Gruel was a lesson in the value of familiarity—the more familiar the elements, the easier it was to like. But even if it were very good, I would never, ever, serve gruel to friends should I make it in my own home. Gruel is personal. At Tassajara it was something I could push against to look at my discomfort and anxiety. And gruel pushed back at me and asked me to be open. I might find that I could just relax and accept what the evening meal brought without saying it was good or bad. In any case, I couldn’t send it back once I had it. I had to eat whatever I had taken. We all did.
One summer I was teaching at a conference in Utah when the cook for our lunch announced that he had a special treat: he was going to introduce us to gruel, and he was very excited about offering us this experience. His version of gruel was cold, stiff polenta covered with a lukewarm stew made with vegetables from a local garden. I was not too excited about this gruel, especially since it was tepid and we were chilly, but also because we were to eat it with our fingers. (For some reason, the teachers were given spoons.) But sure enough, as I poked around trying to make it all adhere, some goodness emerged that exceeded the promise offered by its appearance and temperature. And it was easy to discover the moment when I was full because the gruel wasn’t so tasty that I wanted to keep on eating, regardless. That’s kind of how monastery gruel was.
It was not surprising that the evening meal was referred to as a medicine meal, one we partook of if we needed food to get through the evening meditation periods. But we all partook, whether we needed it or not.
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Days whose dates ended in four or nine—another tradition imported from Japan—were our days off, like the nineteenth of November or the fourth of March. But days off weren’t really “off.” Rather the schedule was modified so that we could wash our clothes and oryoki cloths, re-cover our setsus with clean cloth, fill and clean the kerosene lamps in our cabins, enjoy an extra bath, maybe take a hike, write a letter, take a nap. Regardless of how you spent your time, the days off ended with a sumptuous dinner, followed by a period of zazen. Lunch fixings were put out right after breakfast and we could make our own bag lunches—sandwiches on thick, heavy bread, fillings of miso and peanut or sesame butter, and cookies. Before I got to Tassajara, I had heard that there was a day-off tea when cookies were served. One student was completely undone by the cookie, weeping, because he wanted to join the group but he didn’t want the sugar. In 1971 we were fine with sugar, and when I was there, we got to take a cookie or two—or none.
I usually made two sandwiches and ate one in the privacy of my cabin immediately after breakfast, then the other around noon. Others did the same. Eating these hefty sandwiches so soon after breakfast had nothing to do with hunger. I’m not sure what it had to do with—maybe the pleasure was found in eating by myself in my own way without the drumroll, chants, clappers, bows, and all of that. It was a bigger kind of hunger those sandwiches were attempting to assuage.
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One practice period I was the anja—sort of a glorified housekeeper to the priest who had come from Japan to introduce us to a variety of Japanese monastic practices. On days off he wanted soba for his lunch and he taught me how to make buckwheat noodles, rolling them out with a long cylinder of wood, not a pasta machine. Rather, he showed me once, then I was on my own. I got better as the practice period went on, but I’m sure my noodles were never really up to snuff. I did find it a challenge to do the same thing every five days and see the results of my efforts change. The noodles did get better. But fortunately the visiting priest joined the rest of us for day-off dinner.
The day-off dinners were the treats of the four-day monastic week. Because we ate in the dining room from plates, the kitchen crew wasn’t limited to foods that fit in oryoki bowls. And the fact that we used forks and knives made even more things possible. We could have baked potatoes or spaghetti; blintzes or lasagna. And of course there was a dessert, most likely something dense, sweet, and caloric, like a thickly frosted chocolate cake. These rich and elaborate dinners felt as if they were the products of all the collective food fantasies that had accumulated during the previous four days. This one dinner was in extreme contrast to the zendo meals. But these meals were a bit odd. We’d sit down to a feast then eat it in silence, at least at first. Try to imagine setting the table with cheerful red cloths and vases of flowers, covering it with all these beautifully prepared, delicious, rich foods, and then not talking for the first ten minutes. It may be hard because it’s just not something most of us do. It was strange for me, too, but it showed me how much the pleasure of a meal has to do with sharing conversation—and the degree to which conversation covers up who we are when we eat. In the zendo we didn’t talk, but we didn’t face one another over a table, either. At day-off dinner we did face one another. It always seemed so strange that with all these dishes—the foods you had longed for and probably obsessed about the past four days, and all the work that went into preparing them—there was silence when you really wanted to be able to say, “Yum!”
Still, it was interesting to see what happened when the talk was taken away. I don’t know about others, but for me the silence served as a kind of mirror in which I viewed my own expectations of pleasure, what I thought my needs and wants were, and why I heaped my plate so high that I would surely regret it. People tended to eat so much that evening zazen following the day-off dinner was painful indeed. Eventually the clappers sounded, announcing the end of silence. Talk ensued, and a more comfortable kind of unconsciousness took over while eating.
