● crumbs
● day-old bread
● Wonder Bread

I'm guessing you quickly moved beyond taste and smell to highly personal associations--places, people, feelings, stories evoked by thinking about bread. Symbols invite you to do that.

Consider also some of the many Bible stories that feature bread:

● Passover with its unleavened bread
● The manna that fed the Israelites in the wilderness
● The miracle of the loaves and fishes
● The Last Supper (a Passover meal) with its shared loaf

--or some scriptural statements about bread:

● "If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat" (Proverbs 25:21)
● "Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread?" (Isaiah 55:2)
● "Give us this day our daily bread" (Matthew 6:11)
● "Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life'" (John 6:35)

Ask yourself, what does the bread mean? You'll likely come up with multiple meanings right away. That's how symbols work.

Now think about bread, any kind of bread you choose--

● how its ingredients are grown, harvested, and processed, and by whom
● how it's baked, and by whom
● how it is served and eaten, and by whom

Can you see how bread might enrich your view of life, or Jesus, or God's providence, or ... ?  Again, you're seeing symbols at work--or at play.

I love the prayer in the Roman Catholic liturgy that echoes the Hebrew blessing over bread:

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation,
for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you:
fruit of the earth and work of human hands,
it will become for us the bread of life.

A person could spend hours just parsing that prayer. Once you let symbols loose in your mind, everything looks different.

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If you aren't yet convinced that bread is an extremely fecund symbol, find more layers of meaning (from the sublime to the ridiculous) in "The Symbolism of Bread."
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This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

Let's talk about food: Signs, symbols, and sacraments

[Renoir, Le verre de vin, 1908]

We're into the third week of conversations about food at St. Barnabas. Week 1 we talked about celebration, because until we really believe that food is good, anything we say about food is likely to be skewed. Week 2 we talked about hospitality and the role food plays in fostering community. Now we're going to look at food as sacrament.

So, what's a sacrament?

If you are of a liturgical persuasion, you probably associate the word with the sacraments of the church, which, like the animals entering the ark, come in twos (baptism and communion) or sevens (those two plus confirmation, marriage, holy orders, anointing the sick, and reconciliation).

Let's back up for a minute and look at the concept itself, not the actions it's usually associated with. A sacrament is a kind of symbol - but not necessarily in the way we often use the word symbol today.

In popular parlance, a symbol is pretty much the same as a sign. Some academics, however, make a helpful distinction between the two words.

A sign stands for, reminds us of, or points to something else. That red octagonal thing on the street corner is a sign that reminds us to put on the brakes. Those yellow and orange leaves just beginning to show up on maple trees are a sign that autumn is here.

A symbol, by contrast, has many more--sometimes even inexhaustible--layers of meaning. That metal band on your finger is a sign that you're married, but it may also be for you a symbol of permanence or value or eternity or faithfulness (and you can keep coming up with more). A good symbol has rich personal and cultural associations. A really good symbol works for many people in many different cultures.

A sacrament points to something beyond itself, but it is more than a sign. It has multiple layers of meaning, but it is more than the religious version of a symbol. A sacrament is a special kind of symbol that actually makes present the reality it evokes.

Three theological examples:

• Jesus is the sacrament of God: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14.9).
• The church is the sacrament of Jesus: "Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it" (1 Corinthians 12.27).
• Eucharist is a sacrament of the church: "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread" (1 Corinthians 10.17).

Back to food. A loaf of bread is not generally a sign. Hansel and Gretel used their bread as a sign, but for most of us most of the time, bread doesn't point to something else: it is what it is. (Some Protestants do see bread as a sign: something that makes them think about Jesus. I confess I've never found bread very helpful in that regard.)

Bread can be a symbol, though, and not necessarily a theological one. "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread--and thou" is not a depiction of Eucharist, but it is richly symbolic.

And bread can be a sacrament. More about that tomorrow...
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This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

Let's talk about food: Building community one bite at a time

[Companions of the Round Table, 14th century]

For some 20 years two friends and I have gotten together at least once a year to celebrate our birthdays. Since 1995 we have called ourselves "Three Tall Women"--that was the year Edward Albee's play by that name came to Chicago. Our birthdays are in February, August, and November, but it doesn't matter. Whenever we can find a time to be together, it's birthday time.

For maybe 10 years two other friends and I have gotten together at least once a year, also to celebrate our birthdays. Since we are all Leos, we call ourselves the Lionesses, and we try to meet in August. This year, though, we're meeting in October. We do what we can.

When my friends and I get together, sometimes we bring gifts and cards, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes we meet in homes, and sometimes we meet in restaurants. Sometimes we share joys, and sometimes we share sorrows. But here's the one thing we always do: we eat.

Somehow, food and friends belong together. The word companion comes from roots that evoke shared meals. This is obvious in Latinate languages: "with bread" is con pan in Spanish, con pane in Italian, com pão in Portuguese, and cu pâine in Romanian. My companion is one with whom I break bread.

