Something for the last post

The Phantom Tollbooth

There's a section when the main character must "eat his words." Literally.

Discussing Food

I once detailed the process of the digestive system to my father as he was eating dinner.  He was not pleased.

On Using Cookbooks

My family loves them.

Cannibalism in My Mind

I recently read a Harry Potter fanfiction called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.  In this fic, Harry believes that any being with self-awareness has a right to life, and when he learns about being a Parselmouth, he realizes that talking snakes, as sentient beings, are, ethically speaking, equal to humans.  He quickly makes the leap of logic that if snakes are sentient then other animals may be, too, and that eating them is wrong.

Much like other fictional characters have an angel and a demon guiding them from their perches on their shoulders, Harry has the Hogwars Founders speaking to him.  At breakfast the morning after learning about being a Parselmouth, Harry discussed the moral implications of eating potentially sentient food with his internal voices.  I'll include a portion here:

Good! said Slytherin. I'm glad you see now that the most moral thing to do is to sacrifice the lives of sentient beings for your own convenience, to feed your dreadful appetites, for the sick pleasure of ripping them apart with your teeth -What? Harry thought indignantly. Which side are you on here?His inner Slytherin's mental voice was grim. You too will someday embrace the doctrine... that the end justifies the meats. This was followed by some mental snickering.Ever since Harry had started worrying that plants might also be sentient, his non-Ravenclaw components had been having trouble taking his moral caution seriously. Hufflepuff was shouting Cannibalism! every time Harry tried to think about any food item whatsoever, and Gryffindor would visualize it screaming while he ate it, even if it was, say, a sandwich -Cannibalism!AIIIEEEE DON'T EAT ME -Ignore the screams, eat it anyway!

Harry's dilemma of overidentifying with his food reminded me of The Edible Woman and also of my own issues with eating certain foods.

In my dad's family, each person is assigned an animal upon being born (or marrying in).  From early childhood, my cousins and I have all been taught that we are the animals assigned to us.  When we would see ducks as we walked through the park, my parents would say "look, kids, there's Uncle Al!"  When we'd go to the zoo, we wouldn't say we wanted to see the bears or the tigers, we'd say we wanted to see Neil or Jimmy.

This extreme connection extends, for me, beyond the living animals into those same animals as they sit, swimming in sauce, on my plate.  Several of my family members are edible: I'm a sheep, my uncle is a duck, my sister is a rabbit, one cousin is a deer and another a frog… I cannot eat these meats, because much like Harry with his sandwich, it seems too much like cannibalism for my tastes.  Granted, they are not all the most common foods to find on a menu, but when they do, I steer well clear of them.  I do not know what I would do if the next member of the family were to be a pig or a cow. 

Food in Stargate Fanfiction

I read a lot of fanfiction.  I read it because I can continue to immerse myself in a fictional world long after I am done reading the book or watching the movie it belongs in.  I read it because I love that when fans sink their pens into an established canon, they feed off each others' creativity and the world they're playing in grows and develops into infinity.

One of the fandoms I read frequently is Stargate. For those unfamiliar with sci-fi, Stargate: Atlantis is a television show about an international expedition of soldiers and scientists who travelled to the Pegasus Galaxy and were promptly cut off from Earth.  Although they knew their trip was likely to be one-way and packed accordingly, their supplies were limited. As a result, finding allies and trade partners was of high priority to them as they explored the galaxy, even after they reestablished contact with Earth at the end of the first season.

So when fans write in the Stargate fandom, they spend a lot of time talking about food, even more than in the show, if I recall correctly.  When fic authors write missions for the teams, they often choose to make them trade missions, with bartering for vegetables, grains, or animals.  They write about visiting other planets during their harvest seasons and the feasts that follow.  They write about joining hunting parties, and social faux pas when dining with another planet's king, and foods that taste like something on Earth and foods that taste like nothing we've ever dreamed of before.

One of the main characters, Rodney, is hypoglycemic and allergic to citrus, and is not shy about telling the world these things, though the creators of the show generally leave it at that.  The fans went further.  They write about the precautions his team takes to avoid letting his blood sugar drop too low, about people who don't believe him, about hypoglycemic attacks in the field.  They write about how do you identify citrus fruits in a galaxy where all of the plants evolved independent of those on Earth? Is there citrus at all? Is citrus in fruits still, or is it in vegetables or grains? How do you ask about something when the people who are serving you dinner may not have any word for citrus at all?  They write about his team members carrying epipens and tasting everything for any hint of citrus before letting him eat. They write about taking no chances, about Rodney starving because he's been taken hostage and has no way of knowing if the strange food he's served will kill him.

