Fire Eating

When I was about five years old, my dad read to me from D’Aulaires Greek Myths every night. My favorite story of all was of Icarus, who tried to escape captivity by flying with wings he had made using collected feathers and bees’wax. I was enchanted by the picture of Aphrodite rising from the ocean. In the picture of the gods and goddesses sitting around Mt. Olympus, my favorite goddess of all was Hestia, the hearth tender. While all the rest sat, doing nothing but looking good, she at least could keep the flames alive, sitting directly in the middle. She at least had something to do — something important. I believe keeping the hearth healthy is one of the most important things.

Cooking and baking is the way that we get fire into ourselves, from the outside in. One could be a raw foods enthusiast, and while I am very curious about raw foods, I realize that I need fiery foods, spicy foods, food that confers warmth, heats me up, lets me sweat. I must eat fire. The book: The Magic of Fire: Hearth Cooking: One Hundred Recipes for the Fireplace or Campfire by William Rubel intrigues me. (I haven’t read it, but plan to.)

I have begun to give some thought as to how to practically describe cooking the enchanted way. It is difficult to do this in a purely mental forum, the internet, when the work itself is numinous, poetic. It is just as difficult to find things out about Hestia: what she did, why she was important. Instead, she is a constant presence, but little is KNOWN about her. It may be that cooking the enchanted way cannot be KNOWN, but rather FELT best. Nevertheless, I will find a way.

(Michelle-Lee Phelan's Hestia image for some reason reminds me more of Bridget. Beautiful, though.)

But first, I recommend a book that inspired me greatly, and which deals with enchanted cooking, and the sacrality of food: Anne Scott’s Serving Fire: Food for Thought, Body & Soul. It is a must-have, a seminal work dealing with the importance of keeping the hearth. Read it.

Wild Garlic not meant for Bears

In early spring the wild garlic comes up and people go nuts for it, here. In Germany it’s called Bärlauch (Allium ursinum) and is also known as bear garlic, ramsons and wood garlic. A woman at the market told me she eats as much of it she can, fresh, and must no longer take heart medicine. It grows in shade here and is already coming up, mid March. It has a slight garlic flavor, and many people who can’t handle bulb garlic can handle wild garlic. I have heard that folks make pestos out of it, blending it with olive oil, salt and pepper. Cut just the leaves off, but leave the bulbs intact so it will continue to leaf out.

I made a lovely soup yesterday out of it: Carrot and wild garlic soup with buttermilk. I really must get up and running with pictures of what I make, but until new batteries find their way into my camera...

Here’s what I did:

Saute 2 onions in 3-4 T chili oil and vegetable oil, with chili oil taking no more than 2T of that mixture. Add 1 t powdered coriander, ½ T salt, and ½ T black onion seeds (these are optional, but they add another layer to the hotness), still stirring and sauteing.

Add a whole bag of carrots (2 lbs), chopped into cubes, let them sweat a while, and before the pot gets dry, add 1/3 bottle of dry white wine. Fill the rest of the (ca. 4.5 Liter capacity) stockpot with water and add 1-2 T good quality vegetable stock concentrate.

Peel and chop 3 potatoes, and sprinkle with 1/3 cup gram flour (ground chickpea flour) over the top and work in to the damp potatoes with your hands. Put into the soup. If you don’t have gram flour, use wheat flour—but gram flour dissolves like magic, leaving no trace except a smooth gravy, and of course there’s no gluten or clumps.

Then take about 3 to 4 cups of fresh, washed wild garlic and chop, and put into the soup.

Let rise to simmering, and after 20 minutes, taste and season (salt if needed). Then pour in about ½ liter of very fine buttermilk. Be careful, I’ve only done this with European buttermilk which is mixed fine, and doesn’t have any chunks in it, and has a mild flavor. I would have to try this with American buttermilk—I would use perhaps half as much and be prepared to see clumps. Simmer another 30 minutes or so and serve. The chili oil gives it an undercurrent of bite to go along with the mildly tangy/hot wild garlic, but the sweet carrots mellow that out.

Wild garlic doesn’t leave the heavy trace in your breath the way bulb garlic does, but even so, the best thing to take away garlic breath is: milk and chocolate. Really!