Breaking bread was a vital component of early Christian life and worship. Brand-new believers "devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.... [They] broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts" (Acts 2:42, 46).

Though we're talking about hospitality this week at St Barnabas, community is what's really important. By providing food and inviting guests, hospitable people help to make community possible. So do gracious guests who accept others' hospitality with gratitude and joy, and households who make a point of gathering regularly around the dinner table, and friends who meet for lunch or coffee.

I think St. Barnabas' mission statement is slightly defective. "We are a Christian community that is focused on Jesus Christ, centered in worship and prayer, and committed to participating in God’s mission of reconciliation in the world," it says. It would be more accurate if it said "centered in worship and prayer and shared food." We break bread together at the Eucharist, of course (we'll be talking about food as sacrament next week). But we break bread together at lots of other times too:

• every Sunday during the fellowship time after liturgy
• several weeks a year with the homeless who come for dinner, a place to sleep, and breakfast
• the second Wednesday evening of each month at a parish potluck
• with Foyer Groups and at international dinners
• at Lenten soup-and-bread suppers
• at the post-Easter Vigil feast
• at a nearby soup kitchen and at a halfway house in Chicago
• when parishioners are ill
• when parishioners have a new baby
• at all kinds of church celebrations
• and sometimes, just because.

What does all this shared food do for us? I love this description from Eat With Joy by Rachel Marie Stone:

We sit at the same time, at the same table, acknowledging our common creatureliness as we stop and do the necessary, joyful business of eating. The same food goes into each of our bodies, building up our cells, becoming, quite literally, a part of each of us. We make memories and get a little closer to one another as we laugh and talk.... Sometimes table chatter is nonstop; sometimes the only sounds are of contented chewing. But regardless, we're mysteriously bound to each other in the breaking of bread.

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This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

Let's talk about food: Hospitality for shy people

[Mother and me, 1950]

Something you should know about tall women who seem reserved and even distant  - they may just be shy or socially awkward, and they may really want to be your friend. I've understood this all my life, of course, but I was well into adulthood when my mother told me she understood it too.

My mother was not the kind of woman who could chat easily with strangers or charm other people's children. She would not have survived as a social worker, therapist, or nurse. If she had belonged to a church that equated righteousness with personally comforting the deranged or the homeless or the dying, she would probably have changed denominations.

I tell you this only to point out that hospitality has many faces.

My shy mother did have close friends, and she was known in our small town for her unrelenting hospitality. During my grade-school years when my father was president of a small college, she invited faculty families to dinner nearly every weekend. It was the late 1950s, and the dinners were pretty formal: white Quaker Lace tablecloth, Noritake china, and Community silverplate. Stemmed goblets filled with Hawaiian punch and ginger ale. Individual Jell-O molds with dabs of mayonnaise. A centerpiece. The amazing thing is that, with virtually no help (my father and I were useless in the kitchen), she managed to make all the hot foods finish cooking at the same time.

This was hospitality, to be sure, but her company dinners are not what impressed me most about my mother's approach. Back in the 1950s and 60s, I've learned, most American social occasions were one big Noah's Ark: you came in pairs or not at all. I did not realize that at the time, because it wasn't the way my mother operated. She had friends whose husbands got sick, or left them for other women, or died. These friends were often at our house. Sometimes we all went out and did things together. I never gave it a second thought.

Years later several of my mother's friends told me that once their husbands became unavailable, most invitations dried up. Couples they used to go out with stopped calling. For a time my mother was just about their only friend who continued to have them over for dinner.

I was dumfounded. It had never occurred to me that the death or desertion or illness of a spouse would make a mid-20th-century American woman a pariah. I thank my mother - a tall, reserved, possibly distant woman - for keeping me ignorant of such heartless behavior. And I thank her for giving me a lesson in hospitality by treating her hurting friends with such dignity that even her daughter had no idea she was doing anything unusual.
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This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

Let's talk about food: Restoring soul to food

[Jan Steen, "Meal," 1650]

"Food has a profound capacity for meaning and fostering community."

So writes Thomas Moore in "Food for the Soul,"an article in Resurgence and Ecologist magazine (Nov/Dec 2008). Moore, a former monk, a psychologist, and the best-selling author of Care of the Soul (1992), believes that food is (or should be) much more than fuel. When we bring imagination to food, we allow it to enhance community, conviviality, pleasure, beauty, spirituality--and no doubt lots of other good things.

"There is always a place for a quick meal," Moore acknowledges, "but everyone also needs communion, the intimate experience of conviviality that only food can provide." Here are two paragraphs from the article that especially pertain to this week's conversation topic at St Barnabas, hospitality.

Food ... brings people together, mysteriously serving the emotional life. Say you have trouble in your marriage. You call a friend for help. Do you say, “I know a solitary place with no distractions where we can have a serious talk”? Or do you say, “Let’s have lunch”? On such occasions do you need the calories or the chemicals? Do you need to deal with your hunger? Or do you know deep down that eating together will intensify your conversation?

