A hearty mug of erwtensoep is just what a fellow needs in midwinter
Well, we all survived 2020. See, things are looking up already!
Can I tell you about a simple pleasure that made me much happier than you would think? One of my favorite things to eat is split pea soup. It is such comfort food. It’s simple and earthy, and oh so hammy. I used the hambone left over from Christmas dinner to make a simple split pea soup yesterday. Normally I make it in the Dutch way (with carrots, potato, and onion) – the Dutch call it erwtensoep – but I didn’t have any of the ingredients, save the peas and the ham. I also usually make it in a Dutch oven on the stovetop, but this year I thought about doing it in my Instant Pot pressure cooker. I didn’t measure the water, but I did season it with Tony Chachere’s (a spicy Cajun blend popular here in south Louisiana) and the Oktoberfest blend of dried mustard, rosemary, garlic, thyme, sage, and bay leaf, exclusively from The Spice House in Chicago.
In only 40 minutes, voilà, there was pea soup. Problem was that I made it too thin; I prefer the Dutch style, where it’s so thick you can almost smear it. But it tasted so, so good, and I savored the morsels of ham that cooked off the bone. To Roscoe I gave the bare bone, and he was very grateful.
Erwtensoep (pron. “AIR-ten-soup”) is not popular in my house. One of my vulgar children said, “Ewww, it looks like baby poop.” Bless their hearts. No, it is not pretty, but it tastes like sitting by a glowing kachelje, the Dutch potbellied stove, with Oma ladling it out into deep bowls, and cold beer in pint glasses near to hand. I have never actually eaten erwtensoep at anybody’s Oma’s place, or sitting next to a kachelje. That’s beside the point. The point is that there is a whole imaginative world tied into the taste of split pea soup, a world that I find kind and comforting.
I’ve discovered that I have a reputation among readers for being a lover of fancy food, but the truth is, I love well-made plain food most of all. If in Paris, I would much rather go to a little bistro where they make la cuisine de grand-mère than to a Michelin-starred restaurant. Here’s one of the most memorable lunches of my life: a chou farçi (stuffed cabbage) on October 31, 2012, at Le Quincy, a down-home country restaurant in Paris, near the Gare de Lyon. It was bigger than a man’s head.
If you speak French, or even if you don’t, here’s a short video in which the chef at Le Quincy demonstrates how to make this delicious dish. This is not La Tour d’Argent, but it is just what I want and love.
A slow-cooked brisket, in the style I make it home, is more pleasurable to me than a grilled steak. I don’t know why. It probably has to do with one of my most precious childhood memories: sitting around my own grandmother’s modest table in her country cabin, eating her roast chicken, rice and gravy, black-eyed peas, and biscuits. The food was good, but somehow the effect was greater than the sum of its parts.
I’m like that with greens and cornbread. That’s poor people’s food in the rural South. My grandmother – Mullay we called her, though I don’t know where that came from – often had a kettle of greens going on her stovetop. Mustard greens, collard greens, or turnip greens with roots – they all smelled the same. You’d fry bacon in the deep pot, then sauté the greens briefly to make sure they were covered with bacon fat. Then put water, salt, pepper, and the bacon in, and let them cook down. Meanwhile, make cornbread in a black iron skillet, to give it a crispy crust.
When you eat it, you have to dunk your cornbread into the pot liquor, as the liquid that comes with greens is called. My late father would eat this, and always say, “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight?” The joke was that even though we are eating like poor people, the taste is so good that it makes us feel rich.
Here’s a 2015 shot of Mrs. Sue Powell, one of the best Southern Baptists in the world, and the four-time Mustard Greens Queen of West Feliciana Parish. Man, what I wouldn’t give tonight for a mess of Mrs. Sue’s greens.
Mrs. Sue Powell, Queen of West Feliciana Mustard Greens
Actually, I didn’t like greens at all when I was a kid, but came to love them – even cherish them – in my twenties. It’s all about Mullay, deep down. I mean, I love the taste of greens and cornbread, but it’s impossible for me to separate them from the coziness and reassurance of my grandmother’s kitchen.
My wife Julie’s Mammaw makes the best cornbread I’ve ever tasted. Julie doesn’t like greens, but she loves any excuse to make her East Texas Mammaw’s cornbread. Here is the recipe:
Mammaw Reba’s Cornbread
1 1/2 cups cornmeal 1/2 cup flour 1 tsp salt 1 tsp baking soda 1 egg 2 cups buttermilk
Mix it all together until smooth. Pour into a black iron skillet that has been greased with butter or bacon fat. Bake in a 425-degree oven until top is brown and firm.
