An excerpt from this essay, "Good Enough To Wait" can be found in
Living in Season.
Preserving food is the extended foreplay of the gustatory world. Especially for city-dwellers, it revives a sense of connection with wild nature, and rejuvenates senses dormant from over-reliance on the fast and the cheap. If drive-thru is the dining equivalent of the quickie, preserving fresh, seasonal produce for later supping is tantric bliss.
The last week of summer I drove out to the local farm and purchased boxes of coral peaches, firm pickling cucumbers, banana and pasilla and sweet Anaheim peppers, ripe red and fleshy green tomatoes and plump blackberries. It didn’t look like promiscuity until the saleswoman sized me up and down behind the mountain of produce stacked in eight large boxes. “Well, you’re sure going to have your work cut out for you,” she snarked. And the old man in line in front of me offered a wide grin, as if he knew what I would be up to, and said, in a wistful tone: “Me and the missus used to put up. Oh, I miss it so.”
By the time I unloaded the car and began washing the long, nubby cuke, I realized I was going to be days in this kitchen – days immersed in the sweet perfume of fervid juice and musky field; days with my fingers in slippery seeds, days nudging the ruby pit from its fleshy center. I filled the sink with cool water and stripped to my bare feet, and brought a berry to my lips, tracking its nib with my tongue before biting into its succulent drupelets.
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Canning, freezing, drying, curing, fermenting, pickling, jam and jelly making – preserving holds the genius of our earliest people. Preserving developed between 5500 and 3500 BC, creating villages, and vessels, and livestock, perhaps even the very urge to civilize in the way we experience it today. (Though it seems strange to this acculturated cook, one of the ways historians categorize societies as being ‘civilized’ is when the primary purpose of food gathering, preparation and storing has been diverted to allow the pursuit of other, more ‘complex’ activities, such as war, religion, bureaucracy.) Homo sapiens found he could manage his stock, and digest proteins better when food went over fire, and intentional cookery followed, leading to food as a social engagement, as taboo arbiter, as identity-maker. What we keep can communicate our sense of frugal sparseness or our abundant beguilement: the heirloom we shelve can be our strained broth or our rose-drenched honey. We preserve what we wish to have known as the common good.
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The world’s greatest preserved city, Pompeii, (smoked, as it were, by layers of volcanic ash) put up all manner of food, especially in the town’s restaurants that served such salt-preserved brews as garum, a sauce made by fermenting fish entrails, a flavor whose closest modern equivalent would be Thailand’s nam pla. (In another paean to eating out, Pompeii also featured one of the world’s earliest monuments to cunnilingus in a famous fresco. While phallus-centered Romans found use for many household objects shaped like the male member, the town was open to all manner of sensual influences. One wonders what it would have been like to live and dine constantly in the midst of erotic art.)
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Like discovering lips and tongue can travel, drying food was quite likely a happy accident. Fire made food easier to trek, as well as store over the lean season, which soon changed the tribe. It allowed people to settle in one place, gather their resources, plan their next adventure, maybe even provided time for other desires. Whether preserving first occurred by hanging meat over a fire or leaving some fruit to dry in the sun, it opened the imaginative impulse toward adventure. The Sumerians were the first to combine drying and smoking, and the South Americans, American Indians, Celts of Armorica and the nomads of Asia each had a favorite method of drying and reducing meat so it could be reconstituted on the trail. Still, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century, and the discovery of sterilization by Nicholas Appert (Americans deemed his process ‘appertizing’) that the use of heat guaranteed food safety. At the time of Napoleon’s conquering, and British scurvy, the press proclaimed the brewer-inventor had “found a way to fix the seasons; at his establishment spring, summer and autumn live in bottles…”(1) Some say historically, a full pantry preceded sexual adventures because, from an evolutionary perspective, survival had been assured, before there was time for play. Now we’re more likely to preserve to escape the mundane. We want concoctions that happily tempt the tongue, and an environment that allows us to be tempted by food and each other.
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Gastronomy, being lingual, and sometimes seductive, as M.F.K. Fisher knew, pleasures “one who with cunning and deliberation prepares a meal which will draw another person to her”, (2) and the one seduced by the beauty of the feast is also wooed by the appearance of abundance. Such “wanton women” and courtesans have “studied the appetites of their prey” (3) and can “placate his earlier inhibitions and flatter his later ones” (4) both in acquired taste and carnal performance, one could assume. And there is a breed of lover for whom a full pantry is like having a lustful bedmate: pickles and relishes and chutneys and sauces and vinegars and oils and confit and curds and ketchups and jams and marmalades and mincemeats and mustards and butters and leathers and patés and cured hams and smoked fish and peppered salamis and herbed cheeses and sugared fruit and all manner of dried fruits and canned vegetables make a horny cornucopia. Even a simple split biscuit loaded with berry preserves brought to the morning bed can tantalize the beloved in a manner that state fairs and 4H clubs have little in common with. And in our desire to please, we expose the body to the rigors of the preparation – we sweat and strain, we create the fleur de sel that those we live with grow to know as our scent.
