Adam Small
Easter has come and gone. The atmosphere is still with us, and the time still good for contemplation of “high values” (NP van Wyk Louw’s phrase). I am not thinking of values boasted by people who behave as if they are without fault, but of values of substance sought by those conscious of their shortcomings: the Bible speaks of “the meek”.
I was privileged, during this time, to light on a wonderfully interesting book long hidden on a back shelf – a book of Rosalie’s, titled Loaves and Fishes(about foods from Bible times). I started reading it, and was fascinated. The text is imaginatively compiled, the recipes given within a context of summarised extracts from Scripture.
Images from the life of Jesus came to mind – to start with, the Last Supper, which, surely, had little to do with gourmet palates and tastes. It was a stark dinner (“eternalised” afterwards by Leonardo da Vinci): there was bread, and there was wine, and those forever words: “This is my Body. This is my Blood”, and the assertive command that He be remembered until He “came again”. It was the meal of all time, marked with authority, and a compelling designation of the meaning of food and drink, which includes compassion, as in the well-known story of Jesus’s multiplication of the loaves and fishes.
On this, Matthew reports that crowds would follow Jesus as He preached, and when it grew late, He noticed how the people were flagging, since they had not eaten all day. “What do we have with us, for them to eat,” he asked the disciples, who answered: only a few loaves and a few fishes, but there were at least four thousand people there. (There are different versions of the story, differing about the numbers of loaves, fishes and people. What matters is that there were a great many people, and very little food.)
Jesus asked the crowd to sit down, took the loaves and fishes, and cast His eyes up. Suddenly there were armsful of food, and He pressed the disciples to feed the people – “and they did all eat, and were filled”. What was left over filled seven baskets.
The story is indeed “food for thought”, as the philosopher Martin Versfeld might have said. We must attend, now, to the recipes themselves.
The kitchen at home is not readily responsive to miracles. It has to be decided, mundanely, whether this or that recipe is for serving four, or six, or eight persons, and so on. Other matters are stove and oven detail: the pre-setting of temperatures, timing and the like. The cook often has to improvise.
The preface to Loaves and Fishes claims its authors have accomplished “a delectable compendium of tasty treats provoked by Biblical literature”. The writers themselves wisely consider that “the Bible has been the source of information and inspiration for countless people through the centuries. Our deep interest in the history of food led us quite naturally to the Bible (and) we found, to our delight, a definite correlation between ancient and modern foods”.
As a vegetarian, I usually shy away from meat and fish foods, and writing about them. Containing myself, however, I’ll nonetheless mention recipes requiring these ingredients.
Obviously, one cannot resort here to detailed descriptions of the preparation of dishes – such is not the object of my writing either. I give myself, rather, to poetic recognition and naming of ingredients: the meaning of some of which will escape me, though be obvious to cooks handling them every day.
Our book opens with comment on Noah and his Ark (around 4 000 BC). Provisioning the ship must have been an enormous undertaking; apart from the amount of food required, there was the volume of water to be catered.
More salient, given that the Ark would be afloat longer than a year, it was out of the question to take meat on board, and the animals on the Ark were not for slaughter. Noah and his family perforce became vegetarians!
On the ship, then, there were “reasonable quantities of eggs and milk” (which could be replenished, when necessary, by the livestock on board), and also good quantities of “vegetables, grains and fruit”. So, it comes as no surprise that the recipes start with watercress soup, omelette, chickpeas with sesame sauce, uncooked nut crescents (with zwieback crumbs), cabbage salad, barley pilaf, pita bread, and the like. (Apparently, already around 6 000 BC, “bread wheat had appeared, with its marvellous gluten content, allowing raised bread”.)
For dessert, on Noah’s menu (our recipe writers imagine), there were zimrah compote (with apricots, apples, and raisins); date palm pudding; grape conserve; and sweet curd pie. (Did Noah have a sweet tooth?)
What about Moses’s palate, and King David’s, and King Solomon’s? And, from the New Testament: Herod Antipas’s; John the Baptist’s; that of the Wise Men of the East and Mary’s and Martha’s (of Bethany); that of the well-to-do Lydia of Thyatira (who sold purple and was an early convert to Christianity); the Emperor Nero’s, and Agrippa’s. And there was also the menu for the Feast of Agape (Divine Love) to be considered.
Let’s start with Agape. Ratatouille seems to have been a favourite dish for it (as it is still well known today), with its content of eggplant (aubergine), zucchini (courgettes), and onion and olives (the latter, shall we say, being eternal).
If tomatoes are part of these recipes, this happens clandestinely – as the writers admit – for the plant was not cultivated yet in Biblical times.
The Wise Men of the East themselves seem to have been pretty indulgent, with a taste for Persian cream ring, Chaldean prunes, spiced cider and ginger cakes! And Tiberius Caesar (the Roman Emperor who posted Pontius Pilate to Judea) – although he was a man of “sturdy virtue” who, in theory, prized frugality – pampered himself a little: among his preferences were roast pheasant with herb jelly, endive and ham salad, and macaroon parfait. Another delicacy on his table were glazed onions. On the side of frugality, he loved King’s garden asparagus (but they had to be “done up” with butter and cheese).
John the Baptist, undoubtedly, was a man of great discipline, as testified by Jesus: not a man “blown like a reed in the wind”. He was a man for plain chicken stew (like my mother used to make, without tierlantyntjies – nothing fancy); and Ezekiel Bread (plain wheat bread); and, for dessert – though he would not think of it as such – nuts and fruit (figs, dates, grapes – whatever was “in season”). One isn’t sure where the locusts and honey that the Bible says he ate, fit in.
When the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, he threw a banquet for her. The laden royal table carried only the best for the lady with “eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon by the gate of Bathrabbim”. She could choose from Coronation fish with taratoor, En-rogel salad, braised leeks of Gibeon, and for hors d’oeuvre or dessert (whichever way she preferred it), apricot trifle, pomegranate nectar, Ophir baked melon, date orange cake (and, even more delicious, there were saffron rice, lemon chutney to accompany various curries, and should anyone in the entourage have had a taste for soup, there was celery and other).
The authors are mindful also of the palates of the Bible’s shepherds (like those who “watched their flocks by night”). Sheep, shepherds and flocks “are woven like golden threads” in the Bible’s story. Shepherd’s Field “still stands outside the gates of modern Bethlehem… These were the fields that Boaz owned, where Ruth gleaned. Their produce, and that of the simple kitchen gardens the shepherds’ wives kept, provided the dishes” (for the menu they liked): shepherds pie, obviously, and green salad from the garden (it was fresh!), the latter, with a basic dressing (as still done) of olive oil, vinegar, mustard, sugar, pepper and salt; and for dessert – or even mains – there were pine nut wafers or gingered prunes.
Several other palates of the time warrant comment, though space forbids: one thinks of lecherous Herod Antipas, and his brother’s wife (with whom he had an “affair”), and her belly-dancing daughter, Salome.
A meaningful thought (even glorious), is that Jesus’s miracle of multiplying the loaves and fishes, has not stopped. It keeps on providing for us: the food on the table – whether ours, now, or King Solomon’s in his time, or the Bible’s shepherds’ – is a gift from God.
Lastly, this upliftment: those also who come to our door, seeking alms, have access to God’s “baskets”, and will eat, and, wondrously, there will be food left over for still others after them!