There are some things in this world as good as this cornbread, but almost nothing better. Trust me. But if you bake it in something that’s not a black iron skillet, you won’t get the crunchy crust, but don’t come hollering to me.
One thing I’ve never tried: cornbread crumbled into a tall iced tea glass, soaked in milk, and eaten with a long-stemmed teaspoon. My dad ate that every time we had leftover cornbread when I was a kid. “Many a night during the Depression, cornbread in buttermilk was all we had for supper,” he would say. For him, to eat that simple meal was to commune with his childhood. Proust had his madeleines; my dad had cornbread soaked in milk; and I have pea soup.
The thought of it returns me to this passage from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. Clophine Toney was an impoverished, illiterate Cajun woman who lived in our community. She and my mother loved each other. My mom, who grew up poor, has always had a heart for those on the margins of society, and that Miss Clophine certainly was. She and her husband, Mr. Huey, and their son James lived in a shack in the woods off of Highway 61. James was a year old than me, and a teammate of mine in summer baseball league.
Miss Clophine was skinny and leather-skinned from working in her garden all day, in the summer sun. She talked with a very thick Cajun accent, chainsmoked Winstons, spat, and peppered her discourse generously with profanity. She was not an easy person to care for, but my mom did. Once Miss Clophine arrived late to a ball game, and took her seat next to my mother in the bleachers. She started smoking and cursing, and the other women moved away from her. She stood up and let them have it.
“All you bitches don’t want to talk to me. I see what you doing. But Miss Dorothy” – my mom – “she gonna talk to me. She’s my friend!”
And it was true: Mama would talk to her, because she genuinely cared for Miss Clophine. Here’s a passage from Little Way. It takes place in 2012. In this narrative, I call my mother, Ray and Dorothy, what their grandkids call them: Paw and Mam:
Miss Clophine Toney died in hospice care that spring. She was 82. On the day of her burial, picked Mam and Paw up and we drove to the funeral home in Zachary. James, her son and my childhood peewee baseball teammate, eulogized his mother. I knew my old friend had become a part-time evangelist, but I had never heard him preach. He stayed up all night praying for the right words to say. He stood behind the lectern next to his mother’s open casket, flexed his arms under his gray suit and black shirt, then turned the Spirit loose on the 40 or so mourners in the room.
“During Christmastime, my mother would go out and pick up pecans,” he began, in his husky voice. “She wasn't very well educated. Today they tryin’ to educate us in everything. Gotta stay with the next game, gotta make sure we go to college. We can't get too far behind, because we might not make enough money, and that would make our lives miserable. My God, we gettin' educated in everything, but we not gettin' educated in morals. We not gettin’ educated in sacrifice.”
James said his mother was poor and uneducated, but during the fall pecan season, she worked hard gathering pecans from under every tree she could find.
“She was carryin' a cross,” he said. “Because let me tell you something, if you don't sacrifice for your brother, if you don't sacrifice for your neighbor, you not carrying your cross.”
Miss Clophine took the money she made selling pecans and went to the dollar store in St. Francisville, where, despite her own great need, she spent it on presents for friends and family.
“Aunt Grace told me the other day that of all the presents she got from everybody, those meant the most,” James said. “Why? Because there was so much sacrifice. She sacrificed everything she made, just to give.”
James pointed to Mam and Paw, sitting in the congregation.
“She used to give Mr. Ray and Miss Dorothy presents. And I'll say this about Mr. Ray and Miss Dorothy Dreher, they were so close to my mother and my father. They sacrificed every year, whether my mother and father have enough to give them a gift of not. They gave. We talkin’ about sacrifice. We talkin’ about whether you’re carryin’ your cross today.”
As a child, James said, he would cross the river into Cajun country to stay with his Grandma Mose, Clophine’s mother. There he would eat a traditional dish called couche-couche, an old-timey Cajun version of fried cornmeal mush. Grandma Mose served couche-couche and milk nearly every morning, and little James loved it.
“But every now and then,” he continued, stretching his words for effect, “we wouldn't eat couche-couche and milk. We'd eat something called bouille.”
Bouille, pronounced “boo-yee,” is cornmeal porridge, what the poorest of the Cajun poor ate.
“I didn't like bouille. I frowned up. Mama made me that bouille sometime. Bouille tasted bad. It wasn't good,” he said. “But let me tell you something: you may have family members, and you may have friends, that will feed you some bouille. It may not be food. They may not be treating you the way you think you ought to be treated. They may be doing this or doing that. You may be giving them a frown. But we may be talking about real sacrifice.”
James’s voice rose, and his arms began flying. This man was under conviction. He told the congregation that if a man lives long enough, he’s going to see his family, friends, and neighbors die, and no matter what their sins and failings, the day will come when we wish we had them back, flaws and all.
