The man next to me, his white hood down, springs up to cut the fluffy long fingers of quiche for an older neighbour, who lives now with Parkinson’s. Then he comes back and tells me about the nine-hour drive he just took to an ashram in southern India, and the forest fire that wiped out a colleague’s place in the hills of Santa Barbara. I ask him if he saw the movie about the monks of the Grande Chartreuse and we talk about the Dalai Lama, Tanzania, how best to die. One of the men who’s just left this place – for Jerusalem, to work for peace – used to zealously keep the Sabbath in the midst of all these Catholics.
‘I suppose monks are the only ones who don’t keep the Sabbath,’ I say to my friend Raniero.
‘The inner Sabbath only,’ he says, his cheek dimpling as if he were not the prior.
In the corner there are two large tubs of green-tea ice cream and Italian spumoni dessert; next to them, two plates of peach pie with fruit so fresh I wonder if it’s been airlifted over from the Garden. In another corner is a thermos of hot water and all the teas, fancy and a little less so, that modern California can devise. We talk of common friends – Berkeley, Shanghai, LA – and I hear from a beaming monk how all the miles collected on the monastery credit card are sending him this summer – first class! – to Rio.
Then Raniero gets up and rings a little bell. ‘Dear God,’ he says, quickly, without fuss, ‘thank you for this food and the friendship around these tables. Special blessings to Benedict, for preparing this excellent meal. As we go forth from this room and back to our duties, may we always see that light that shines in others and in ourselves.’
‘You free for some washing-up, Pico?’ the man next to me, in an apron, says. Seconds later, I am standing next to the former prior, in his eighties, and the current one, working briskly, as we chat, to make all the plates shine again.
What in the world am I doing here, you might ask? I sometimes ask myself. I’m not a Catholic, and nine years of enforced chapel twice a day at British boarding school (with Latin hymns on Sunday nights) seemed to satisfy more than a lifetime’s quota of religion. I respect those people who have the groundedness and selflessness that faith often brings – the alertness to compassion and a larger view of things – but I’m not quick to call those virtues mine.
Yet what I am is a traveller, whose life is about trying to occupy shoes – and lives and hearts – very different from my own; and a human being, who cannot fail to be washed clean and opened up by silence. So I come to this Benedictine hermitage, tucked into the central coast of California, and sit in a little cell looking out on the great blue plate of the Pacific, 1300 feet below, scintillant in the sunshine, blue-green waters pooling around rocks, filling the horizon from one end of my deck to the other, and think about what travel really means, and why these men in hoods seem like the most fearless and spirited adventurers I’ve ever met.
A monk wants to be clear and undistracted in his journey, so he doesn’t have too much to eat (in theory), or too little; there’s nothing uncomfortable about this place, and sometimes I feel almost embarrassed at how well treated we visitors are. In my little trailer – ‘Hesychia’, it’s called, meaning ‘spirit of stillness’ – there’s a large pot of Extra-Crunchy Skippy peanut butter (‘Fuel the Fun!’) above the stove, next to a bag of Swiss Miss Milk Chocolate. In the communal kitchen, the ten or twelve people staying here on retreat can help themselves to ‘Very Cherry’ yoghurt and extra-virgin olive oil, Colombian coffee and kosher salt. Someone has contributed pineapple salsa from Trader Joe’s to the communal refrigerator, and one large bottle is always filled with oatmeal raisin cookies.
Every day, at 12.30, bells ring – as they do for Mass – and a monk drives down in a cracked blue hatchback, no licence plate on it, dust swirling up behind him as he accelerates out of the Monastic Enclosure, and brings us a tureen of hot soup, a main dish, some vegetables and often extras, from which each of us collects a lunch to eat in silence in our rooms. One day it is carrot soup, flecks of Bugs Bunny’s favourite floating on the surface so it looks like strawberry yoghurt. Another day there are egg rolls, and pasta shells with salmon in them (fish the only ingredient to disrupt the monks’ vegetarianism). One year every dish came with a sprig of mint, or some basil, courtesy of a chef from a four-star restaurant in San Francisco who was spending a year here on retreat, getting himself in order. ‘Buon appetito!’ the monk always says as he leaves the glass trays on the counter, to come and collect them again an hour later.
If I wanted mere food, I realised some years ago – steaks and sorbets and spicy panang curry with strong chillies – I could find them almost anywhere these days, ten minutes from my home or across the world in some fairy-tale palace; if I wanted a meal to remember, I could go back to Aleppo or Buenos Aires or Hanoi. But after seventeen years of criss-crossing the globe, I came to think that it was only the food I couldn’t see that really sustained me and only inner nutrition that made me happy, deep down. A meal I grabbed in a Paris McDonald’s, to keep me walking through the streets of the 6th arrondissement, left me hungry ten minutes after I’d finished it; a richer, fancier lunch left me so replete that all energy for exploration was gone for the day.