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It’s possible that salt was the first additive used as a method to preserve food. Used by ancient communities close to the sea, salt preserves by inhibiting toxin-producing bacteria, making it essential for forms of flesh – meat, fish and the human body, as for mummifying. Those who wielded the salt wielded the power, as the Emperor Claudius knew when he strolled into the senate one day asking if man could live without salt meat. Before it was the Eternal City, Rome was a staging post where local marketers exchanged their goods for precious salt. Leaders and merchants preserved their own futures along the Via Salaria, the salt road; when unforeseen circumstances meant there was little access to fresh food, salt could define a government’s rule.
Indeed, whoever holds the keys to the pantry holds the power. None knew this better that Mahatma Gandhi, who emerged from his six-year prison confinement to protest the exclusive British licensing of Indian sea salt. When he marched from the ashram to the beach at Dandi, he placed salt crystals evaporated by the sea into his small palm, enacting a potent ritual that defied the authorities in one simple act. Indians followed, breaking the law en masse, literally assuming worth of one’s salt, until the Brits relented and asked Gandhi to represent his Indian Congress Party at the 1931 leadership conference.
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At Indian rituals, Roman feasts, Athenian festivals, Chinese banquets, Middle Eastern merry-making, and Egyptian sacraments all manner of seeds, plants and flowers were preserved with sugar. After the fourteenth century, the master confectioners of Paris made their fortunes selling to the aristocracy, and since gifts of preserves were considered luxurious, these sugared treats became a regular expense of anyone who had a role with the law. (Used as chamber spices for ‘dispelling wind and encouraging the seed’ these sweets, often called sweetmeats, were at least poetically-perfect: a candy by any other name would surely not have prefaced lovemaking.) Sugar was brought to the New World after Columbus’ affair with Canary Island’s Governor, one Beatrice de Bobadilla, who sent him from their month-long tryst with cuttings of sugar cane. From that sweet union, came America’s love affair with all things candied. Jams, jellies, syrups, sugared fruits, sugar-wine (rum) – sugar was once an international currency, with labor rewarded in casks of syrup, and millions paid for its becoming a standard with their very lives, including creating a caste of slaves from Africa who would do the back-breaking work of sweetening up the colonist’s diet, and his pockets. Even though we now have more sugar than we know what to do with, we continue a romance with the saporous temptress: we call our beloveds ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ and ask them to give us some ‘sugar’ when we wish to be kissed. “It must be jelly,” says the blues singer, “Cuz jam don’t shake like that.” We cut into the virginal white cake after our nuptials, in a ritual symbolic of intercourse and of promises for a sweet future. Our nursery food – puddings, custards, purees – become, like breasts, a reminder of the comfort we once had at our mother’s side. At the Smell and Taste Research Foundation, pumpkin pie was the scent most likely to stimulate blood flow to the penis (offering another potential meaning of the Thanksgiving spread.)
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Because aroma can have compelling aphrodisiac aspects, spices have long been a food served at the altars of the gods and offered up to lovers. We place basil in our marinara sauce because it is a fine compliment, and perhaps, because it stimulates fertility and the sex drive. Chili peppers spice up our pickles and chutneys and when eaten, they simulate the physiological responses – heartbeat, sweating, heat -- of having sex. It is said that Tibetan monks were not allowed to have eaten garlic before entering the monastery – the passion of this bulb (and its ability to increase circulation) being reputed. Though there are Chinese herbals dating 5,000 years old, the Egyptians date the first aromatics, at 2800 BC, which was likely a papyri recipe indicating the use of mint, juniper, frankincense or myrrh. Cinnamon, used widely in preserves today, was utilized “lavishly” by Indians, and cinnamon was also valued by the Greeks and Romans as “a medicine, cordial and aphrodisiac...To the Taoists it was the food of the immortals, a kind of ambrosia.” (5) Ginger, the ambrosia of chutney-makers, was said to provide African men “insurance for their old age by siring a great many children.” (6) Spices of all kinds were mixed with wax and worn as perfumes, or pinned onto the clothing or hair, to entice the suitor. Before the commercial scents of lotions, oils and creams masked our body’s sexy aromas, Aphrodite’s spices complimented our natural funky state, generating heat on the skin, lips, fingers, and providing warmth to our insides. Scent in our food is so titillating that the Puritans “barred spices from their tables on their belief that their use ‘excited passion’.” (7) Preserves cooked with bold spices -- chutneys, harrief, masalas -- like the dominatrix of the world, assume the ascendant, assertive role on the plate. The seal is lifted from the jar and we are entered, first by means of this fierce and risqué fragrance, and then through the reawakening of the tongue and our organs of desire. We are transformed by what we have saved.
