Cracked Hearth

Well. Since moving in the cooktop has, by degrees, given up the ghost. I wonder what this means with regard to the health of my hearth.

What happened was: the glass cooktop is a unit bought by IKEA six years ago, and during the move it got cracked. I covered one heating element with a plate and continued to cook. One by one, the elements all stopped working, like lights slowly going off on a stage. Last week the final smallest, most furiously hottest one (I burned two chocolate puddings on it even while being very careful) gave it up.

The oven still worked, so I was making lots of roasts and potatoes and salads. That works, too. For a while. The loss of cooktop was the perfect opportunity to get back into Raw Food...an opportunity that I let slip by.

Tomorrow Carsten will come and put in the new cooktop and we will again have heat. Thank the gods! The hearth will be back on fire. I feel a sort of ancestral guilt for letting the fire go out in my house. I would have quite happily trudged hours to the peat fields if that is what it would have taken, but instead it took a weekend jaunt to IKEAland and a wait for the technician. But soon all will be in order again.

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.