Here I just get into a car and drive up a winding mountain road along the sea, three hours from my mother’s house, and find that I am perpetually full and hungry for more with every breath – the way, in love, you thirst for the other’s company, yet know that even years together will never be enough.
Now, as the bells ring and ring – time is so slowed down here that I explore every moment as I would the crevices and soft spots in a new lover or a simple honey-flavoured candy exploding in my mouth like caviar – I can reach in my little trailer for the rice and bean chips (with adzuki beans) I’ve brought up or (as I’ve smuggled in here on more than fifty retreats now over nineteen years) the jumbo bag of chocolate chip cookies. In the monastery bookstore they’re selling Chocolate Fudge Royale and Special Gourmet Mocha Mix in hazelnut flavour. Pieces of the hermitage’s celebrated moist fruitcake are available, free of charge, by the cash register, and bottles of Monastery Creamed Honey sit among the Tibetan prayer bowls and rosaries.
But mostly what I do here is think about daily bread, and what communion means in the context of the traveller’s daily lifelong companions: restlessness and solitude. In silence the day stretches out and out till sometimes it feels as if yesterday were an eternity ago. I wake up as the first light begins to show above the hills, and make toast and two cups of tea for myself in my little kitchen. I take long walks along the monastery road, stopping at the benches set around every turn to watch the sun sparkle on the water and the coastline to the south slough off its coat of early-morning fog. I read and read – Patti Smith, Marcus Aurelius, Werner Herzog, Thomas Merton – and attention becomes so sharpened that every snatch of perfume, scuffling rabbit or echo hits me like a shock.
The day itself becomes my fuel. I reach for some ‘simply cashew, almond and cranberry’ trail mix from my suitcase. I stop by the kitchen to pick up an apple. I handwrite letters to friends far away, make plans for the summer, watch the colours turn above the ocean as the darkness falls.
Not having anywhere to go or anything I have to do – no telephone or laptop or television – makes each hour feel as nutritious as a Christmas feast. And spending so many hours in silence, all emptied out, gives new meaning to community when the monks invite us to share in their lunch after Sunday Mass (I go to lunch though I skip the Mass).
Sometimes, when I don’t intend to, or am just walking down the road, or reading a biography of the incorrigibly licentious Lord Rochester, I think about what I seek at mealtime. It’s not the tastes I savour (I was born and grew up in England, so my taste buds were surgically removed at birth); it’s the setting, the circumstances, the company. I would rather, as Thoreau might have muttered, eat a hunk of bread with a friend over good conversation, in a place of beauty such as this, than suffer through a multicourse opera at El Bulli. The food is
a means to happiness, a sense of peace; and the true meaning of happiness, as Socrates told me yesterday morning, is not to have more things but to need less. I’ve never been in a restaurant where people seem so much themselves – which is to say at home – as at the Sunday lunches with the monks.
It’s really just a story of love and attention, I come to think – and not even caring which is which, or where one ends and the other begins. I’ve been lucky enough to eat injera bread at Lalibela on New Year’s Eve, and to step down into a basement kitchen in Lhasa, where red-cheeked Tibetan girls were cooking up a feast. I’ve had $300 French kaiseki meals along the red-lanterned lane of the Pontocho district, near my home in Kyoto, looking out on the Kamo River and the eastern hills of the old capital beyond, a moon above the temple spires. I’ve relished vegetarian meals in a blue restaurant painted over with the lines of Neruda in Easter Island on the first day of the millennium.
But I don’t think any place has taught me what a meal is – not just food and not just fuel – so much as here. ‘Get up and eat, else the journey will be long for you!’ was the topic of the week’s sermon at St Anthony’s church, in the middle of modern Istanbul, when I looked in on it seven months ago. Now I reach into my bag of Reduced Guilt white corn tortilla chips, and pull out of a drawer one of the ‘sweet-hot soft ginger candies’ a friend gave me on the way up here. The journey doesn’t seem long at all. At the very best restaurants I’ve visited, my body changes a little when I’m through, and my mood lifts a bit too. Here, when I’m finished with my lunch, I feel as if my life has been transformed.
Communion on Crete
RHONA McADAM
Rhona McAdam is a Canadian poet and food writer who has eaten well in many countries. She has a master’s degree in Food Culture from the University of Gastronomic Sciences (Slow Food’s university in northern Italy), writes a food and poetry blog (the Iambic Cafe), and teaches an online course in urban agriculture and food security for St Lawrence College in Ontario. Her most recent full-length poetry collection, Cartography, was published in 2006, and two delectable chapbooks of her food poems (Sunday Dinners and The Earth’s Kitchen) are soon to be published. She is a Europhile who lived for many happy years in London, but currently lives, writes and cooks in Victoria, British Columbia.
I do not honestly know how many church dinners I have attended in my lifetime, but I know there have been many. My mother’s platters still bear our family name written in felt tip on the bottom, and I have memories of those modest, long-tabled spaces, the serving hatch with its retractable wooden shutter behind which the church ladies wove their footsteps, the steam, the heat, the aromas.