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There is no savings in preserving food at home. The costs of labor and equipment and of what will break or go rotten through experimentation is high compared to what we can stroll down to the store and buy for a dollar or two from Smuckers or Kraft or Heinz. Still, there is a part of our relationship to food we are buying back when we agree to follow the transformation from field to table. In grocery shopping there isn’t the kind of bond to the elements, the land, the season, the home, the kitchen; there isn’t the connection to one’s memory, or history or intention; there isn’t seasoning or sensuality or seductive surprise that can come from becoming present to food as it changes, or even likelier, as we are changed by its presence in our midst.
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This is how it happens in our home – we weave food preparation with the events of the day, with the weather, with the quiet and the conversation, watching movements and mistakes as they assert themselves, upon us and upon our food, asking for our attention. This is how dried lavender gets shaken into the sugar canister for lavender-scented sugar; this is how the lavender buds get dumped into the peach jam, when the sifter is forgotten; this is how it gets stirred in with a jam-coated spoon; this is how it drips onto my breasts when I lean over to sample it; this is how my lover, walking by, missing no entreaty, turns me around and licks it from my flesh; this is how the fire leaps into me and my peaches while we’re dancing and kissing above the flame; this is perhaps what you also taste when I make you toast from fresh bread and chunky fruit and violet sprigs of calming flower. We are preserving passion, which is, I believe, able to be ingested as nourishment, as earth-muse, and for us, as remembrance of a moment’s lovemaking.
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As Proust knew, food is our strongest form of remembrance – we can be transported to our childhood or to a lover or to another land through scent and taste. What the home cook preserves not only reveals how she feeds her family, but what she desires to hold onto, what she values in method, in memory and in meals. Show me a cook with a mouth set in a grimace, and I will show you fodder for heartburn. It is the heartfelt connection to, say, a ripe tomato, how it burnishes plump under the hot sun, how it is splattered with droplets on a summer morning, how it gives, gently, when it is taken from the vine that can provide the inspiration for a recipe. We preserve because “…a taste of a coming season in the wind can sweep your whole life past you, rich in portent.” (8)
We preserve in a way so we can open up that jar and know what it was we felt on that day, the qualities of the food, the way the house smelled, the way our lover leaned against us as we stirred the pot. We preserve food in the same way we engage in other arts – it is an impulse that stirs us, that compels us. In these the domestic arts, we long to make meaning from small acts. Wendell Berry, farmer and writer, reminds us we preserve to explore that rewarding bond – “from the forest to the dinner table, from stewardship of the land to hospitality to friends and strangers. These arts are as demanding and gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing, as the so-called “fine arts”. To learn them is, I believe, the work that is our profoundest calling.” (9)
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We seek to preserve food with the same integrity in which we preserve our relationship with the land. The land is humus for apples and ancestors. We cannot hold dear our harvest without regard for the terra firma -- the same ground receives our forebears and feeds our children. For those committed to such movements as Slow Food, our very urge to eat is being compromised by ignorance of the connection between harmful food production and perilous consumption systems, the recent deaths from spinach being a tragedy likely to reoccur until the costs of not eating locally are reckoned. We preserve both food and land for the common good, and when we are disconnected from the locality of the harvest, we cannot trace disease, and we cannot receive our food in a nourishing way. (Have you ever been filled up by or understood the food origins of a Twinkie?) We’ve become like Zen’s hungry ghosts, gorging at an ever-groaning feast, without truly tasting it. By slowing things down enough to locate a farmer, connect with a recipe, mull in the kitchen, preserve on behalf of our community, we enjoin the fruits of our labor with the promise of wholesome meal-making, ensuring biodiversity and cultural diversity through conscious choices.
