Image at right: learning to perform a Newari style blessing on my last day in Kathmandu in July.

I’ve spent enough time overseas at this point that I often find myself watching events here in my motherland with the conscious distance of a foreigner. So while Hindu pujas may have lost their exotic veneer, ostensibly familiar ceremonies strike me conversely as peculiar: the intricate social dance we enact with polite acquaintances, for one, or rituals of restaurant decorum. Certainly the episcopal Christmas eucharist I found myself at today (thanks to my girlfriend, a divinity student) struck me as about as strange as any of the festivals I was privy to in Southasia: eating the body and blood of Christ actually seems much stranger than eating actual meat that has been first been sacrificed and offered to a god.

Part of me is most at home when I am out of place, for in not atypical modern fashion there is no one place I truly belong to: I’ve never quite felt like a New Yorker, though I drive like one when I’m in Manhattan, jaywalk like one anywhere, and I’ll fiercely defend my old neighborhood pizza joint, Sal and Carmine’s, as the best slice on earth. Meanwhile, living in Caledonia county, VT this fall, lovely as it’s been, has held constant reminders that I’m an unusual breed in those parts as well, if not a flat-out flatlander in most eyes. In Nepal, at least, I’m obviously “from away,” a bideshi, which status begets a certain amount of tolerance towards me when I fail to act in expected ways. Perversely, for someone like me it becomes easy to feel at home in a place where one is an acknowledged outsider. Perhaps this is why I felt so at home last night, Christmas Eve, at the home of a high school friend and his first-generation Polish immigrant parents: an American most at home elsewhere, at the home of foreigners who had made America their home, and for whom (I surmise) Christmas serves both to connect with traditions from the old country and to reground themselves in the new one.

The venue was the Moore residence (the name is an Ellis island substitute for an original I can best approximate as Zbienievski), a neat house on a quiet street in Riverdale. Gathered there were Kate and John Moore and their son David, Kate’s twinkly-eyed grandmother who speaks not a word of English, Kate’s sister Margaret and her two sons, the pregnant wife of the older son, and a two couples of family friends. I arrived with my girlfriend Thandiwe and my mother; my father, who lives in a dementia care facility in Manhattan, was with us at the Moores’ two Christmases ago, just days before we “placed” him in his first institutional home.

Christmas eve dinner has been a mainstay of the Moore family for years, presumably ever since John Moore arrived in this country from Poland via an Austrian refugee camp with his wife, a few hundred dollars, and two or three words of English. And though no word is spoken during dinner about the provenance of the dishes shortly to be described, the meal smacks overwhelmingly, deliciously of tradition. I mean, would any single person acting independently come up with the idea of serving five different cold fish dishes as part of an appetizer course? The reasons for this single-minded extravagance lie in Catholic observance and long family practice accommodating it and now, in this generation, standing in for traditional religiosity: somewhere along the line, the operative question was “what is the most enormous feast we can have without eating any meat?”


The evening begins with a breaking of bread: wine glasses wielded, everyone mills around the kitchen breaking bread with everyone else and wishing them a merry christmas in a series of quick face-to-face encounters. This simple practice has the effect not only of introducing or reacquainting everyone but also of building a feeling of fellowship: we’re all here together, doing the same thing, with the same sorts of wishes and hopes. Then it’s to the table, where we sit at assigned places marked with slips scrawled in Polish-inflected phonetics: to my left sat Yvonne, once she deciphered the slip marked “Ywon” on her plate. The Maestro, John, has already set the cold appetizers out along the length of the table he and his son had expanded with a new leaf just for the evening: two kinds of pickled herring (one in cream sauce), cod with a tomato and onion “Greek sauce,” a fresh tuna salad with roasted red peppers, a canned tuna salad wrapped in lettuce leaves, a salad of diced vegetables, peas, apples and pickles dressed in mayonnaise, a wild rice pilaf, and bread and butter. By any normal standards, this is already a meal in itself, and a generous one. But the guests know what’s coming, and each seems to have a strategy in mind for how to cope with the onslaught of delicacies--some have primed their metabolic pumps with cannabis brownies, and at least one guest is taking a power nap on the couch.

