The Reporter’s Kitchen

DECEMBER 2016/FEBRUARY 2017

In January of this year, when the Metropolitan Museum’s medievalists Melanie Holcomb and Barbara Drake Boehm were five years into researching and assembling the exhibit “Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven,” they called Yotam Ottolenghi in London to talk about holding a period celebration soon after their show opened in the fall. Ottolenghi was born and raised in Jerusalem. And given that his cookbooks, restaurants, and documentaries have been largely responsible for our millennial obsession with the tastes and colors and textures of the Eastern Mediterranean, it isn’t surprising that Holcomb and Boehm—having spotted an eleventh-century brass lentil pot and brazier in a cache of metalwork long buried in a huge clay fenugreek jar in Caesarea—decided to throw a medieval Jerusalem dinner at the museum, and said to each other “Ottolenghi!” (Jerusalem was the third of Ottolenghi’s six cookbooks.) “We travel together, we love to eat, it’s part of what we do,” Holcomb told me, describing their first trip to one of Ottolenghi’s London restaurants, and their decision to celebrate Jerusalem’s cultural heritage and its historic diversity with a feast that would evoke civility and amity in what is arguably a politically toxic present.

A few weeks later, Ottolenghi flew to New York for meetings with the two curators and with Limor Tomer, the director of the Met’s Live Arts program, and in the course of them, suggested bringing on board the food writers Maggie Schmitt and Laila El-Haddad, whose cookbook The Gaza Kitchen was for him an eloquent reminder of the fact that, however potent its symbolic status and however many armies fought to control it, medieval Jerusalem was a dusty provincial town, with little to offer by way of a great culinary tradition of its own, whereas Gaza, at the time, was a prominent trade-route port and cultural center where the classic Indian spices—galangal, ginger, cloves, and cinnamon, to name a few—had transformed the local cuisine into a repository of flavor, fit for what you might call high-end feasting.

Back in London, Ottolenghi started researching Arabic texts of the period, which, he says, introduced him to the “richly thick dining history” of the Abbasid dynasty, whose decline had opened the door to the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century, ushering in ninety years of Christian rule, but whose glory years had long since defined the sumptuous and extravagant potlatch style of the high court celebrations that resumed during the Ayyubid Caliphate, when Saladin’s armies took back Jerusalem from the Europeans. It was, as Ottolenghi puts it, “a period notably obsessed with the culinary arts.”

A few weeks later, he went to work in his London test kitchen, transforming the arcane clues and measurements gleaned from hundreds of medieval recipes into dishes adapted to the Met’s vast basement kitchen, not to mention his own. El-Haddad, a Gazan who lives in Maryland, and Schmitt, a New Yorker who lives in Spain, are scholars of the Abbasid high-court banquets, which in the dynasty’s heyday involved as many as two or three hundred dishes, and they kept in touch with Ottolenghi for the next six months, sharing research and results, until together they had worked out what Ottolenghi calls “the significant flavors” that you would have found in any one of those feasts. Most notable, he says, were the combinations of sweet and sour—of fruits, say, cooked with meat. Then came the flavors of preserving—pickling fish, for instance, in the white-pomegranate vinegar known as “Babylonian vinegar” and honey. But the most surprising delicacies of all were bananas. “The Europeans who arrived in the eleventh century were bananas about bananas,” Ottolenghi told me, his point being that for every period of crusaders gnawing bones at dinner there were periods of great gastronomic surprises and sophistication and even a certain amount of monotheistic mingling. (In Hebron, for instance, an ancient Abrahamic tradition of hospitality ensured that any stranger entering the town was welcomed and fed.)

The daily staples of medieval Jerusalem were bread and lentils. Lentil pots like the one the two Met curators found were the sine qua non of every Jerusalem kitchen, from the humblest to the most elaborate. So, too, was the battery of tools with which wheats and grains were pounded and refined in very distinct and various ways to produce whiter, lighter flours and hence more delicate breads and pastries. Europeans, accustomed to heavy, unrefined breads—especially rye-flour breads—took to them instantly, as well as to the unaccustomed taste of cane sugar, which came from the marshes of Iraq, in their desserts. Ottolenghi and his young test-kitchen cook, Esme Howarth, spent the better part of six months translating the instructions and ingredients in scores of ancient recipes into their contemporary equivalents, or near equivalents—their job being to create new dishes that would still be unmistakably medieval.