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The overall atmosphere surrounding food at Tassajara was vaguely to intensely anxious. Would we run out? Would there be enough? Would it be good? And mostly, would it satisfy some impossible longing? One way in which individuals’ anxieties and desires were allayed was via the town trip. Once every five days a few older students who had already done practice periods and could therefore be trusted to leave Tassajara without going nuts or escaping, drove a truck into Monterey. There they picked up groceries for the kitchen, tools and equipment, kerosene, and other things that Tassajara needed in order to run. It was also possible for students to order things like soap, ChapStick, razors, flashlight batteries, and best of all, food. The morning after the town trip, which always coincided with a day off, everyone’s purchases were set out on the dining room tables—boxes of Mystic Mints and Oreos, jars of Horlicks malt, jars of peanut butter, chocolate bars, and bags of candies, nuts, more cookies, and even the occasional bar of soap or flashlight. Once a student ordered—and got—a bucket of KFC. Who got what was on view for everyone to see, a public display of the secret feeding frenzies that were going on outside the austere zendo meals. I saw who had a lot of cookies, and before I knew all the wonderful things that could be made out of malted milk, I knew whom to ask. This all tapered off come guest season, when suddenly there was lots of food all of the time, including sweets. Guest season was like one big (leftover) day-off dinner.
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But before students could experience any of this—the gruel, the bag lunches, day-off dinners, the daily schedule, zazen, the zendo meals, town trips—they had to prove their intention to practice by doing tangaryo for a period of five days. Historically, tangaryo referred to the days a monk spent sitting outside the temple gate to prove his intention to practice. At Tassajara tangaryo involved sitting in the zendo from the predawn zazen period into the night, without moving. You could not talk, walk, wash, or do anything but sit. There were no breaks for walking meditation, as in sesshin. Tangaryo was excruciating; but it wasn’t an empty form. During this period I projected a life story for myself of a perfect marriage and children, then as I retold it to myself, it started to fray here and there until it fell apart and I had to conclude that there were no guarantees for happiness. Lots of other stuff about my life came up that firmed my intent
ion for the practice period to come, and I’m sure that was true for others. Otherwise why not leave? In short, tangaryo was a good thing to do.
While I was sitting during tangaryo, I could hear the students having their work meeting just outside the zendo, after breakfast. They could be talking about lost socks and to even imagine taking part in such a conversation seemed like the most enviable thing in the world. Ordinary events were infused with the miraculous when there was absolutely no possibility of taking part in them.
During tangaryo, I was faced with the monastery’s food for the first time. Tassajara food was different from city food, at least in 1971; it was more austere and even somewhat strange. One day we were served a lentil soup in which stale croutons of Tibetan barley bread were submerged. The bread was so dark and chewy that I was sure it was beef, and I couldn’t believe there would be a beef stew at Tassajara. I was also a little relieved because I hadn’t been thriving that well on my new strictly vegetarian diet and here was this beef and it was so nourishing and good. That I couldn’t tell bread from beef already said a lot about my ability to discern grain from flesh, but I couldn’t wait to make this stew for my parents when the winter break came, this and other good foods, like hearty split pea soups and strange new breads, for instance bread made from gruel—gruel bread, in fact, was what it was called. When I finally did go home, I tried out these new foods on my parents, who were only marginally impressed. Now, of course, I realize that they had their own ways of eating and were not very interested in adding new ones, especially those from a Zen monastery. I probably should have known that then, but I was so excited by these foods that I didn’t think about it. I was keenly disappointed that they weren’t more enthusiastic.
12. Guest Season at Tassajara
When we first acquired Tassajara, in 1967, we continued running it the way it had been run before Zen Center’s ownership. Which is to say, the kitchen served meat, a practice that continued for a short time. Imagine what it must have been like for these hungry, hardworking, not necessarily vegetarian students smelling the lamb chops they carried out of the kitchen to the guests in their dining room. Within a season or two, we decided to serve our guests vegetarian meals.
This was a very daring thought. Vegetarian food was still pretty primitive at that time, but we had some advantages: Our guests had absolutely nowhere else to go unless they wanted to take a very long drive out and back on that treacherous road, which they didn’t. They were relaxed, and they were hungry. Plus Tassajara was rustic enough that being there in the summer was a little like camping, and as we all know, everything tastes better out-of-doors, or something like the out-of-doors. Sitting in a large screened-in dining room that was perched over the rushing Tassajara Creek was not a bad dining situation for the guests, and all of these factors made the transition to a vegetarian menu that much easier. The food itself evolved year after year as we became aware of new dishes and recipes and how to cook them, changing ingredients and bettering our cooking skills—in short, accumulated experience. For the most part, our guests were accepting and happy.
Although it was vegetarian, guest food was not like the student food eaten during practice period. It was more familiar to the guests and far richer. Most every meal was an occasion for biscuits, fresh breads, rolls, cakes, and other kinds of baked goods. They were so delicious—especially the breads—that many guests asked if they could buy a loaf to take back with them to the City. Extra bread was always made for that purpose. At some point, we started hearing people ask if we could open a bakery in San Francisco. This was long before Acme bakery and the era of slow-rise levain breads and there weren’t many bakeries making tender whole-grain loaves and blueberry muffins. Eventually Zen Center opened the Tassajara Bread Bakery on Cole Street. It was a hugely successful adventure that gave students the chance to work in an atmosphere of their own (Buddhist) making instead of having to go downtown to work. Its income helped support the Zen Center, and it provided many San Franciscans with loaves of bread along with lemon bars, those muffins, poppy seed cake, and other pastries.