The preacher turned to his mother’s body, lying in the open casket on his left, and his voice began to crack.
“If my mama could give me that bouille one more time. If she could give me that bouille one more time. I wouldn't frown up. I wouldn't frown up. I would eat that bouille just like I ate that couche-couche. I would sacrifice my feelings. I would sacrifice my pride, if she could just give me that bouille one more time.”
I glanced at Mam, who was crying. Paw grimaced and held on to his cane.
“Let me tell you, you got family members and friends who ain't treating you right,” James said, pointing at the congregation, his voice rising. “Listen to me! Sacrifice! Sacrifice! -- when they givin' you that bouille. Eat that bouille with a smile. Take what they givin’ you with a smile. That’s what Jesus did. He took that bouille when they was throwing it at him, when they was spittin' at him, he took it. He sacrificed.
“My mother didn't have much education, but she knew how to sacrifice. She knew that in the middle of the sacrifice, you smile. You smile.”
The evangelist looked once more at his mother’s body, and said, in a voice filled with the sweetest yearning, “Mama, I wish you could give me that bouille one more time.”
James stepped away, yielding the lectern to the hospice chaplain, who gave a more theologically learned sermon. Truth to tell, I didn’t listen closely. The power and the depth of what I had just heard from that Starhill country preacher, James Toney, and the lesson his mother’s life left to those who knew her, stunned me. And it made me thing of Ruthie, who lived and died as Miss Clophine had done: taking the bouille and giving, and smiling, all for love, as Jesus had done.
This was true religion. James showed me that. I tell you, the greatest preacher who ever stood in the pulpit at Chartres could not have spoken the Gospel any more purely.
James Toney, at his mother’s graveside
The funeral director invited the congregation to come forward and say our last goodbyes to Miss Clophine before driving out to the cemetery. I walked forward with my arm around Mam’s shoulder. We stood together at Miss Clo’s side. Her body was scrawny and withered, and it was clad in white pajamas, a new set, with pink stripes. I felt Mam tremble beneath my arm. She drew her fingers to her lips, kissed them, and touched them to Miss Clophine’s forehead. In that moment, I thought of the Virgin Mary’s song, from the Gospel of Luke:
He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
And hath exalted the humble.
He hath filled the hungry with good things,
And the rich he hath sent empty away.
Well. We have gone far from writing about the simple pleasure of a humble pea soup. It’s funny, though, how once I start thinking about one thing, I go right down a rabbit hole of making connections. Anyway, James Toney was talking about eating bouille with gratitude, though it was unpleasant. By contrast, I think pea soup, boiled greens, and simple things like that are truly pleasurable. What these two ideas share, though, is that the foods point to something beyond themselves. For me, pea soup is delicious in and of itself, but I can’t separate it in my mind from the times I visited Dutch friends in the Netherlands, and enjoyed warm hospitality at their tables. (I get nostalgic about that especially this time of year, because my Dutch friend Miriam died of cancer on Christmas Day a few years back.) Pea soup can never simply be pea soup for me. Nor can turnip greens and roots ever be only that. I could be in farthest Mongolia, and if somehow, someone served me a bowl of authentic turnip greens and roots, with crusty cornbread, I would be back home in Starhill as surely as if I had been hypnotized.
Ever see the movie Babette’s Feast? It’s about food and drink as media of grace. A refugee French chef creates a magical meal that serves to bring back fond memories to a quarreling community, to build bridges, and to heal wounds. Food and drink as sacrament. Babette’s Feast teaches us to savor beauty and receive its graces. If you have never seen it, oh, listen, you have to watch it this weekend!
Baking Prosphora
Moving on to foodstuff that is more formally religious, my baker daughter Nora today made prosphora for church. Prosphora (from the Greek prosphoron, meaning offering) are small loaves of unleavened bread used by Orthodox Christians for communion. They are baked according to a strict recipe, and impressed with a seal that contains the Greek letters IC XC NIKA, which stand for “JESUS CHRIST CONQUERS.” In the liturgical service, the priest ritually divides the bread, places the center (called the Lamb, for Lamb of God) in the chalice, consecrates the bread and wine, and delivers it to each communicant at the end of a long spoon.
Above you can see Nora’s hand holding the dough from an individual prosphoron she had just pressed with the seal. For an explanation of the other symbols on the seal, click here.
What an awesome privilege for a girl, to make the bread that will be transformed into the Body of Christ! For us Orthodox, as for Catholics, this is not merely a symbol, but is mysteriously the thing itself.