Now, gentle reader, be advised: the appetizer of would-be lofty rumblings on sense of place has been cleared, the soup of interpreting traditions has been supped, and the main dish to come smacks of a different flavor entirely. This essay is about to devolve into a sort of carnal blow-by-blow description of a meal that simply deserves to be commemorated. Let the food porn commence.

An hour after the meal has begun, half of us have migrated to the kitchen, where John is heating up pierogis he’s made with chanterelles from his woods. It’s not hard to coax everybody back to the table, the axial center of the universe on this night, where the delicate pierogis are followed at a leisurely pace by a light, pure-tasting mushroom soup made from dried boletes (porcini). Matt, the older of Margaret’s sons, mentions in his understated way how he looks forward all year to this soup, and how it always tastes the same. Dave admits that he always dreaded it--apparently he spent his formative Christmas Eves eating bread and butter. In one of the evening’s more self-conscious moves, Dave has been called upon to record some of the recipes for posterity, but it hasn’t happened this year.
More milling follows the dumplings, along with plenty of wine and a brief jam session (electric guitars and drums) by a few of us downstairs. In the kitchen, John calmly sautees breaded scrod and amasses the tower of fillets, teetering, on a platter. Into another pan goes sauerkraut with yellow split peas, and mashed potatoes are in the works. Somehow everyone finds the appetite to fill their plates once again: fish and kraut and buttery, golden mashed potatoes, along with a salad of shaved cabbage, onions, parsley and vinegar. I a point of saturation with food and wine--not overindulgence, for I have been mindful and even up to now restrained--but fullness, a brimming over of contentment and good will. I catch the bright eye of Babcha, a grandmother “out of central casting” as my mother puts it, and someone mentions with a wink that she’s really in it for the sweets. Sweets. Course number five, and it’s nearly midnight. But a really good dessert makes room for itself, and without forcing it I sampled all four confections: first thick, rich chocolate cookies that resembled burger patties and rolled cookies with apricot jam, lemon zest and walnuts--Sarah’s creations. Then John’s poppy seed roll, a handsome labor of love. Finally, along with the last drops of coffee from the tall, ornate porcelain pot, comes Babcha’s contribution: a poppy seed cake laced with what I can only assume is chocolate ganache, dotted with golden butter frosting, and soaked in spirits. It’s sheer soft, heady, sumptuous pastry heaven. I catch Babcha’s eye and make what I hope is a universal sign of dessert appreciation. I go back for seconds, finally tossing in the white flag with a single bite of cake left on my plate. We’ve been sitting (and standing, milling, drumming, napping) for nearly 6 hours.

(End of explicit content)

Today I found I hardly needed to eat anything, but to call it a fast would be ridiculous.
I don’t know quite how to wrap this up. A final nod in the direction of tradition? Ah, tradition--a word I find myself using a lot these days, and one that has taken on an almost hallowed aura in my own mind. But what separates beautiful, wise, sustaining, and nourishing traditions from rigid, unyielding, repressive and lifeless ones? Is there any clear distinction, or way to cultivate the one while shedding the carapace of the other? To be continued, perhaps.

Notes from a Cookbook to be

I'm finally doing it: throwing together my obsession with food and my increasingly arcane views on health into a sort of manifesto, masquerading as a cookbook. The project's still in its early adolescence, but I see no reason not to provide a taste of it here.

* * *

Guidelines for Cooking and Eating Well:

Base your meals around what’s fresh and in season.
Use all your senses.
Don’t be Afraid of Salt and Oil.
Use Good Ingredients and Be Generous with Them.
Be Mindful of Balance.