We ‘put up’ what we like, especially what we wish to devour midwinter when the tomatoes are without scent, when the berries have no grassy must, when the roll cries out for ripe infusion. At such times, we’re not prying lids off jars sealed for months just out of desire for fuel, but to be nourished by the people who made them for us; we’re eating to feed the deep hungers that reside within, including the desire for community, for union, for comfort. Hospitality enters in the moment our senses link with the sensual experiences of the preserver, the repast a link to that specific past, and also, the imagined past – those interested in the domestic arts long to preserve the beautiful, historical traditions of the table, even though we might have only known frozen food from TV trays. Like the Beatitudes reveal, we hunger and thirst for righteousness, and in the virtue that comes from right growing, right harvesting, right preparation (meaning, in part, that we produce and consume in a good, clean and fair manner), indeed, we shall be satisfied.
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On the Sunday after I’d been at the farm, a box of enormous tomatoes sat on the kitchen table, their pulp so ready to burst forth they practically split sitting in the afternoon sun. It was time to get ready for dinner, and my man had lit a fire of mesquite and hickory on the smoker just outside the kitchen door. As he came and went, smoke infused the house, leading us straight into an ancestral domain. Before long we had gathered those beefy reds and laid them on the grill and waited until their skins split from heat and flame. I let them cool on the counter, then quickly cored and peeled them, sliding eighths into a large pot, simmering slowly, before adding grainy salt and a handful of fresh basil. An hour or so later, I lifted a wooden spoon to my mouth and felt another woman enter from the balls of my feet to the curve of my belly to just below my throat. And then she was yelling a phrase I knew I’d heard my grandmother say a long time ago, -- “Oh. My. Lord!” – a gusty, guttural call of a blues woman, an expression coming more from kinetic core than mental knowing, the smoke-dazed freshness of the fruit a memory of a time I hadn’t had, couldn’t know. The man looked inside from the fire, smiling. He didn’t know who this woman was yet, but he was about to taste her.
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SEXY RECIPES:
Peach Lavender Jam
Smoke-Infused Tomato Sauce
Fig Chutney
Ginger Chutney
Spiced Whole Oranges
1. History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, U.K., 1992, p. 738.
2. The Art of Eating, M.F.K. Fisher, Wiley Publishing, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1937, pg. 706.
3. Ibid, pg. 706.
4. Ibid, pg. 708.
5. History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, U.K., 1992, p. 485.
6. Ibid., pg. 497.
7. The Sex Life of Food, Bunny Crumpacker, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2006, pg.66.
8. “The Fruits of Memory,” Corn Bread Nation 2, Amy E. Weldon, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004.
9. “In Distrust of Movements,” In The Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World, Wendell Berry, Orion Books.
Peach Lavender Jam
Sugar:
4 cups granulated sugar
large bunch lavender buds+
Shake buds into sugar and let rest for two weeks, shaking a few times each week.
Jam:
2 1/2 lb. peaches, peeled and pitted
juice of one lemon
1 cup water
Prepare peaches, cut into chunks, then sprinkle with lemon juice and stir.
Bring the sugar and water to a bowl; sift the lavender out, or not – your choice! Stir until the sugar is dissolved, and boil rapidly five minutes. Add the peaches, return to boil, and boil rapidly, stirring often twenty minutes, or until jell stage. Remove the pot from the heat and let cool for ten minutes. Skim well. Ladle into hot sterilized jars and seal. Process according to recommendations.
Makes three pints.
+(if you don’t grow and dry your own, purchase buds from a botanical store locally)
Smoke-Infused Tomato Sauce
4 lb. beefsteak tomatoes
large bunch basil
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon cider vinegar
Prepare a grill or smoker and soak wood chips in water. A few minutes before placing the tomatoes on the grill, let the chips begin to smoke. Quickly place the tomatoes, cover and peek every few minutes to see if the skins have burst. Take them off the flame (use the grill for a kebob or steak to go with the sauce.)
Peel the tomatoes, cut into eighths and if you prefer, remove most of the seeds. Place in a heavy bottomed pan, and bring to boil. Add salt. Simmer 45 minutes, or until the sauce thickens. Take off the heat and stir in the vinegar.
Add a few basil sprigs to each hot sterilized jar. Pour the sauce over. Heat process, cool, and check the seals. (If you prefer not to heat process, you can refrigerate up to one month, or freeze for two months, but cool the jars first before refrigerating.)
Makes 5 cups
Use in pasta sauces or on pizzas.
Other recipes I recommend here should be from Preserving, by Oded Schwartz, which is the most beautiful preserving book ever created. (DK Publishing, Inc., New York, N.Y. 10016) 1996.