El-Haddad and Schmitt say that they dreamed of serving a hundred of those dishes at the banquet, passed and shared at long, low, communal tables, with everyone sitting on the floor eating with their fingers, making the celebration a lesson in historical authenticity. Their dreams were dashed, not only by the impossibility of sourcing and cooking all those exotic dishes (for one thing, there are no armies of slaves in the Met’s kitchen), but by the strong likelihood that the kind of people willing to spend a hundred and twenty-five dollars to sit on the floor for a forkless three-hour meal would be too old or simply too stiff to get up from the floor once they finished eating. After some negotiation, and a test run through the famous multicultural shelves and counters of the purveyor Kalustyan’s, fifty blocks south of the Met on Lexington Avenue, the menu was fixed at thirteen courses. As for the proper libations, Ottolenghi ordered local Cremisan wines—red and white—from vineyards in the Judean Hills that Salesian monks have been cultivating for the last eight hundred years (and that are now threatened by an Israeli government attempt to claim the land for new settlements, as well as for a new wall pushing back the Palestinians who still live there). The irony was not lost on the diners when on the second of two sold-out nights of feasting, he told the vineyard’s story and El-Haddad talked about visiting her parents in Gaza but being unable to cross into Israel and visit the city whose celebration she was helping to plan.

In the end, though, there was something inspiring, even hopeful, about a meal served in the wing of a great museum at a couple of tables so long that a hundred and twenty people, most of them strangers, could sit down together, passing platters of arguably odd, unfamiliar food, chatting to each other about it and then about themselves and, by the end of the evening, exchanging e-mail addresses and phone numbers while, at the front of the room, Ottolenghi, El-Haddad, and Schmitt, holding microphones, explained the courses as they appeared. I learned from Ottolenghi that when he was a boy, his parents liked taking him to the Cremisan cellars “to see how the monks did it”; and from El-Haddad that alcohol is an Arabic word, and is also the word for kohl; and from Schmitt that the sweet-and-sour marinade from the halibut we were about to eat—and from which Europeans derived seviche and escabeche—has practically disappeared from Arab cuisine; and from all three of them that an abundance of sugar, when it came to sweets, was a sign of wealth, generosity, and refinement.

The next day I avoided the scale and ate vicariously by reading and rereading the menu I had saved. The first course included, along with the halibut, platters of wine-poached quinces with spices, blue cheese, and walnut brittle; braised fennel, capers, and olives in verjus; burnt aubergine, tahini sauce, cucumber, pomegranate, and Urfa chili; chicken meatballs with melokhia, garlic and coriander; and sambousek root-vegetable pies with cardamom and lime yogurt. The main course involved slow-cooked lamb shoulder with figs, apricots, and an almond-and-orange-blossom salsa; sweet-and-sour leeks, goat’s curd and currants; green beans with pistachio and preserved lemon; and harak osbao, a lentil dish of such irresistible complexity that its Arabic name means “he burnt his fingers,” perhaps because the cook couldn’t wait to try it. Dessert was kataifi (shredded filo) nests filled with feta-and-saffron cheesecake; and pomegranate granita, with mint and roses.

“Something light, after all that food,” Ottolenghi had said.

That night I e-mailed him asking what, exactly, went into harak osbao, figuring that it must have been the one dish on the menu with too many ingredients to list. The next morning, this was in my inbox:

Harak Osbao

This is a dish for a feast, yet it is extremely comforting and delicious with all the toppings mixed in. Serves eight to ten.

40g tamarind, soaked with 200ml boiling water

250g fettuccine, broken up roughly

60 milliliters olive oil

2 red onions, thinly sliced (350g)

1.5 litres chicken stock

350g brown lentils

2 tbsp pomegranate molasses

6 garlic cloves, crushed

30g coriander, roughly chopped

20g parsley, roughly chopped

90g pomegranate seeds

2 tsp sumac

2 lemons cut into wedges

Flaky sea salt and black pepper

1. Mix the tamarind with the water well to separate the pips. Strain the liquid into a small bowl, discarding the pips and set aside.

2. Place a large saucepan on a medium-high heat, and once hot, add the broken-up fettuccine. Toast for 1 to 2 minutes until the pasta starts to brown, then remove from the pan and set aside.

3. Pour 2 tablespoons of oil into the pan and return to a medium-high heat. Add the onion and fry for 8 minutes, stirring frequently until golden and soft. Remove from the pan and set aside.

4. Add the chicken stock to the pan and place on a high heat. Once boiling, add the lentils, reduce the heat to medium, and cook for 20 minutes, or until soft. Add the toasted fettuccine, tamarind water, 150 millilitres water, pomegranate molasses, 4 teaspoons of salt, and lots of pepper. Continue to cook for 8 to 9 minutes until the pasta is soft and almost all of the liquid has been absorbed, and set aside for 10 minutes. The liquid will continue to be absorbed, but the lentils and pasta should remain moist.

5. Place a small saucepan on a medium-high heat with 2 tablespoons of oil. Add the garlic and fry for 1 to 2 minutes until just golden brown. Remove from the heat and stir in the coriander.

6. Spoon the lentils and pasta into a large shallow serving bowl. Top with the garlic and coriander, parsley, pomegranate seeds, sumac and serve with the lemon wedges.

