Let’s begin with a memory: I am nine or ten years
old, shivering with terror in my bed at night. A violent storm rattles
the windows, the lightening sharp and sizzling, thunder a
chest–rattling roar in the darkness. Skeletal branches frantically lash
the panes. I have read too much Beowulf for my own good, and I
am
prepared at every blinding flash of lightning for the sight of the
hulking monster Grendel. But another sound soon catches my ear. Pots
are clanging, cupboard doors are opening and cutlery is chiming. My
father is in the kitchen in the middle of the night, cooking a spell to
soothe the terrors of the storm. I listen eagerly and there it is — the
staccato tattoo of the knife on the chopping block, the soft sizzle of
heated oil and at once the house is filled with the pungent reek of
garlic. Bedroom doors open, and
the rest of the family, as if called, leave their beds and gather in
the kitchen to wait out the storm–tossed night while my father cooks.
Outside the storm rages, but inside, in the warmth of the
kitchen, my father is committing an act of sorcery on fresh tomatoes.
How else to spell away the darkness than to evoke all the ingredients of
a sunlit summer’s day — the green–gold olive oil, the peppery scent of
garden tomatoes, the tart juice of parsley leaves. And garlic, lots of
garlic. With drowsy expressions, my mother and brother sit at the table,
chins resting on their upturned palms while my cousin, visiting from
France, opens a bottle and pours glasses of wine (mine diluted with a
little water).
My father moves around the kitchen, a wizard carefully arranging the
components of a complicated spell, murmuring in a soft voice, throwing
ingredients into the pan erupting with curlicues of smoke and a
commanding aroma. Watching him, fascinated by the deft movements of his
hands, his face nearly invisible in the gathering steam, I can forget
the storm outside. When the fat globes of Tomates á la Provençale,
their flanks glistening with oil, are spooned at last on my plate, I am
aware that the storm has moved on, grudgingly perhaps, for I am sure
that if it could, it would have joined us, happy enough to take the
bread and soak up oil, herbs, and the golden seeds swimming in the soft
pulp of the tomatoes. I lick my fingers and, sleepy once more, return to
bed, the oil around my mouth staining the pillowcase.
The very best of cooks are sorcerers, wizards, shamans and
tricksters. They must be, for they are capable of powerful acts of
transformation. All manner of life, mammal, aquatic, vegetable, seeds
and nuts pass through their hands and are transformed by spells — some
secret, some written in books annotated with splashes of grease and
broth. For years after his death, I was convinced I could take my
father’s stained, handwritten recipes, dip them in hot water, and there
would be enough residue of the dish on those pages to create consommé.
Master cooks are alchemists, turning the lead of a gnarled root
vegetable into the whipped froth of a purée, hazelnuts into digestive
liqueur, a secret combination of spices and chilies into a mole paste
that burns and soothes at the same time.
From a bin brimming with hundreds of choices they can sense the
ripe cantaloupe, the juicy peach and the blueberries that have lingered
long enough on the bush to become sweet. I am in awe of their skill,
their secret knowledge, the inexplicable way I can follow my father’s
recipe and not have it taste anything like his, missing that one secret
ingredient, those whispered spells that transformed his dish into
something sublime.
Perhaps because the cook, like other ambiguous archetypes,
functions as catalyst of transformation, myths and fairy tales are
filled with all manner of cooks, some creatively heroic and others
deeply villainous. And it is the villains that come first to mind
because their concept of cooking provokes such a shocking contrast to
our usual expectations. For them, cooking is an act of violence and
destruction. It is not about nurturing, but revenge, obliteration and
murder. There are the giants whose cooking skills lean toward the
grinding of “his bones to make my bread.” There are the jealous
step–mothers pulling their recipes from black magic cook books to make
poisoned apples. And there are the truly terrifying, the cannibal cooks,
who in their jealous rages extract hearts and livers from their
step–children to make stews
which they feed to an unsuspecting parent. The step–mother of “The
Juniper Tree” makes a soup of the body of her step–son, seasoned by the
salty tears of his traumatized sister who has witnessed the crime. In
Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus, the deposed Roman general
Titus makes a towering meat pie from the bodies of the Goth Queen
Tamora’s sons and serves it to her in revenge for her sons’ brutal rape
and mutilation of his daughter.