The Tassajara Bread Bakery closed some years ago. A friend recently referred to it (and Peet’s Coffee in Berkeley) as “so twentieth century.” Now there is a very different reality concerning bread and baked goods, a reality that involves growing grains or sourcing them from smaller growers, milling them, using cold, long rises, sourdough starters, rustic shapes, higher hydration levels, and so forth. That the bakery on Cole Street was so twentieth century was true. But it served a purpose during the years it was open, which was to provide customers with better bread than they could buy elsewhere at the time, and some old- and new-fashioned American pastries.
As with the baked goods, guests were increasingly impressed with the food that Tassajara was serving. Again we heard them ask if we couldn’t cook this food in San Francisco. (Most of our guests were from the Bay Area.) Could we open a restaurant? It didn’t happen right away—Greens opened in 1979—but the Tassajara guest season served as an opportunity for us to learn our craft. And as we became better cooks, the divide between student and guest food began to narrow somewhat, and not only in the summer. Remnants of that good food served to the guests strayed into the practice period as well, especially once Greens opened.
One of the last zendo meals I ate at Tassajara before leaving Zen Center altogether struck me in an odd way. At that time, Laura Chenel’s goat cheese was one of the hot new foods in the San Francisco Bay Area and we often served it at Greens. It was special and expensive, and unlike today, it was pretty much the only goat cheese available, except for the French Boucheron. During a zendo lunch on this fall day I held out my third bowl and the server carefully set in it chopped radicchio and arugula dressed with olive oil and a piece of Laura’s goat cheese. It looked stunning against the black lacquer, but I was taken aback. I was, essentially, eating a miniature version of a Greens first-course salad. Of course it tasted good, but somehow I didn’t want to have a restaurant dish in the zendo. It made everything the same, and what had been special about eating in the zendo was the opportunity to experience food that was truly modest, even humble, and maybe not very well prepared, and have it be okay. Even more than okay. For me zendo food was about having less and discovering that it was more. It was never about having a dish you might get in a Bay Area restaurant. For all its goodness and prettiness, this dish seemed out of place in the zendo. Perhaps guest food and student food, or Tassajara food and city food, shouldn’t merge in the meditation hall. Or perhaps it was fine that they did and it was my work to come to see that it was, indeed, all the same. Perhaps today that salad would seem ordinary and unproblematic. Maybe even “so twentieth century.” Maybe I didn’t have to get involved in the issue. Questions abound when you make room for them.
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About ten years later I returned to teach a cooking class to guests at Tassajara and I ate with my students in the guest dining room. The food seemed stagnant, the cereal was rancid, and the menu was essentially a repetition of what had worked in the long-ago past with scant regard for new tastes, new ingredients, and new preferences for foods, such as those that wouldn’t put five pounds on a guest over the course of a brief stay, or foods that were better suited for hot weather than nut loaf and chocolate cake. I was not impressed. I was shocked.
13. Also in the Seventies
BREAD
Someone recently sent me a wonderful gift. It was an issue of Life magazine from December 11, 1970. The cover depicted a robust young woman with long blond hair. She’s smiling over her shoulder and hefting a backpack that’s stuffed with vegetables and, of all things, stalks of rice. The cover headline declared, “Organic Food; New and Natural.” “The Move to Eat Natural” was the title of the article.
There were photos. One showed a display of sixteen seeded, dense-looking dark breads. Another showed bowls of brown foodstuffs, including cranberry beans, millet
, soybeans, toasted buckwheat, sunflower seeds, and lentils. A smaller photo showed students at my alma mater, UC Santa Cruz, who, having chosen an organic, vegetarian meal plan, were helping themselves to condiments like kelp, nutritional yeast, and bean curd. I just missed being one of them by two years—I graduated before that was an option. There was also a picture of Alan Chadwick’s garden at UC Santa Cruz. The caption said that students could relax from their studies there by working on the Garden Project. (Ha! I thought. That is if Alan himself wasn’t screaming at them to get out, as he did with me.) But there it was, a school garden. Forty-plus years ago. And the garden looked magnificent.
The article explored the incipient movement toward the embrace of organic foods through the development of food co-ops (Berkeley’s Food Conspiracy) and health food stores (Nature’s Children in New York), a restaurant in Los Angeles that juiced carrots, tomatoes, and watermelon to order (the Source), and the emergence of four successful under-thirty entrepreneurs nervously embracing capitalism (owners of Wholly Foods, also in Berkeley). It also considered compost, vegetarianism, unleavened breads, beverages without added sugar, and brown rice.
An Onion in My Pocket Page 11