* * *

It’s safe to say that good food is, and probably always was, what separates celebrations from rites and rituals, where the food is prescribed and, in the case of rites, ingestion tends to be more symbolic than tasty. (Think communion wafer.) I confess to being an avid drop-of-a-hat celebrator, so it stands to reason that after years of marriage to an anthropologist and a working life of travel, I have also become something of an amateur of the history and ethnography of celebration, of how different people celebrate and why they celebrate, whether it’s a couple of hungry museum curators inspired by the discovery of an ancient lentil pot or Ed Koch presiding over a groaning board at Gracie Mansion or, as he once put it, “celebrating not being poor anymore.” And what’s amazing to me is that until food became a respectable field of social and cultural history, you could read the most exhaustive studies of people and their celebrations and find so little about the food those people ate and where it came from, who grew or raised it, how it was prepared and cooked, and what made it special—or, you could say, celebratory.

Four years after we got married, my husband and I took our baby daughter to a village called Bonnieux, in southern France, for the summer, and when I wasn’t busy sweeping scorpions out the door of our cellar kitchen or laying foam rubber over the stone floors in the rest of the house we’d rented—a primitive form of babyproofing, or more accurately, baby-saving, on the order of plastic socket blockers—I started reading Laurence Wylie’s famous study Village in the Vaucluse, about the people of a nearby village named Roussillon, which he called Peyrane. Wylie, who taught anthropology at Harvard when my husband was studying there, had lived in Roussillon during the first two winters of the 1950s, and six years later had produced his book, which remains a classic in the field of French rural studies. It was in most ways a wonderfully rich portrait. Every aspect of life in Roussillon—all the rivalries and feuds and infidelities and secrets—seemed to be covered, or so I’d thought when I lived in Bonnieux, twenty years later, thrilled to be so close to such a legendary place. But when I took down the book again, six years ago, in the course of writing a talk about celebration that I was due to give at Oxford, I was stunned to discover that there wasn’t a word about what most people in Roussillon ate, celebrating—or pretty much what they ate at all, beyond the chestnuts that one ingenuous housewife roasted in a worn-down skillet into which she had punched holes. More distressing, the one chapter purportedly about celebrating was mainly confined to the menu for the village’s yearly banquet—“our firemen’s banquet,” the villagers called it—a desultory affair which no one but Roussillon’s six firemen and the mayor attended, because it was so expensive. Here’s what the firemen ate and drank, five years after the end of the Second World War:

• Choice of hors d’oeuvre

• Lobster à l’américaine

• Civet of hare du Ventoux

• Hearts of artichoke peyrannais

• Canapé of Alpine thrush

• Homemade pastries

• Local red wine, rosé wine reserve, sparkling wine, coffee and liqueurs

That was it: less a menu, actually, than a list, given that it lacked any of the intimations of color, taste, and texture that a great menu would evoke. I thought, “Wait a minute, Professor Wylie! Where did the firemen get their lobsters?” This was a question of keen reportorial interest to me, since, at the time of their banquet, Roussillon was dirt poor, postwar dirt poor—like Koch’s boyhood Bronx neighborhood—not to mention literally dirt poor, since it stood in precipitous dirt-road isolation in the Luberon mountains, hours from a paved road, let alone a seacoast. It was also of some gastronomic interest to me—a New Englander stripped down at her computer in the sweltering heat of an Umbrian summer, picturing the thousands of lobster pots bobbing in the cool Atlantic, off the Maine coast, and getting hotter and hungrier by the minute. I also wanted to know what besides thrush went into a canapé of Alpine thrush, and who had actually baked those homemade pastries, and how much time did it take the women—I assumed it was women—to make them and, more to the point, what kind of pastries were they. I wanted to know what kind of wood the women of Roussillon fed into their centuries-old stone ovens for the different dishes on that menu. I wanted to know who caught the hare for the lepre du Ventoux, and what went into the sauce, and what did it taste like. What in fact did a lugubriously bourgeois menu like the firemen’s mean in Roussillon? What did food mean? And most of all, why and what were those firemen celebrating? For me, rereading Wylie was like reading my first biography of Edith Wharton, a passionate decorator, and learning nothing at all about what her living room in Newport looked like, or what colors she preferred, and what kind of fabric she used for curtains.

There is, of course, plenty of celebration in fiction. Emma Bovary transformed herself from farmer’s daughter to respectable bourgeois doctor’s wife in the course of one copious wedding dinner. The oozing charcuterie and reeking cheeses in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris were emblems of the greedy potlatch feasts of Louis-Napoléon’s ascendancy. Balzac—who himself went from months of famine (self-inflicted while writing a novel) to a day of feasting (when the novel was finished), which, as the writer Anka Muhlstein tells us in her enchanting book Balzac’s Omelette, always began with an order for a hundred oysters and four bottles of white wine, followed by lamb chops, duckling, roast partridge, and Normandy sole, topped off with dessert and Comice pears—raised the possibility that the most satisfying celebration of all was a solitary one. And in this, Balzac had something in common with Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who built himself a castle for one called Linderhof, with a single bedroom and, more to the point, a single chair for feasting alone in his small mirrored dining room, surrounded by endless refractions of perhaps the finest collection of Meissen on the planet. But even Balzac’s attention to cookery in celebration could flag when it came to the upstairs-downstairs Paris of the banquets he describes in Illusions Perdues, which had mainly to with adjustments and readjustments of favor by way of table seating; it’s hard to imagine the guilefully ingenuous Lucien de Rubempré venturing into anyone’s kitchen to watch the pastry chef spin sugar or ask the cook at the fireplace where to buy a proper roasting spit.