Among the Xhosa of South Africa we find tales of the Zim,
man–eating monsters that dine regularly on dishes of human flesh,
sometimes even their own children. One story tells of Zim parents whose
child is born half sweet, half sour. The parents promptly devour the
sweet side, leaving their child a fast–moving, one–legged creature with a
voracious appetite, hoping to regain its full body in the consumption
of meat. Tricksters in African narratives often use cooking to outwit
these formidable monsters. One clever trickster convinces the Cannibal
grandmother that he is too stupid to figure out how to get into the pot.
Frustrated, she demonstrates by climbing into the seasoned water.
Trickster slams on the lid and promptly turns up the heat. It is
not enough that he cooks the old monster in her own broth, but he
disguises himself as the grandmother, and when her grandchildren show up
for the midday meal, he ladles out her bits and pieces to them. What
follows is a hilarious question and answer dialogue as the grandchildren
become suspicious. “But this looks like my grandmother’s eye,” one says
looking at the contents of her spoon. “And this looks like my
grandmother’s foot,” whines the other. “Eat your food,” the Trickster
grandmother orders, and they do.
For me, the Russian wood-witch Baba Yaga
is the most powerful of the ambiguous and transformative cooks in the
fairy tale tradition. She straddles the threshold between life and
death, between the promise of change and the imminent threat of
destruction, between learning to cook a meal or become the meal. This
is no sugar–coated, one–dimensional Gingerbread House witch. Baba Yaga
is a potent mix of domestic and fantastic — potential helper to the hero
or heroine in the guise of a ferocious grandmother with iron teeth and
wicked claws. Baba Yaga’s house is surrounded by a fence of human bones
and lit by lanterns made from the skulls of her previous meals.
Yet we know we are in the presence of a powerful cook for her house
rests on chicken legs (that key ingredient of any good soup) that lift
and carry the house to different locations, reinforcing her ambiguity —
the domestic combined with the dangerous, the tame with the wild, the
oddity in a cannibal’s household of using chicken legs for transport and
human beings for dinner. When not in use for culinary practices, Baba
Yaga flies around in a mortar, flailing the pestle like an oar. And her
choice of weapon (beyond those great teeth and long nails) is the oven.
Woe to the girl who stumbles into her path unable to cook, to separate
wheat from chaff or poppy seeds from grit.
But as Vasilissa the Wise proves by her encounter with Baba Yaga,
this difficult cook can be appeased, cajoled by good manners and decent
meals into providing the necessary ingredients for a long and healthy
wedded life.
There is a part of me that understands Baba Yaga, so in love with
youth as to desire to consume it, to keep it close. When the children
who were once our flesh, whose young lives we stirred and seasoned like a
slowly simmering pot, begin to demand their independence, it can seem
like the threat of future starvation. When my daughter approached
sixteen years of age, I was jolted by the realization that I was now too
long past youth myself to identify with the fairy tale journeys of
young women.
My rites of passage had become deeper, closer to the bone and were
hedging toward the eternal. To walk on a busy street with my daughter
was to disappear in her lovely shadow. I could almost feel the iron
tusks erupt from my mouth, the long claws dragging at my finger tips. I
wrote about this cannibal hunger, this monstrous motherly cooking in
the poem “Baba Yaga,”confessing:
“My daughter when you were small
How I wanted to eat you.
Cast off flesh of my flesh
I wanted to keep you in me,
Digest my fear of losing you as I swallowed
You whole, plumped and roasted.
Can you forgive the way
I fretted over the oven
And took the measure of your
Wrists with my worried fingers?”