Together these add up to a formula for good eating and, through it, satisfaction and health. The first guideline may seem obvious, but the point is often lost on folks: you’ll eat better if you head to the market with an open mind and let yourself be moved by what looks, smells, feels, tastes, and sounds good. That’s where the second rule comes in, obviously. Engage with your ingredients on a visceral level. Then as you head home with a bag full of whatever called out to you, let inspiration for how to use it all come to you. Or if that’s too abstract, start planning your meals as you roam amongst the garden rows, market stalls or aisles. Just don’t let preconceived notions of what you’re going to cook dictate your choices completely. You’ll miss too many delights that way.
My third and fourth rules may come as a surprise, since I’m advocating a certain level of indulgence and claiming to offer a healthy approach at the same time. The idea is that food should be about pleasure, not guilt; depriving ourselves of what satisfies us now is only likely to lead to overindulgence in less wholesome ways later. True, we first need to discern what is truly wholesome and nourishing. And the answers here may be counter-intuitive. After all, we have been trained for a few generations now to avoid so many of the foods we naturally gravitate towards. Nutritional science has by turns steered us harshly away from fats, carbohydrates, sugar, and meat. Every two weeks, it seems, there is a sea change in what is allowed to count as healthy. And partly as a result of this indecision, we find ourselves in the midst of what Michael Pollan calls a “national eating disorder.” We are simultaneously obese and starved for nourishment; record numbers struggle with anorexia. It’s probably not a coincidence that fewer and fewer people spend time cooking, or even feel comfortable in the kitchen. For the question of what to eat is a remarkably simple one (and one that applied science has done more harm than good in trying to answer). Michael Pollan again: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
The heart of the answer is incredibly simple: eat food. Real food. The sorts of things people have been eating for millennia. We all know at some level what this means: real, crusty bread that you have to chew; vegetables that aren’t jetlagged from their red-eye flight from another hemisphere; fragrant nut and seed oils and sweet yellow butter; and, yes, meat, from animals that lived happily and healthily and were slaughtered humanely.
Lest this sound too good to be true, there is a mounting movement to support exactly this kind of traditional food and reveal the dangers of modern, industrialized diets. The work of the early 20th Century dentist Weston A Price has been championed by Sally Fallon and others to show that people living on traditional diets tend to be in excellent physical condition and don’t suffer from the degenerative diseases that plague modern Americans. “Traditional diets” means exactly what Michael Pollan does: real food. But some of the details are surprising, because it is often exactly those foods which we’ve been warned against most severely that turn out to be most supportive of good health. A prime example is fat. Fat itself has been demonized, which is absurd since fats are an essential class of macronutrients that we need to produce everything from cell membranes to sex hormones. Simply put, without fat people go crazy, wither away and eventually die. The key, however, is getting the right kind of fat, and this is where the biggest surprise comes in. Because the saturated animals fats that we all “know” are bad for you turn out to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Butter, lard, tallow--all of these are life-supporting lipids, provided they themselves come from healthy animals. In this sense the authorities are correct, for most of the butter on the market come from cows raised away from their natural pasture and in factory farms. But real, sweet, yellow butter is out there, too, and worth every penny you pay for it. This kind of butter actually concentrates the nutrients found in green grass, providing a rich source of the omega-3 fatty acids that have emerged recently as so crucial to good health. Lard from pastured pigs is similarly healthy, in proper proportion. Of course, it’s not just animal fat that’s good for us: plant oils are great too, if they’re unrefined. This is what makes extra virgin olive oil so healthy as well as so flavorful. What most people don’t realize is that tons of other seeds and nuts are equally healthy and delicious, if we can get a hold of them in cold-pressed forms. Sunflower, mustard, hazelnut, almond--every edible seed has precious oil locked within.

...But for whom? What the Weston Price/Sally Fallon school of traditional diets tends to gloss over is that not all people are the same. Some of us struggle to keep our weight down, while others can’t ever seem to put on a pound. Some are prone to acne while others have perpetually dry skin. Some people do indeed have to watch their salt intake and blood pressure, while others have to make sure they’re getting enough iron and other nutrients to keep from becoming anemic and having fainting spells.
Almost everybody has an intuitive sense of what’s right for them. Haven’t you ever bitten into a radish or a cucumber and felt unreasonably good? Or eaten a supposedly healthy meal only to find it’s given you gas, or that you’re hungry again 90 minutes later?
A one size fits all approach doesn’t work. This is where traditional ideas from both Eastern and Western traditions can help immensely... (to be continued)