It took Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse, to lead us from vegetable garden to kitchen to dinner table for the Sunday boeuf bourgignon prepared and served by the sublime Mrs. Ramsay at her summer house on the Isle of Skye. Mrs. Ramsay regarded Sunday dinner as a celebration—a coming together of family and friends, an occasion for matchmaking, for an embrace of lonely, solitary people (call it a gathering of strays) and for the courtesies that a prescribed occasion involves. Children bathed and behaving. Interesting, agreeable conversation. Time out of time, or what we call liminal time—a passage from the ordinariness of daily life into the next round of daily life by way of a salubrious diversion that restores connections, renewing affection for that life and for the people in it. All celebrating is, in that sense, liminal, and it has been more and more obvious to me, as a reader, that I owe my fascination or, more accurately, obsession, with the part food plays in the experience of celebration to (as with so much else) Woolf and her luminous creation. Mrs. Ramsey literally changed the way I see, and the questions I ask, and the conclusions I draw whenever I sit down at my desk to write.

* * *

Last summer in Italy, my husband and I went to the penultimate night of our local sagra—a two-week-long celebration during which the women of the village of Sismano prepare nightly dinners for the hundreds of people who come from similar villages in the area to eat, dance, drink, and play. In larger towns—towns with a few thousand rather than fifty or a hundred people—the sagra used to include a pageant or a historical reenactment. In one sagra, in a town off the mountain road we take to Spoleto, you can still wander through narrow streets, from tableau vivant to tableau vivant, with a paper cup of terrible red wine and your plate heaped with local specialties, and the most popular of those tableaux is always the one with a witch burning at the stake. Girls from the town compete to play her, and the winner each year is always the prettiest girl who can scream and groan the loudest.

In most towns, the sagra used to be political. The Christian Democrats had one, the Communists had one, and the Socialists had one. They were a way of reinforcing, with an eye to the next election, what you could call communities of ideology, through food, music, and regrettably, long speeches. But Sismano, which is literally tucked into a castle close, was part of a feudal estate until the 1950s, and politics were not encouraged by the local nobility—the result being that our sagra had none of those ideological diversions: no oompah bands playing “The Internationale”; no tipsy bishop telling you to vote for the party of God; no posters of a perennially renascent Berlusconi. It did use to include a procession honoring the Madonna on the last of its fourteen nights, but a few years ago the local priest rescheduled it for the following Sunday, saying that he didn’t want to spoil the fun with too much piety—meaning, of course, that there was a limit to mixing the sacred and the profane. The result is that no one in Sismano actually knows anymore what it is they’re celebrating or why, only that “that’s what we do in June, and in July, we’ll go to the sagra in Castel dell’ Aquila, and then the one in Avigliano, and before you know it will be September.”

Here’s what happens at the Sismano sagra. All the otherwise unbridgeable differences between castle and contadini break down (though, this being a nighttime celebration, they are certainly preserved during the day). Our local marquesa, a beautiful and very sexy woman who is usually regarded with longing from a deferential distance, dances with all the men. The village children sit on her lap and wipe their hands on her designer dresses. (I should explain that the local specialty is stinco di maiale, a roasted pork shank you can polish off with your fingers at a sagra, though presumably with a knife and fork at home. The men get drunk and air old quarrels, and end the evening the best of friends. Everybody embraces. Our gardener, a man of such exquisite decorum that he insists on knocking whenever he carries a pail of vegetables to the kitchen, planted a kiss on both my cheeks, and so did the ironsmith who made our lanterns and the base for our porch table.

Here’s what our sagra is not. It’s not a harvest feast, to mark the end of the trebbiatura. The harvest is at least a month away. It’s not the birthday of Sismano’s patron saint; that’s in August. When I ask my neighbors why they’re celebrating, the best they can think of to say is, “It’s time,” and to prove it they go on eating. A lot of celebrations are like that. When the Navajo celebrate the slaughter of a sheep, it’s not for one of the incantational ceremonies known as ways—an enemy way, say, or a ghost way, or a supplication for rain. They don’t even say, “We’re killing the sheep because we’re celebrating.” They say, “We’re celebrating because we’ve killed the sheep; it was time.” The age and readiness of the sheep—that’s the determinant. The Navajo are herders. They were once a nomadic people and their homesteads today tend to be far apart. When a sheep is slaughtered, they come together from all over to celebrate—and of course to eat it. And a far-flung community is rearticulated.