Perhaps the greatest challenge in this time of rapid technological advance and the shrinking of the globe is to create a world community. But that important task can’t be done in the abstract. Food can play a role. Food as community, not as a commodity. Whatever power allows lunch to foster friendship, wedding cake a marriage, and bread and wine a religion could make a community of the world’s population. But we need first to restore soul to food.

Moore's article is short but deep. Though my friends who have studied the 16th- and 17th-century Puritans will point out that his comments about "puritanism" have little to do with the behavior of actual Puritans (apparently the first Thanksgiving drinks included "beer, brandy, gin, and wine," for example), the word "puritanical" has taken on a life of its own and I'm willing to give Moore a pass.

St B parishioners, here are some questions we might talk about Sunday:

• Think of some hospitality stories from scripture. What foods were involved?
• How does food foster community?
• Are some foods better than others at fostering community?
• Do we ever use food as a substitute for community?
• How might we pay more attention to the "soul" of food?

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This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

Let's talk about food: What I love about St Barnabas

Here are some stories that show what I love about St Barnabas.

About ten years ago, my friend and former colleague Lucille, then retired and in her late 70s, fell in love with St B. A gregarious woman, she soon had many new friends there. A dozen of us gave her a confirmation party at Macaroni Grill (she's second from right in the photo).

Lucille became very active in the parish. She befriended a sometimes homeless, always challenging parishioner who contracted breast cancer. She also befriended the woman's estranged mother and helped bring the two of them together before the woman died. And then Lucille was diagnosed with cancer - first in one lung, then in her liver, then everywhere.

St B parishioners got together to talk about how to help Lucille. Some helped her deal with her dying husband. Some helped her find affordable housing. Some took her to her medical appointments. Eventually Lucille and a few of her friends from St B decided to join an Anglican parish, which was more in line with her conservative beliefs, but the caring continued from all of us. When in her last days she was moved to a nursing home, a St B member was with her. When she died, a former St B member was holding her hand.

That's hospitality, both given and received.

I too benefited from St Barnabas-style hospitality. In 2011, I learned it was time to have open-heart surgery to correct a birth defect. Rev. Donna anointed me during a Sunday Eucharist, and the whole congregation prayed for my healing. David and I flew to Cleveland for the surgery. Bob took us to Midway for the outbound trip, and Estelle picked us up and brought us home afterward. While we were in Cleveland, a priest friend of Fr. Matt's visited me in the hospital.

Once I got home and began my long recovery, St B parishioners were there to help. Sue and Shirley came over and walked me around the neighborhood. A lot of people prepared and delivered meals--Dick and Shirley, Dolores and Paul, Lisa and Bob, Richard and Cari, Mary and Dean, Jean and Bob, Phil and Ashley, Art and Gayle, Al and Sue, Katelyn, Mark and Monica, and others, I think, that I appreciated every bit as much but was apparently too drugged to write down.

I was completely overwhelmed. In a good way.

When we talk about hospitality next Sunday, there's nothing I can teach St B parishioners. I've learned from them, though, that the best hospitality isn't something I do--it's something we do together. I'm looking forward to talking about it together too.

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This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

Let's talk about food: Abundance vs deprivation--where's your focus?

"Diets don’t just reduce weight, they can reduce mental capacity. In other words, dieting can make you dumber."

That's the beginning of a fascinating New York Times article called "The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less." Its author, Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, is coauthor (with Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir) of a just-released book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. I haven't seen the book yet, but the article ties in well with the conversation we had at St Barnabas this morning about food as celebration.

Mullainathan writes:

Psychologists find that dieters have spontaneous self-generated cravings at a much higher rate than nondieters. And these cravings are not the dieters’ only distraction. Diets force trade-offs: If you eat the cookie, should you skip the appetizer at dinner? But that restaurant looked so good! Many diets also require constant calculations to determine calorie counts. All this clogs up the brain.

The result of diet-induced brain clogging? A measurable decrease in "logical and spatial reasoning, self-control, problem solving, and absorption and retention of new information"--which tends to lead to self-defeating decisions.

If we want to relate to food wisely and joyfully, we need to start with abundance, not deprivation. That's true even if - especially if - we really should be eating less, or differently.

A couple of years ago two of my family members were living with major dietary restrictions. When I realized I'd be cooking a week's worth of meals for both of them, my first reaction was panic. But then I found a website that listed all the things they could eat. To my amazement, the list was long, and it included a lot of delectable foods. My attitude changed just as soon as I printed the list and displayed it on my refrigerator door. I no longer had to think about deprivation--what they couldn't eat. Here was abundance--far more than we could eat in a mere week. Four whole pages of abundance, with color illustrations!

Next Sunday at St Barnabas we'll be talking about hospitality. There are a lot of hospitable people in my parish, and I'm eager to hear their stories. I'll write about my experience of St B's abundant hospitality tomorrow.
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This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.