Taste of the World Edition (Winter Issue 8)
Passing the Cup
By Hannah Hawksbee
Saturday, 6 March 2021
I’m sitting in my London apartment on a slow Saturday afternoon. With my dog sleeping at my feet, I type between sips of mate, the “tea and coffee” of Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay and other parts of South America. Coming from the plant Ilex paraguariensis, you drink this tea out of cow horns, clay cups or dried gourds. Since no tea bag contains the leaves, you consume it through a sieve-tipped metal straw. You can drink it hot or icy-cold (tereré) when seeking relief from the summer heat. It tastes like home; it feels like home.
In England I drink alone, but I remind myself that this tastes of community. I may get odd looks for carrying around it here, but on the streets of Paraguay, you see a husband and wife drinking it on the pavement in front of their house. You see friends sharing it on a bus on the way to work. Workers take a break from work and pass around the cup. Soccer matches end, and out comes the tereré. You wouldn’t be surprised to see it passed down a church pew or around a pastors’ meeting. Community is built into its mode of consumption; there is a thermos of hot or cold water and one cup with one straw. A designated server holds the water and the cup bounces back to that person for a pour of water between people. It invites sitting in a circle within passing length of one another and leaves little room for a fear of germs.
Growing up as a missionary kid in South America, mate became part of the fabric of our family life. My brothers and I would find my parents drinking it in the garden, and we would be drawn into the circle. It was a packing essential on every road trip. As kilometers of flat lands covered in palm trees sped past our car windows, the cup would travel around the car. Today, I drink it and think of my family in that land I call home and wonder when we will once again sit in that mate circle together. I long for the day when the social distance between communities will shrink back to passing length and sharing a cup will not pose a threat. I also am reminded of and find myself longing for the cup we share in as the Christian family, the cup we pass to one another in remembrance of the grace that has drawn us in.
Side Dishes: On Cross-Cultural Dialogue
This Winter, I started having weekly one-on-one tutorials with my thesis supervisor for my directed study. I remember having this shock in the very first session when my teacher said: “So let’s begin.” I took that as a signal for: OK I am pricking up my ears and all ready for listening attentively and jotting down notes! But when that signal came a couple more times then I realised Oh NO! It’s meant to be ME SHARING FIRST! And then I started to appreciate the inspiring feedback to follow. Phew! (Fanny Pang)
Return
By Alice Hodgkins
It might be boxed mac and cheese
Caesar salad
Apple crisp
Beef-pickle spread through an old meat grinder
Congee
Popcorn popped on the stove
Cheerwine
Koeksisters
Peanut butter bites
Vanilla ice cream in a little paper container
Oyster dressing
Or tomatoes. Sliced homegrown tomatoes.
These lumps in our throats punch holes in our hearts and the hunger floods in,
Ripping us back by scent and tang to last time we were small,
Small and content to see nothing but blue clouds billowed like a spread tablecloth
And our own bare feet on linoleum or dirt.
And now this windy whistling hunger proclaims that
It has always been such.
We are small still.
The sky remains great with child.
So another bite, another crumb, another sip,
Holding the taste on our tongues, we wait:
The light is coming,
Coming fast and through the kitchen.
For me and perhaps for you
The beatific vision begins with a rolling pin.
Side Dishes: On Moderating Luxury
Spreading pandan kaya on toast transports me right back to being five years old in Bangkok and feeling sick from having eaten too much of this sweet treat in one sitting. This pandan-flavored coconut egg jam is popular across Southeast Asia but a rarer delicacy in the United States, so more recent memories involve bonding with Indonesian relatives or Filipino and Malaysian friends whenever we get our hands on this creamy green spread. Today, I still adore pandan kaya, but take care to indulge in moderation. (Amelia Hamiter)
Why Home Canning
By Kate Miller
For my 30th birthday, I threw myself a canning party. I mailed out invitations to my friends and family to join in on a weekend of jam-making and pickling at our home in the southern Ontario countryside. It was a three-day event. Some pitched tents in the backyard, others dropped in and out; those less interested in canning helped by barbecuing and child-minding, still others took to crafting decorative labels for all of the jars. And there were lots of jars. For every recipe that we made, each family could take a jar home. It was epic.
I had learned how to can the season before from a septuagenarian Church Lady, who was tickled to bring all of her equipment over to my kitchen, and we made relish together. The experience was apparently transformative, since from then on, canning was not just a part of my homemaking, but a highlight, not incidental to the other household tasks that I carry out in my home. Unlike routine housework, I have to make time and space for it, stewarding the process from seed to storage, and I depend on other people to make it worthwhile—not just the baby-holders and peach-growers, but the people around me to eat it all, too. For me, canning is work goes the extra mile. It really just isn’t necessary. It’s a total labour of love.
Now, in my city condo, with compromised pantry space and fewer farmer friends, I indeed preserve less than I did when I had an abundant garden and the obligation to make something of the boxes and boxes of windfall pears kindly left on my doorstep. So why make preserves when you can buy pickles at No Frills, or better yet, go to the market and buy Craft chutneys, artisanal marmalades, and feel good about supporting local initiatives while you up-level your toast game? Why engage in a skill that is either too 1950s housewife or too hipster Pacific Northwest for your taste, or when fresh produce is expensive and difficult to access? What even is compote and what do you do with it?* Why bother?