Whether you eat a sheep or a pork shank, you do the same thing, celebrating—even if it’s just two people celebrating an anniversary. You get together, you do something transformative, something that renews the group or the family or the couple. Celebration is civilizing. It deepens the bonds that can keep people who have no choice but to live together from killing each other—and as often as not, it does this with food that’s special to the occasion. On New Year’s Eve in Italy, it’s lentils and sausage. In China, it’s noodles. In France, it’s foie gras; you save for a year to buy the best. What’s more, you tend to get dressed up—a dinner jacket or a slinky gown is enough to transform most people into glamorous, romantic strangers, even if they go to the same dinner with the same old people and eat the same old thing every year. In fact, the most satisfyingly transgressive way to celebrate the New Year may be to stay home in your sweats and eat something different.

On Christmas Eve, the menu is seven courses, and if you’re doing it right in a Catholic country like Italy, it’s fish. On birthdays, by now almost universally, it’s a cake with candles. At Pagan weddings, as I discovered when my friend Margot Adler, who was a Wicca priestess, married, it’s a symbolic display and tasting of a lamb shank and bitter herbs, just like Passover. (I often wonder how many of America’s Pagans grew up in secular Jewish families.) At christenings, in much of Europe, it’s a symbolic mix of salty and sweet, and the rules are strict. I am godmother to two French children, and the instructions presented to me for sweet and savory were as clearly defined as the kind of the gold cross I was supposed to buy for the Catholic baby to wear on a gold chain—solid and plain—as opposed to the one for the Calvinist baby, which, contrary to my expectations, was uncommonly elaborate and came with a little gold bird (which is to say the Holy Spirit) hovering on top. In Morocco, when you break fast at sundown during the month of Ramadan, the celebratory meal always begins with a special soup called harira. Next door in Algeria, the harira is different, but the imperative is the same. In Whatcom County, Washington, at a time when rural poverty was driving people out of their houses and into trailers, they celebrated payday with potluck dinners, the rule for which was explicitly, and defiantly, “Bring trailer-trash food.” At baseball games in New York, everybody eats hot dogs and drinks beer in the bleachers—a ritual you could call “Yankee fans are one people” or “Mets fans are one people.” In Boston, you also eat hot dogs, but there it means, “Red Sox fans are one people, in teams and taste.” After high school proms, it’s twelve kids and a carton of pizza in a stretch limo. At American movies, the celebratory food is popcorn. You are out of the house in a dark room with a couple of hundred strangers, all noisily munching on the same thing. This is a ritual I embrace. I cannot watch a movie without a bag of popcorn on my lap; it would be a kind of blasphemy. I know this because my husband prefers the little gummy candies called Dots, and the looks he always gets from the people in our row are killing.

* * *

In 1967, when I was writing a book about Allen Ginsberg and his friends, we made a ritual climb of Mount Tamalpais, near San Francisco—a mountain sacred to the tribes that had first settled Northern California. We were celebrating “being.” The climb was arduous, made more so by the fact that we were chanting Sanskrit mantras as we climbed. Our goal was to make a joyous circumambulation of the mountaintop. No one could say whether the Native Americans ever did that, or whether the Tibetan guru with us did the same thing, back home in the Himalayas. But the love generation was very syncretic—so we just did it. I sprained my ankle crossing a rocky stream on my way down, and was “healed” with a joint, accompanied by a mudra to take the pain away. At the bottom of the mountain, we trooped to an ice-cream store in our beads and boots and sweaty clothes. I ordered a cone of fudge ripple. Allen stopped me. “The flavor has to be rocky road,” he said. “It’s part of the celebration. We eat it every time.” The ritualized repetition of a menu is part of what makes celebrating so satisfying. Every year, on my husband’s birthday, I make linguine alle vongole, which started out as a simple dish with Manila clams steamed open in a white wine and garlic sauce, but has become incrementally tastier and more elaborate, for which I credit Mario Batali’s sublime addition of diced pancetta, red onions, and hot pepper flakes to the recipe, not to mention my own self-appointed license to double the amount of whatever ingredients I like best, especially the clams. On our anniversary, we go out. At first it was always to the modest (okay, cheap), bring-your-own-bottle Afghan restaurant on St. Mark’s Place where we spent what could be called our first date, meaning that he paid my half of a bill which, as friends, we had always split. Thankfully, the restaurant closed before I could deliver an ultimatum. We went to Le Bernardin, and I never looked back.

