I rely on cooking, eating and drinking to connect to the rhythms of life, to mark occasions, to grasp time. Easter is this weekend, and I keep thinking about my past, when fasting, like eating, helped me process the changing seasons. Particularly winter to spring, to what feels like the first full step into a new year.
First I have to explain a little that I was raised Catholic and Presbyterian. I made my confirmation in the Catholic Church. The more I aged into the Church the more I felt alienated, angered and conditionally welcome, conditions I could not or would never meet. It took me a bit to understand that there’s a part of me that feels culturally Catholic even if I’m not practicing anymore.
The modern Catholic convention for fasting is one light meal and two small snacks, for people whose health doesn’t prohibit it, and who are between 18 and 59. During Lent this practice intends to mirror Christ’s isolation in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights, and to make room for the contemplation of the sacrifice Christ made in his death for human sin.
Like lots of people, I've wanted to shrink my body since I was a child. The first opportunity where dieting was somewhat socially acceptable or at least somewhat tolerated by my parents was at Lent. Lent allowed me to give up sugar, fried foods, pasta, etc, all things I enjoyed eating that I understood to be the worst, according to things like the South Beach diet (I’m 33).
My Mom did not like that I was giving up foods. She always says you should take something positive on. I think she also saw her child dieting and wanted to discourage that. She told me that on Sundays it’s ok to do what you gave up, to eat the fries. I really admire how she told me this, trying to give me back some control over the rules around my body. She’s an expert at navigating limitations in order to support me and our family. On fasting days she told my sister and me to eat if we wanted to. If your thoughts keep wandering to your hunger, she said that was counterproductive. The idea is to remove food as a distraction. From this perspective fasting is the absence of feasting.
On the surface it seems fasting and feasting sit at two poles, like good and evil (the Church loves a binary). To me they are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. Fasting is defined in the negative, in opposition to the feast of Easter to come soon. But at dinner on Good Friday, my family would still gather for a light meal. I remember eating minestrone soup once. I recall being confused that we were still sitting down to the table with food decentralized from the ritual. Christ was alone in the desert, and I thought fasting took place in isolation. There’s more diversity to it than that. My family still needed that dinner time to convene at the end of the day, and of the week, and to share the anticipation of Easter to come.
Em, who was not raised in a religion, speculates that there’s a reason religions time things with the seasonal calendar, in the case of lenten fast it seems possibly related to people’s larders being depleted. Easter coincides with Passover because in the Bible Jesus's death and resurrection occurred at the time of the Jewish Passover. Passover is celebrated on the first full moon following the vernal equinox. The Torah commands to “Guard the month of spring, and make [then] the Passover offering.” Barley was needed for the observance of Omer, a sacrifice offered on the second day of Passover, therefore, it needed to really be spring (this is in Israel) in that things needed to be fruiting and harvestable. Ramadan is going on now, a holiday the observance of which also includes fasting. Ramadan takes place at different times each year because it follows the lunar calendar. Passover had been like this for centuries but was eventually set in the spring harvest.
Em directed me to Honey From a Weed: Fasting and Feasting by Patience Grey. I found more insight into the notion of fasting together, and of togetherness not in spite of but through lack. I did not know until looking at this book that there are special foods for fasting - including a Rainbow favorite food, salt cod. It finally dawned on me that my family’s Friday soups are fasting foods, too. In her introduction to the book, Grey writes, “When Providence supplies the means, the preparation and sharing of food takes on a sacred aspect. The fact that every crop is of short duration promotes a spirit of making the best of it while it lasts and conserving part of it for future use. It also leads to periods of fasting and periods of feasting, which represent the extremes of the artist’s situation as well as of the Greek Orthodox approach to food and the Catholic insistence on fasting, now abandoned.”
Fasting through a western lens is more of a mode of eating than a mode of not eating. While we don't have a lack of food now, there is a lack of fresh, local things, as the earth is just waking up. Fasting as a ritual supports this time of the gradual thaw, it internalizes winter, and the arrival of spring, in the body, in the round of your belly.
“Wild Garlic & Potato Soup” from Darina Allen
Patience Grey also writes how the people on the Greek island of Naxos survive Lent on just a few foods, including weeds. My mind goes to a favorite soup from Ballymaloe Cookery School, one I can imagine fasting with. Wild garlic is what the Irish call ramps. If you don’t source ramps, you can use spring onions, I think they have them at Cermak Produce on North Ave.
Serves 6
45g (1 1/2oz/scant 1/2 stick) butter
150g (5oz) peeled and chopped potatoes
110g (4oz) peeled and chopped onion
salt and freshly ground pepper
900ml (1 1/2 pint/3 3/4 cups) water or home-made chicken stock or vegetable stock
300ml (10fl ozs/1 1/4 cups) creamy milk
150g (5oz) chopped wild garlic leaves
Melt the butter in heavy bottomed saucepan, when it foams, add the potatoes and onions and toss them until well coated. Sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper. Cover and sweat on a gentle heat for 10 minutes.
Meanwhile prepare the wild garlic leaves. When the vegetables are almost soft but not coloured add the stock and milk, bring to the boil and cook until the potatoes and onions are fully cooked. Add the wild garlic and boil with the lid off for 4-5 minutes with the lid off approximately until the wild garlic is cooked. Do not overcook or the soup will lose its fresh green colour. Puree the soup in a liquidiser or food processor. Taste and correct seasoning. Serve sprinkled with a few wild garlic flowers.”
Darina Allen, from https://www.ballymaloe.ie/recipe/wild-garlic-potato-soup
edible weeds (wild watercress) in co cork. also good in a soup!
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