Christmas In Norcia
Look at this gorgeous Italian village scene at Christmastime:
It’s a Nativity scene created by my friends the Zennaro family, who live near Norcia, in the mountains of Umbria. Nobody beats Italians in making Nativity scenes. Here’s more:
And:
Giovanni Zennaro, the papa of the four little Zennaros (Alice is the mama), says that their children painted the sky. The statues in the scene itself, he writes, “are from various periods; some are very old. We inherited them from three different grandparents, and we combined them to make a single Nativity scene.”
Can you imagine the intense sense memories that the Zennaro children will have from Christmas at home? What a gift Giovanni and Alice are giving them!
From The Mailbag
A reader writes about visitations of messengers in hard times:
It’s true that the meaning of suffering comes in the form of unspoken whispers that you feel rather than actually observe. It happened to me when my husband and I were going through an extremely difficult time. First our daughter at around age 18 developed a mental illness with full-blown delusions and hallucinations and at the same time our son in high school at 16 started down his own journey of mental illness hell with depression and severe anger problems that bubbled through many years of irritable hell. Both later were diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Our other son was not ill, but has been affected severely by loss of a meaningful relationship with his siblings. At one of the worst times of the illnesses, I was in so much pain and sorrow, and I heard a message clearly as if it was spoken aloud, but was not: “Your faith will get you through this.” It has been almost 20 years now and my daughter is well, works full time and married a really nice man. My son lives with us but is doing lots better with no more irritable rages. For many years I pondered that message and believe that the “this” is life. Faith will get you through life, and suffering helps to really discover faith.
The End Of The (Free) Line
OK, friends, this is it. This has been the very last free edition of Daily Dreher. Starting Monday, you will only receive this e-mail if you have a paid subscription. I just turned on the “let subscribers pay” function. If you’d like to keep reading, kindly sign up for the daily feed. It’s five dollars per month, or fifty dollars per year. This amounts to 25 cents per day. Such a bargain for you, ladies and gentlemen! I’m well disciplined about writing, so you can be sure you’ll get what you pay for. If I have to miss a day because of travel, illness, or something, I will make it up on the nearest weekend. If something unforeseen happens, and I can’t post for a while, I will stop billing until I can return.
I’ve set up a Founding Member level for subscribers who would like to support my work at a higher level of patronage. It’s $300/mo., and gets you a passport to a 90 minute monthly Zoom call with me and other Founding Members. If that gets to be too many people, I’ll split it into smaller groups so everybody can get to participate. I’ll also send you one signed, personalized copy of Live Not By Lies (or, if you prefer, The Benedict Option; I think I have a few of those left here, and maybe a couple of How Dante Can Save Your Life).
I appreciate your interest in my work, if you have only read for pleasure, but don’t intend to subscribe past today, but especially if you are going to subscribe. For the few who have the means and desire to become patrons, I’m very grateful. I do work hard on this newsletter, at the most superficial level because I’m trying to replace speaking income lost in 2020 to Covid (I expect 2021 to be mostly a wash on this front too), but more so because I have found that I really need the spiritual training that comes with writing this daily newsletter. As I’ve said here before, it’s a matter of training my senses to detect the hidden beauty and grace in daily life, and to hold on to reasons to hope, despite all the bad news. I’m not sure how much this newsletter has helped you, but for me, it has made me more attentive to the gifts and blessings in our lives, though the long and deep shadow of Covid has made them harder to sense. Honestly, I’m not sure I would have considered a mug of pea soup to occasion an epiphany, and a chance to lose myself in a reverie, thinking about my grandmother, if I hadn’t put myself into a stance of mindfulness via writing this daily letter to you all.
I’ll keep writing what you’re used to: non-polemical and non-political personal reflections, especially about matters religious and spiritual; commentary on things I’ve seen or read, particularly books and movies; posts about food, friendship, and other hobbity things; and, of course, your letters. I want to create a sense of community here. If I ever receive too many reader e-mails on a topic to include in a single newsletter, I’ll send out an extra at no additional cost. Keep in mind that I am eager as well to hear your suggestions for things I should read, see, or otherwise consider for commentary here.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Daily Dreher is probably the only place in the Substack universe where you can get reflections on the sacramentality of pea soup and mustard greens, an East Texas cornbread recipe, Cajun funeral oratory, Orthodox liturgical baking, Umbrian Nativity displays, and Mrs. Sue Powell — all in the same newsletter, or the same day. I would have added a true story about a West Feliciana Parish mustard greens patch and UFOs — I’m not kidding — but I’m going to save that for later. For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like. Now, if you will, kindly convert your free subscription into paid. You have the entire weekend to do it, and all day Monday, but don’t put it off, because you might forget. Thanks!