Every year, I wait for Easter, Passover, and the Muslim holiday I knew in Morocco as Eid al-Kabir to fall in the same week (the odds are astronomically high) so that for once the three monotheisms could be celebrating a feast whose origins they in many ways share—food rituals involving the sacrifice of a lamb which over time have morphed into celebrations. The difference lies in how we celebrate and why and what our celebrations symbolized in a past that we will never know completely. The Torah says that the Hebrews sacrificed a lamb to commemorate their exodus from Egypt—a moment when their firstborn sons were spared death at the hands of an avenging angel by the trick of marking their doors with the blood of a slaughtered sheep. There is always a lamb shank on display at a Passover seder, just as there was at my friend’s Pagan wedding—celebrated, by the way, on Martha’s Vineyard—but the food of choice at American seders, at least today, is chicken. The question is why? Is it for the broth of the boiled chickens, which can then be used for matzo ball soup. That is, for thrift. Or is it simply that for centuries Jews have preferred chicken, and it eventually became their go-to holiday dish? The early Christians celebrated Easter with lamb because Jesus is said to have eaten it at the Last Supper, which was a Passover feast, and because, sacrificed and resurrected, he became “the lamb of God.” The Catholics and Orthodox Christians of Southern Europe still eat lamb at Easter, but in the north of Europe, ham is the dish of choice. Why again? Ham was a symbol of luck in the Pagan north, so perhaps it’s that. But it’s worth noting that early Christians in the Middle East were also said to have preferred ham, because it proved that they were Christians, celebrating the resurrection of the Messiah, and thus no longer bound by Hebrew food proscriptions. Muslims, on Eid al-Kabir, slaughter a lamb, have always eaten it, and still do. Each family who can afford to does this, but they do it to commemorate the story of Abraham and Isaac. Theirs is the one “why we do this” meal that has never been contested by, say, a chicken—or, understandably, by a ham.

There are probably as many theories of celebration as there are writers or academics to invent them. Mine is that people often celebrate because they’re bored. “It’s time,” as the Navajo say. But given that my favorite celebration is Thanksgiving, and that I write about our national holiday at every chance I get, I should add that what I love most about it is the ritual discipline it instills in most of us, the guilty feeling when we have to miss it, even the excuses I make to myself when I’m happily celebrating it at the “wrong” time in the “wrong” country, and the recitation I feel compelled to offer of all the authentic dishes I would be cooking at home in New York. In this, our Thanksgiving dinner has somehow become a sacralized celebration, the binding agent in the secular melting pot of the republic, which may in fact be why it continues to fascinate me as a subject—a theological puzzle I can never solve. Who, for instance, are we supposed to be thanking at Thanksgiving—God? Country? Mother? The harvest? The turkey? The Pilgrims who were feckless enough to climb into three creaky boats and make the trip to Plymouth? The answer remains a delicious mystery. My husband, who endures nights of terrible takeout dinners while I’m cooking my way through Thanksgiving week, thinks that I should be thanking him. So I have begun to call it the feast of the First Forgiveness. His. There is in fact a strong element of forgiveness involved in the run-up to our national groaning board, given that something inevitably goes wrong, starting with the quality of the pad thai and the soggy tempura and the oily mopu tofu and the cartons of cold greasy pizza sped by kamikaze cyclists to just about every apartment in every building in New York that week. Or the turkey is undercooked, the turkey is overcooked, the white meat is dry, the dark meat is raw, the Brussels sprouts are burned, the sweet potato purée is lumpy. And worse, the Indian pudding, three or four hours in the oven, has failed to firm.

In the course of my research into Thanksgiving eight years ago—the part that wasn’t in the kitchen—I consulted a book called Readings in Ritual Studies, which included an essay with the title “Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day.” Out of kindness, I will keep the authors—there were two—nameless. Their first theory was that over the centuries, Thanksgiving had gone from being a harvest celebration to being a celebration of “consumerism,” a celebration of—this is a quote—“not just a moment of bounty, but a culture of enduring prosperity.” The thought was interesting, in a kind of mean-spirited Marxist way. And in any event, the professors were wrong about harvest celebration. The first Thanksgiving, at least, was a hunt celebration; the Pilgrims caught the wild turkeys, and a party of Wampanoag braves went into the woods with bows and arrows and supplied the deer. I would add, pace Cardinal Richelieu, that sitting down to a feast with your real or imagined enemies can go a long way toward keeping the peace. (Still, it’s worth remembering that the cardinal did take the precaution of banning daggers from his dinner table.)

But the idea of Thanksgiving as a consumer sport was nothing compared to the Freudian hypotheses that the authors offered next: Thanksgiving, they said, being “mythically connected to the infancy of the nation,” represents the “oral stage of development, allowing each participant to return to the contentment and security of an infant wearing comfortable soft clothing who falls asleep after being well fed.” In fact, they likened the smushing and mashing of food around on your plate—that tasty American Thanksgiving habit—to a return to baby food. Christmas, they said, was the “anal stage”—a “cultural negotiation of greed and retentiveness.” New Year’s Eve, which from their arid perspective—they lived in Arizona—must have looked like a bacchanal, was a time of “hedonic sexual fulfillment.” The genital stage. After which, they said, Americans returned to “the everyday world of adult instrumentality.” Whatever that is.

Lately, I have come to the conclusion that celebrating Thanksgiving is about affirming and reaffirming a connection between generations past and future, and especially generations of women, about a continuity of family—my mother’s Thanksgivings, her mother’s—that now includes my daughter, presiding over her own Thanksgiving table and extends into the future with her son grown up and his children smushing their food around. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that even our most secular ceremonies involve a kind of magical thinking, in the way of prayers.