The authors write about how foods are different in Pegasus than on Earth. The characters describe foods as being "almost" and "nearly" and "sort of" and "not" like Earth foods.  They eat almost-carrots and nearly-chicken.  They eat foods that taste like something familiar but look alien and vice versa. They bite into fruits that look like bananas but taste like broccoli.

As the characters become more at home in Pegasus than on Earth, their descriptions of food change.  Whenever they return to Earth, they begin comparing Earth foods to Pegasus foods.  Instead of "X Pegasus food tastes a bit like Y Earth food," they think in terms of "Y Earth food tastes a bit like X Pegasus food."  Through the characters' relationships with and thoughts about food, the authors show the characters' shifting loyalty from Earth to Pegasus. The ideas of "food" and "home" are closely linked, so it is an easy and subtle way to show that the expedition members no longer consider Earth their home.  

Food is an inextricable part of culture, history, community.  Sometimes we learn about culture, history, community as it is expressed in food when we look at cookbooks, or food memoirs.  Sometimes, those stories will never be told on a large scale; sometimes they are best (or only) told by word of mouth. Oral histories are, I believe, as important a piece of literature to examine as anything we can find in print.  Some of my favourite family stories have to do with food.

When my dad tells us about how his family once ate their pet rabbit, I learn a bit about what rabbit tastes like (chicken, unsurprisingly), a bit about his family, and a bit about Boy Scouts (though I've never thought to ask if "breed/raise/kill/eat rabbits" is still a badge to be earned, or if it was phased out sometime between the seventies and now).  When my mom tells me about the time our dog ate all of my grandma's pies, except the rhubarb, I learn about our dog, my grandma, and that people bake rhubarb into pies (seriously? People eat that?). When we tell the story about the time my sister found a bullet in her boar stew, we remember Italy, the people we met there, the stories they told us.

I love looking at the difference between what we write and what we speak.  If I were to write down any of the stories above, they would read the same way every time someone visited them.  I would tell the story in a specific way; maybe I'd forget to add a detail here, maybe it'd be a bit dull to anyone who doesn't know me or my family.  When we tell these stories orally, our audience can ask questions, someone else may jump in to tell it themselves for awhile, we may go off on a tangent about some glancingly related aspect.  Every time the story is told, it's a little bit different. Yet we get into a habit of telling stories the same way every time.  There are some stories from my dad's childhood that I can—and do—quote back to him.

Similarly, recipes are passed down differently when they are written than when they are spoken.  If you read a recipe written on a card or in a cookbook, you'd be able to bake an angel food cake.  When my aunt tells me the recipe, she explains each step every time.  This is the best way to separate an egg, this is how you know when the egg whites are ready for the flour, this is how you properly fold in the flour so the egg whites don't lose their fluff.

In my previous post about the angel food cake, I tried to convey that sense of oral history, even though it's been written down.  I wanted to show that learning how to bake this cake is more detailed when it's not from a recipe card. I wanted to include my own experiences with the recipe (seriously.  EVERY DAMN TIME, the top of the cake falls off while it cools.  We have yet to figure out what I'm doing wrong.). I wanted to glancingly reference other cooking stories (because tangents are an integral part of my oral storytelling process).  I wanted people to ask "wait. What happened with the melted Christmas cookies? How the hell did you manage to melt cookies?" I wanted to encourage interactivity, because that's the part of storytelling I love best.  Orally, I love when a story becomes more of a discussion than a lecture, when you meander through experiences and "oh, yeah, I did something like that…" and eventually you get back to the original point, but maybe you don't, and that's okay, too, because you shared so many stories in the meantime, and you can tell the rest of the original one another time. Maybe.  In print, I love when an author leaves so much out of the story, and the only thing you can do is fill in the blanks on your own.  I love when the author leaves—intentionally or otherwise—parts of the story for me to write myself.  I think one of the most important aspects of literature is that it's not the transference of a story from one person to another, but an interactive experience wherein the story grows and changes with each retelling and is told as much by the reader as by the writer.