Yet my daughter comes from a long line of cooks and knew the
answer lay not in repudiating me, but in offering a different meal to
soothe my hunger and my loss. After two years of living in Costa Rica
she wrote a reply in “Baba Yaga’s Daughter”:
“Are you still hungry, Old Woman?
Are you rocking on your chicken claws
and picking at your iron teeth?
Well, you will have to wait some more.
You see, I want to make for you the
sweetest tastes (of course)
and beyond the market, Old Woman,
on blue sand that meets milk white water,
I see strange, handsome fish.
I am going just a little farther from your cottage.
After all, you have the bones to nibble
while I am away.
Suck on them hard and inventory
the flavors that linger.
Spin your fingers around a femur
stuffed with marrow
and quench your idle, rusting fetish
while I am away.
It should still be savory in my absence.
Old Woman! You are wasting away!
Those eyes that once crackled bright
in your little cottage
seem opal cold through aged, pursed lids.
I will warm you with a dinner and
spiced herbal cider.
Won’t you be stunned to see,
in your weakened state, Old Woman,
that I have brought more than fish!
I will teach you, now that you have
burned your old recipes,
the new ones I remedied.
And I will uncover the hidden plants
I’ve stashed in my hair,
the worlds I have in my mouth,
the tattoos woven in my skin
and the sky I discovered in my breast.
Old Woman, this will surely be your
finest meal.”
So we must offer praise to the cooks who know the creative power
of their magic to replace hunger with contentment, alienation with
intimacy and anguish with joy. Every night among the Norse gods,
Andhrimnir, the cook of Valhalla, prepares a rejuvenating meal for the
Einherjar, the heroic dead who have died in great battles. He cooks to
perfection the massive wild boar, Sæhrimnir, in his cooking pot,
Eldhrimnir. And each night, though they feast on Sæhrimnir, by morning
of the next day the wild boar has become whole, ready to be cooked
again.
In many variants of the fairy tale “Donkeyskin” and
“Tattercoats,”the young woman disguised as a dirty scullery maid takes over the
job of cooking the Prince’s meal while the cook dashes upstairs to view
the arrival of the regal entourage. Into the soup the girl tosses not
only her own selection of spices, but also her golden ring. The Prince
eats the soup hungrily, captivated by its original flavor, and discovers
the ring at the bottom of the dish. Cinderella may have danced her way
in glass slippers at the ball, but it is Tattercoats’s skill as a cook
that brings the Prince down to the kitchens to find her.
“The Daughter of the Sun,” an Italian tale, provides one of the
most outlandish examples of the fantastic cook. A serving maid is
impregnated by the Sun, gives birth, and then abandons her infant
daughter in a bean field. The baby is discovered by a King, who brings
the foundling home where she is raised alongside the King’s own son, and
the two eventually fall in love. But it is not considered an
appropriate match, and the King to disrupt the relationship moves the
girl to an isolated house deep in the forest. In time the Prince is
betrothed to another and servants travel to all the relatives bearing
the news and a gift of sugared almonds.
They arrive at the little house in the woods and the daughter of
the Sun begs them to wait until she has made a gift for the Prince and
his bride. She astonishes the King’s men by commanding wood to march
into her oven and ignite. Then she leaps into the flame and returns
with a beautiful cake as a wedding gift. The servants return home with
the cake and the castle crackles with the news of the daughter of the
Sun’s remarkable talent. The intended Bride, upon hearing the tale from
the astonished servants, boasts of a similar talent. But she is not the
daughter of the Sun and the poor creature is burned to death in the
oven. And the tale continues; new brides are found and each one fails to
match the daughter of the Sun in culinary feats of magic such as
plunging ones fingers into boiling oil to create fried fish, and,
finally, brewing pap from magic barley
to heal the Prince of a mysterious illness. It is through her
fantastic cooking skills that the heroine is revealed to be a daughter
of royalty and the only legitimate bride.