Weddings, of course, are the universal ritual celebration, and perhaps the most magical, in that prayerful sense that Pascal called a pari, a wager—and it doesn’t matter if they’re royal marriages with three billion people inexplicably tuned in, or the boy and the girl down the street. What’s universal, among other things, is the presence of food that’s somehow attached to one’s idea of the people getting married. I remember the wedding of two Chinese friends—they were married at the groom’s parents’ house in Greenwich (the Connecticut Greenwich)—and how odd it seemed when the dinner began with trays of deliciously briny oysters on the half shell and went on to hot boiled lobsters from Long Island Sound. The groom, a linguistic anthropologist, was properly speaking Chinese-American. The bride, a well-known writer from Beijing, had done her graduate work in New York. They were a worldly, sophisticated couple. He loved lobster. She loved oysters. So why was the menu bewildering? Perhaps because the celebration was otherwise quite traditional. The bride wore a red Chinese wedding robe, and the groom’s father, a master of classical Chinese poetry—which exists, calligraphically, on several levels of reference and meaning—wrote the epithalamium. (On one level of the poem, the newlyweds went out in a boat, and the bride fell in the water and presumably drowned; but a few levels deeper, there they were, living happily together ever after.) What I mean to say is that the guests expected a Chinese banquet, not the truly delicious New England seafood feast they got. It was like the shock of pork chops at a Thanksgiving dinner.

I can’t think of any weddings that don’t include eating—from the potlatch feasts of the hedge-fund billionaires who get married in places like Phuket or Patagonia or Patmos to a champagne and finger food reception in the backyard to the restaurant lunch after a quick trip to the marrying judge at city hall. And the magical thinking behind most of them, especially the truly excessive ones, are the hedged bets that they involve—the wagers, as Pascal would say, that the more elaborate they are, the more enduring the marriage bond will be. Hindu weddings can last for days and feed hundreds of people, many of whom were not invited. Muslim weddings, too. The elaborateness is considered propitious. I was once—I guess you could say—a bridesmaid at the marriage of a thirteen-year-old Berber girl from a tribe in the Middle Atlas. It was arranged as an exchange, because the groom’s village had been losing its young men to the bride’s village, and needed to replenish its supply of girls in order to earn back the animals it had been paying out in bride’s prices. The wedding itself was a three-day celebration. It began in the bride’s village, with the bride sequestered and decorated with henna, and course after course of food for the male guests, each course cooking while they ate the one already on the platter. The etiquette was that the men ate until, literally, they dropped. The second day was taken up with the bride’s ceremonial trip to, and arrival in, the groom’s village, where she would be taking up residence in his mother’s house. The third day was spent in preparation for her deflowering, followed by the presentation of a bloody cloth on a copper plate, and then another feast. The bride was missing from the feast, though I was the only person who seemed to have noticed that. When I found her, she was passed out on the floor of the wedding room, still tied up for her initiation into wedded bliss. I was horrified. The first thing she said to me when I managed to revive her by burning incense was “Go eat. It’s over, and they’ll be serving dinner.” I often wonder if it would have all gone better if the dinner had been served first.

The collapse of that particular marriage began at the dinner, when the men of the two clans started fighting, and the bride’s family fled to avoid being killed. The bride, of course, stayed. A few weeks later, when a goat that was being saved for another wedding died, she was accused of bringing bad magic to the village and became a pariah in her new family. The marriage itself survived. The feasts had cost too much to bear repeating.

In the West, the order of food and sex at a wedding is, of course, reversed. The tribal wedding I just described didn’t involve Islam. It was a thoroughly secular economic exchange of what you could call goods and services. The Western wedding, whatever the reality, is a pointedly religious exchange of vows if a priest or pastor or rabbi officiates. A couple is joined “under God” with all the attendant promises of fidelity, longevity, and devotion, not to mention its admonitions to “bear fruit” and to “let no man put asunder.” And never mind that, at least traditionally, a wedding was mainly what you needed to go through to have sex. That’s clearly not necessary now, but it’s my guess that in those late, unlamented days of blushing virginal brides and horny, anxious grooms, the unspoken function of the wedding feast, with its cheerfully leering toasts and endless courses, punctuated by an exhausting amount of dancing, was an even more liminal ritual than the ceremony itself. It linked, eased, and extended a fairly flagrant transition from sacred to profane—in time, distraction, and alcohol. It wasn’t so different, in this, from the Sismano priest calling a week’s respite between the sagra and the procession of the Madonna. Or for that matter, from the long Last Supper in Xavier Beauvois’s beautiful film Des Hommes et des Dieux (translated backward, in English, as Of Gods and Men). The film—set in Algeria during the violence of the early nineties—is about a small, remote community of French Trappist monks, a doctor among them, who have peacefully taught and treated and farmed with their Arab neighbors until the fighting reaches them and everyone’s lives are abruptly shattered. Actually, it’s about the monks waiting to die, knowing they are marked by Islamists for assassination and celebrating life—and the things of this world—in the face of death. They spend their last day working, chanting, praying, and most satisfyingly, as the sun sets, at their kitchen table, feasting. They open two bottles of rare French wine, prepare a last supper, and calmly and silently await the attack, nodding, tearing, and even at times smiling to the music of an old, scratchy record of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Their last supper has all the joy and solemnity and futility of ritual. With its intimations of sacrifice, it is as liminal—and as transformational—as human beings can get.