This interactivity is especially present when we talk or write about food, because it is a universal and universally diverse experience.  Everyone has experiences with food, and everyone's experiences with food are different.  So the story flows, eternally, back and forth between the tellers.

Baking an Angel Food Cake

There’s a family gathering.  Easter, maybe, or a birthday.  It doesn’t really matter; all that matters is that someone has requested angel food cake.  Aunt Carol makes a tasty and delicious angel food cake, so she’s responsible for providing it.  You will assist her.

Step 1:            Under no circumstances do you go to Kroger and buy a cake. That is cheating.

Step 2:            Aunt Carol begins with a quiz.  What ingredients do you need?  You list them.

            Cake Flour (It’s sweeter than regular flour, and fluffier, too.  You know this because you tasted it once because you wanted to know what the difference was.  Now you taste just a little bit because you like it.)

            Sugar  (In two parts: some with the egg whites, and some with the flour.) 

            Egg whites (twelve of them.  Aunt Carol separates eggs using the shells; she says that using an egg separator is cheating.  Once, when you were pressed for time, and she wasn’t there, you cheated.  But she’d had you using the shells for so long, that you found yourself incapable of using the separator properly.  So now you always use the shells and call the separator a cheat, too.)

            Cream of tartar (when you fetch it from the pantry, you see that there’s a small plastic tub of it, or a tiny spice tin.  You grab the tin because it’s cuter.)

            Vanilla  (Aunt Carol uses double strength vanilla extract, not that cheap store brand “imitation vanilla flavor” crap.  This means that, technically, you should halve the vanilla for the recipe.  You double it when Aunt Carol’s not paying attention.)

            Salt  (Just a bit.  You don’t know what purpose it serves in the cake, you just know that it needs to be in there.  You don’t think about this until much later, and when you do, you resolve to ask Aunt Carol about it the next time you bake together, but you always forget.)

Step 3:            Preheat the oven.        If the oven is not hot, the cake will not bake.  This sounds like a stupid step to emphasize, and I know you’re thinking, “What idiot doesn’t think to turn on the oven?” but the answer is…you. You forget to turn on the oven every fricken time. So go preheat the damn oven.  Oh, and make sure you check that it’s empty before you do.  You don’t want to melt the Christmas cookies again.

Step 4:            Beat the egg whites, cream of tartar, salt, vanilla, and some of the sugar until it reaches a stiff peak.          Aunt Carol informs you that you’ll know it’s a stiff peak when you dab your finger on the surface, and come away with a tiny white mountain.  She says this is her favourite part, because she gets to sample the tasty.

Step 5:            Fold in the flour and the rest of the sugar.      Aunt Carol will show you how to properly fold in the flour/sugar mixture, because somehow, you still can’t get it quite right.  As she does, she’ll proudly tell you that this is why homemade angel food cakes are better than store-bought, because machines can’t fold like people can.

Step 6:            Pour the batter into the cake pan. Cut.           Angel food cakes are not baked in ordinary cake pans, but instead in pans wherein the bottom and middle can be lifted out from the outside, so it’s easier to get the cake out when it’s done.  Once the batter is in the pan, you have to slice through it a few times to make sure it’s distributed evenly, without any big air bubbles in it.  At least, you think that’s why you’re supposed to cut the batter.  It’s been a long time since Aunt Carol told you, and you’ve pretty much forgotten her answer.  But you do remember that you used to want to use a sharp knife for this, because they cut better, even though Aunt Carol insists that a butter knife will do just fine.

Step 7:            Bake.   You’ll know it’s done when you can touch the top and nothing disastrous happens.  You can’t actually remember what the real tip is here, which is probably why your cakes never turn out as good as Aunt Carol’s.

Step 8:            Let cool over a beer.   Seriously.  And I don’t mean leave it on the counter and have a drink with your mates while you wait for the cake to be edible.  I mean, turn the pan upside down, and perch it on top of a bottle of beer.  It’s better if the bottle is empty or room temperature, because if it’s cold, the hot pan will shatter the bottle, and your cake will sit in a pool of booze, and that’s not tasty at all.  Trust me.  Oh, and hope that the cake doesn’t fall apart.  Aunt Carol’s never had a problem with this, but you have a history of having the top fall off the cake while it cools. 

Step 9:            Eat.      Some like to top it with sliced strawberries or cool whip, but you just like to grab a chunk and munch on it while you wander around talking to your family.