What happens if the one individual who truly knows how to cook the traditional Christmas Eve meals doesn’t feel like doing much more than resting through her cold?
To begin with, she drinks folk remedies like egg yolks in hot milk — eggnog base, I guess — and a syrup of honey and garlic that produces breath foul enough to stop a charging rhino. (It’s sweet, though, and the Girl loves it: she takes a bit every night, and it truly helps ward off colds. But the best part for her is running around and breathing on everyone. Probably the fact that, in a fit of hyperbolic play, I fell down dramatically in the middle of the kitchen floor afterward helped encourage the game.)
It also means that the Polish-ized American husband gets his first shot and cooking barszcz from scratch.
This starts by making an beet-based vegetable stock from:
- three carrots,
- three beets,
- two celery stalks,
- two parsnips,
- half an onion,
- half a dozen cloves of garlic,
- two prunes, and
- one apple.
Cubed into large chunks, it all goes into a pot of water to boil, then simmer for two hours. Once everything has cooked soft, pour it through a strainer and all that’s left is a glistening, purple beet stock that has a sweet aftertaste and is ready to the final seasoning (which includes the addition of fermented beet juice) to turn it into barszcz.
As I strain it, I find myself thinking that perhaps this is the perfect food for gnostics. After all, if it’s the spirit — the essence — of a thing that has any value, as gnostics believed (and still believe), and the physical body itself is useless, what better food to illustrate that than a soup stock that ends with clarified, pure flavor and a steaming pile of now-refuse, vegetable bodies that once carried the essence of flavor but now, limp and colorless, are good only to be tossed in the compost?
Foolish thoughts, these ruminations of the theology of food: I have other things to worry about, like creating some kind of stuffing for the salmon fillets that will be tonight’s main course. With my usual on-the-fly cooking methods, I end up with sauted crab meat with crushed roasted garlic, capers, and walnuts with a light sprinkling of tarragon and ginger and a squirt of fresh lemon juice just before turning off the heat: a whole slew of flavors that will also be paired with smoked oysters and slivers of roasted garlic before being tucked into a sliced salmon, because Gnostic denial of the senses has no place in the Christmas Eve kitchen.