* * *

Twelve years ago, in England, I went to the Beaufort Hunt, which I have to admit found an extremely civilized affair, perhaps because you can’t eat a fox and so your celebratory ritual is the hunt breakfast—a propitiatory feast known and coveted across the pond as the English breakfast, served before the men and women of the hunt get on their horses and begin to gallop after their baying hounds. It is a warming and inevitably delicious banquet and how not, given that it comes with kippers, sausages, rashers of bacon, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, grilled mushrooms, tomatoes, and potatoes, and plenty of jam, marmalade, and butter for your toast. In France, though—as I discovered over my years of commuting to a Paris office—the celebratory hunt ritual is a wild boar hunt, after which you eat the boar. (You can’t count birding as a hunt; on the continent, it’s likely to be a slaughter on the order of Sarah Palin knocking off moose from a helicopter or stuffing turkeys into a decapitating machine.) In the Sologne, the traditional boar hunt opens with an alarming dance—a pas de deux, you might call it, or an attack, or if you were Bill O’Reilly, in court on harassment charges, just a “seduction”—in which a hunter advances on a young girl, a thrusting boar tusk in each hand, and the girl, naturally, twists away and tries to flee. The dance is atavistically macho, but so is the hunt itself and the consumption of the boar’s flesh.

The best account of a boar hunt I have ever read was written, not surprisingly, by an amused, interested, and somewhat less than enthralled woman—a wonderful French ethnologist named Claudine Fabre-Vassas. It’s about the ritual of boar hunting and what you could call transformative boar feasting in the Languedoc in southwestern France, as told by the men who hunt—and by one of the hunter’s wives, who cooks whatever share of the beast her husband brings home after the hunters castrate and divide it. The men are interested less in the boar itself than in the boar’s testicles—in the hunter who earns them for the kill and in what the others get when they dig in and divide the rest. They castrate the boar very quickly, almost furtively, Fabre-Vassas says, in what could be called a private ritual. They stand in a circle around the animal; they use a knife to castrate it while telling apocryphal stories about hunters who have bit the testicles off—impossible feats of mastery, given that a boar in his prime weighs some four hundred pounds. They say that the power of the boar’s balls—they call it “the iron” or “the force,” using the Latin word ferum—enters the hunter who makes the kill.

In some hunts, the hunting party divides the ferum. In others, they use the French word—couilles—to describe what happens once the force has entered the hunters. The testicles are worthless then; the hunters purge them in running water and vinegar, cook them, taste a symbolic morsel, and throw them to the dogs. Some hunters make a celebratory meal in the woods, and prepare it themselves. They take the heart, the lungs, the windpipe, the spleen, and the liver, purge them in the same way, chop them up, cook them over a fire with onions, tomatoes, thyme, laurel, vinegar, and red wine—while drinking as much of the wine as they can handle—call it a civet, and eat it. Most often, they divide the meat and the organs and bring them home for their wives to purge and preserve or cook. Fabre-Vassas says that either way, the name of the game is virility, and given the news lately, it’s safe to say that in matters of virile preening, it doesn’t matter if the men are old hunters or old politicians, or if they’re three-star restaurateurs scalping the cockscomb off a soon-to-be capon at the capon festival in Bresse, or if they’re worshiping the force of the ferum in Languedoc. The celebration, in any event, belongs to men, like the firemen’s feast in Roussillon.

The truth is that when men “celebrate” without women, the fare is often far more crudely challenging than celebratory, or even tasty. No woman I know would trade one taste of the heartbreak, love, and longing that flavor the wedding banquet Tita cooks in Like Water for Chocolate, or one bite of the French delicacies in Babette’s Feast—the sherried turtle soup, say, or the blinis with caviar, or the quail in puff pastry with foie gras and truffle sauce—with their power to enchant even the dour Pietists of Jutland, for a taste of the ferum at what could be called a stag party in the woods. When that lone Languedoc woman speaks, at the end of the Fabre-Vassas’s account, the blood rites in the woods are over and she is about to cook her husband’s share of scraps of meat and organs from the mutilated boar. We are back to the everyday and family dinner, back to cookery and domestication and its own kind of transformations: “Moi, I make a farcis of sausage meat,” she says. “I stuff the heart with it, and then I cook it, slowly, with petits onions. It’s the only way that they will ever get me to eat it.” That’s life, and she’s not celebrating.