Cooking with Jesus

Next to air, food and water are arguably the most basic of needs. This inescapable fact has evolved into restaurants, chefs, cooking schools, Evian, and even religious practices. It is no surprise to me that almost every religion has some sort of food-related rule. Jews keep Kosher, Muslims don’t eat pork or drink alcohol, Christians have some rule about fish (never quite understood that one actually), many Hindi don’t eat meat, Buddhists are famous for their restraint, and none of it surprises me – confounds maybe, but never surprises.

Indeed, food is so important, that most religions accentuate holidays with what we can’t eat. During Ramadan one is only allowed to eat after sunset, during Passover no bread, during Lent most Catholics give up a favorite food or drink. Why is this? Why is it that food is so readily used as a form of discipline in religion? I can’t speak for any other religion, but having been raised Jewish, Yom Kippur was always made that much more poignant by fasting. Yom Kippur is the day of atonement, the day that we thank God for making and keeping us, and apologize for being imperfect, hoping that we will be forgiven. We are restricted from eating or even drinking water from sunset to sunset (in fact, we get “Breakfast” from the tradition of “breaking the fast” after sunset on Yom Kippur). What does this deprivation add? It strips away one of our basic needs and makes us pay attention to what is being said. The simple act of fasting, focuses our minds, and makes us realize how small and frail we actually are.

I, like so many others in this modern world, call myself “spiritual” if not completely “religious.” While I love the philosophy, traditions, and the emphasis on family and neighborly love within Judaism, I find that organized religion has become more about rules, regulations, and keeping that specific religious “population” alive; and, we have all seen what religious fanaticism can do to a culture or even country. All that being said, I still find that I have some undeniable feeling of something other; a feeling of something more than myself. I feel that “something” floating overhead, and buried deep in my gut… and my gut is hungry.

Food has always been a part of my life. Growing up in New York with two worldly and supportive parents, meant that I was eating with chopsticks as soon as I could hold them, had grown tired of eating Thai food by the time I was 8, and found eating Ethiopian food with my hands while sitting on the floor was always a treat. It helped a great deal that we traveled every summer when I was kid to places like, Spain, Puerto Rico, France, Greece, Guadeloupe… It also helped that I had babysitters from Columbia, France, Switzerland, and Spain just to name a few. Then there’s my Father’s voice saying “you don’t have to like it, but you have to try it.” That came in very handy when I was a 12 year old traveling in Spain, being asked to eat these odd mushroom-like barnacles that grew on the sides of rocks (they were fabulous by the way).

I have fond memories of making Crepes on Saturday morning with my Mother, and making Chutney every Holiday Season with my Godmother. I remember my Grandmother’s Mushroom Barley Soup, and Maria (my Columbian babysitter), making Tostones (fried green Plantains) and rice. I can remember my childhood by meals as easily as I remember trips to the Circus. My favorite birthday cakes came from a neighborhood bakery called Soutine where I would get a yellow cake, filled with Lemon Curd, covered with white Butter Cream and decorated with yellow flowers. All of these memories, all of these meals, all of the people and places that come with it, are more than just superficial; they are my connection to that something spiritual inside. What can be more satisfying than sitting down and eating with people you love? Sharing wine and bread, laughing over a fallen soufflé, watching someone eat mussels for the first time, better yet, watching them enjoy it? This is spirituality in its most basic form: joy.

Cooking is an automatic response for me; I see heirloom carrots in shades of purple and yellow, I must roast them. I see fresh fat shrimp, I must grill them. I see chocolate, it must be praised and then drizzled over… well anything really. All this comes from something so much more than the desire to eat, it comes from someplace deeper. I can best explain this by sharing with you a story about bread. I went to culinary school and was trained as a Pastry Chef. Through the semester we had covered tarts, dough, cookies, flambéing fruits, chocolates, and now it was time for bread making. I had never made bread - it seemed so intimidating to do so without some kind of previous instruction. I came away from those lessons with a renewed sense of being and belonging. Hands in wet sticky dough, the smell of yeast, the cloud of flour that settles on everything, I had rarely felt more connected to humanity, to the past or future then right then. I realized at that moment, that I was making something that people had been making for thousands of years. I was making something basic, something that connected me to every other woman who had made bread the same way throughout history. There was a girl in a slum in India making bread, and I was connected to her, and to a woman in Chile, and to an old man in Umbria. This was the start of a new inner spirituality.

I find it difficult to cook with others, not because I don’t like it, but because I go into a different state of being when I cook. The rhythm of the knife chopping, the feel of the wooden spoon stirring, the sound of things bubbling away… for a moment, I can understand what Whirling Dervishes must feel as they spin, what Voo Doo Priestesses feel as they chant. It’s the feeling of being complete and whole, of being focused and at ease. Whenever or whatever I’m making, I feel a connection. Sometimes it’s the connection to earth or the food itself, an almost Native American ideal – I can feel Mother Earth in the food and her spirit makes my fingertips tingle. Sometimes I can feel a connection to a Sister I never knew I had in Japan when I make Gyoza (a Japanese Dumpling), or a Brother in Lebanon when I make Hummus.

I recently got married. On one of our first dates, I made him a grilled cheese sandwich – the most important Grilled Cheese Sandwich of my life. The very act of cooking for a man I was dating was nothing new for me, but it was for him. He had never had a woman cook for him, and that simple grilled cheese sandwich meant more than cheese and bread to him. Although I’m sure he couldn’t pinpoint it at the time, my cooking for him, and continuing to do so to this very day is the manifestation of my love. Not that the food itself is love, but the act of cooking is love. The very motions of chopping, roasting, and deglazing -- of baking, melting, and frosting is love. He would love me without the food, I know that, but it’s the cooking that has made us a family, has centered and given us a sense of home in our Brooklyn rental apartment that we will never own. Either one of us could get a job in Topeka tomorrow. We would pack up our stuff, and drop it off under our new roof. But, that “roof” wouldn’t be “home” until I made us dinner.

Spirituality comes in many shapes and forms, one man’s burning bush is another man’s BBQ. Who am I to argue with generations of family recipes, years of religious gastronomic do’s and don’ts, and my connection to bread making? Spirituality is what comes to us when we least expect it, like love. I know how to center myself. I know that if the world is pounding on my head, if everything is upside down and I feel like screaming, there is fire and a big pot on the stove to help make it right.

Eating is a pleasure of the flesh. Those crazy Catholics knew what they were talking about when they made gluttony a Deadly Sin, or when society told Women that eating figs was scandalous and not befitting a Lady. But cooking, cooking is something else entirely. Ask a professional chef why he does it. Why does he endure the ridiculous hours, the burns and cuts, the sometime unappreciative masses, it’s not because he loves eating the food he makes, he hasn’t the time to eat it! No, it’s something more, something deeper, something spiritual. Some indefinable need draws the chef to the kitchen -- it’s an urge, a calling, it’s that insistent burning bush.

We live in a world of great beauty; it’s easy to forget that sometimes. It’s easy to focus on war, and death and pollution – it’s much harder to remember that there is something called a Tulip, and it comes in a particular shade of purple, and it’s beautiful beyond words. It’s harder yet to remember that while we can’t control the world around us, we can control the world inside us. I was never very good at remembering prayers, and I wouldn’t know what to say to Jesus, but I would invite him over to dinner in a heartbeat. My inner world is nourished by the act of cooking. My inner world can be poached, whisked, and steamed into peace. My inner God, Shiva, Buddha, Mother Earth, and Zeus shimmer like water hitting hot oil in a pan, and my prayers are always answered.