Every September, grocery stores stock Coronation grapes that come in these adorable boxes with handles, and if you blink you might miss your chance to snag one. These grapes are a deep blue-purple with thick skin, and sour-sweet, like Concord grapes, except this varietal has no seeds inside, a scientific marvel dream come true. Trust me, grab some if you see them and bring them home. Wash them, pluck them from their stem, put them in a bowl, and do the counter-cultural activity and pour granulated sugar over them, more than you think is sensible. And then go to sleep—maceration happens without you. The next day, put the juicy mix in a big pot, and slowly let it bubble and foam and get sticky. Pay attention because it could burn or burn you, and it takes a long time, more than you think is sensible. Scrape the mess into little jars and lick all of the spoons you used. Give some jars to friends or even strangers because who needs all this jam anyway? Put the remaining jars in the back of your cupboard and forget about them. One day in March, remember that you made jam, and bring out a jar. Hold it up to the light and delight at purple. Find bread and spread the jam on it. Say thanks. Realize it made a difference to you that you went to the extra trouble.
Disclaimer: Food safety standards are real and you should heed them and seek out proper instructions on how to safely can so you do not harm yourself or others. The above is a movement on tasting and seeing that God is good, not a recipe for jam.
*It’s fruit cooked in syrup. Put it on ice cream. You’re welcome.
Side Dishes: On Eating Out
When I was at boarding school in Malaysia, we used to go down to the local town to have roti canai as a breakfast treat some Saturdays. Even now the combination of roti with curry or sweetened condensed milk takes me back to those outings with my dorm. (Beth Cormack)
The Editor’s Desk
On Dining Tables
By Steven Gomez
There’s a drawing which hangs in Regent’s atrium, in the space just off the Rita Houston Kitchen which is currently marked as the “designated eating area”—in other words, our dining room. The drawing is of another dining room and table, however; one that sits empty and unused though laid out for a meal, or maybe for tea. Chairs are pushed back as though people have just left. Its title is handwritten on the bottom: The Death of the North American Family. (A photograph of the drawing is in the PDF version of this issue.) I have not been able to find out who the artist is—the signature is no more than a curvy line—but no doubt it’s a donor or some other patriarchal or matriarchal doyen of Regent’s legacy, like Loren Wilkinson or Dal Schindell.
Forgive me for treading on any toes here, but if there is one thing that Regent has taught me it’s how to question or problematize things. And I find this piece of art problematic. Perhaps I’m reading it wrong, but its monochrome atmosphere of elegy seems to be harmonizing with the funeral dirge evangelicals often sing for Western ‘family values,’ and the song is getting old.
I’m not sure that such a picture is appropriate for our dining room. Regent is not actually a church. But we are Christians which makes us part of the Church, and the New Testament uses every possible means and metaphor to help us see ourselves not only as a community of faith from different backgrounds, but as the very family of God. We are “co-heirs with Christ,” “brothers and sisters,” “a spiritual house,” and Jesus Himself says that it is those who hear and obey the Word of God who count as His mother and brothers. Biological family still has a place in our lives (making humans is something God likes to do, apparently) and remains a gracious gift to be enjoyed when given. But the Norman Rockwell vision of the North American nuclear household—Mom, Dad, and 2.5 kids gathered around the dining table—is an unsustainable fiction, one that cannot survive as an independent unit and therefore cannot serve as the cornerstone of society, as we often like to claim. The Bible paints a different picture. The Church is not described metaphorically as a family; it is the family, the model of the new humanity, and what happens in our separate households—whatever they look like—can be a beautiful poem, an ode in honour of life in God’s family. That’s the direction the metaphor travels.
All of this is solidified, given flesh and blood, at what we may call the Church’s dining table, where we feast on bread and wine in communion with God and with one another. Sometimes we get caught up in theological arguments over whether the table is “open” or “closed,” whether or not one can eat without being a disciple—part of the family. I suppose I can accept the principle that only disciples should take and eat. But why this means the table is closed is beyond me. The very mandate which Jesus gives to His family is to go and make disciples of all the nations. Which means that this table is meant for everyone. To pretend otherwise is to shut down our missions committees, cut funding to overseas missionaries, and give up the idea of being missional altogether. The family of God reproduces by mission and discipleship. Jesus lays out the sacrament, throws a party, and invites the whole world to taste and see that the He is good. The table is closed to no one because the family is closed to no one; it is not defined by biology or language or culture or place. To be a disciple is to be the child of a holy Parent, to have brothers and sisters you may never even have met yet. It is to have a dining table that will never sit empty.
North America does not define the family. Jesus defines it, and I am so grateful that Regent throws a party every year to show us what Jesus’ family looks like and sounds like—and tastes like. However painful and complicated it is to do separately during a pandemic, we refuse to let it go. We refuse to go hungry. God’s family does not die. It is headed for eternity.
If you feel like responding to any of this week’s articles, feel free to write a letter to the editor by clicking the link below.