So the setting for the meal offered us by the village of Vistagi, in central Crete, was and was not familiar. In the company of my twenty-three classmates at Slow Food’s University of Gastronomic Sciences, I had travelled to Crete on one of the several stages – field trips – we were to complete in the course of our master’s degree in Food Culture. We’d had an exhausting, uncomfortable, confusing – and exhilarating – time of it, criss-crossing the narrow mountain roads in three minivans, learning about such diverse matters as biodynamics, foraged foods, winemaking, irrigation management and small-scale food production on this rocky island.
We’d been on Crete several days already. Our arrival at Vistagi had been preceded by a wander up a mountain slope to gather wild greens; a dinner in a village taverna where we were individually pressed into song; a tour of a mountain village women’s baking collective; and a lesson on the making of baklava and those exquisite Greek donuts, loukoumades. We’d had a boggling run of boiled goat, wild onion and artichoke dinners; we’d had fava-potato purée at the start of every meal, a sweetish drink akin to church wine with our meal, and Cretan firewater (raki) at the end. But that, said Kostas, was the point: seasonal eating means repetitive eating. It means a cycle of menus where the variety occurs over the course of a year, not the span of a week.
The day of Vistagi had opened, as they all had, with thick, fresh yoghurt and honey, soft crusty bread with homemade jam, and coffee with milk from the goat tethered at the bottom of the garden. We piled into our minivans and followed Kostas’ nimble white Panda up the mountain. Literally. The track we were to follow intersected the road at a near-vertical angle, then twisted its way up to the mountain-top milking parlour in that uniquely vertiginous manner of Cretan roads. The springtime vistas across the valleys were almost breathtaking enough to keep our eyes lifted from the shocking drops below our windows.
At the milking parlour, we watched a pair of shepherds swiftly divest their flock of the morning milk and release them to their grazing, scattering with the sounds of their bells down the hillside. Afterwards we stood together in the warming breeze, dutifully drinking raki and eating pastries, biscuits and fresh cheese – mizithra – with walnuts that the old shepherd cracked on a stone. While we ate, he talked about the life of a Cretan shepherd: the cooking and sewing and shoemaking skills each man had to take into the mountains when he travelled with the flock. The platter he thrust towards each of us time and again was heaped with cheese and we were told we had to eat it all. We ate and we ate, the raki curdling in our bellies.
Finally we were done, and gratefully decamped for the next destination: the cheesemakers’ hut at the bottom of the mountain. We hurtled down the dirt track, ears popping, giddy with raki and too much cheese, eyes fixed on the blue sky and the wildflowers that blurred in our wake. Down and down we sped, until we spilled out of the vans and into the shed, where the barrels of milk were being unloaded and poured into stainless-steel vats, while the earlier batches were strained into baskets and the cheesemakers in their white aprons and boots laughed and chatted through the steam.
It was a scene we’d seen played out a number of times already, for one of the specialisations in our course was cheese technology. But this humble building was a world away from the high-ceilinged Parmigiano-Reggiano caseificio, or the industrial steel-and-glass facility we had yet to visit in Burgundy. The ceiling was low; the room’s concrete floors were damp; the fittings functional, but occasionally improvised, like the shopping cart that held some of the equipment.
We stepped outside to the shade of an awning and another breathless view across the valley. A table had been generously spread with rusks (paximathia) and raki and – more cheese. This time it was gravura, the dense mountain cheese whose nearest cousin is gruyère. It was delicious, and we tried to put duty before hunger, but after a wedge or two I could hardly face another mouthful.
We did what we could and then Kostas, after one of the endless consultations on his cell phone, hustled us back to the vans. Lunch, he said, was waiting for us. I thought he said ‘forty dishes have been prepared’, but I knew that couldn’t be right; I must have misheard.
More twisting mountain roads, more stunning vistas, more dips and rises, and we reached the village, quiet in the noonday sun. We parked the vans and started on foot up the narrow road, where blue doors and pots of flowers lined the way. In one alcove, a donkey was tethered. In another, a flock of chickens sheltered from the heat behind a wired opening. The distant tinkling of goat bells was the only sound we could make out. There was no-one about.
Or so we thought, until we rounded the last bend and looked up to find the town hall, where twenty or thirty villagers of all ages were gathered on the top step, waving and beckoning. Just below them was a fire pit, where the men were sitting on a stone wall, smoking and keeping an eye on the meat that was trellised on sticks, its fragrance stirring something that might once have been appetite, had it not been smothered by cheese.
We approached the crowd, and one woman, Popi, stepped forward. ‘She is going to read you a poem of welcome,’ said Kostas, and she did: the kind of four-line poem the Cretans engrave on the daggers the men tuck into their belts. She welcomed our tribe of students, and we – from Canada, the US, China, Taiwan, Germany, Australia, Denmark, Spain, Japan, Austria and Korea – stepped into the gr
oup of villagers, with no more to offer in return than our greetings.
Honoured and welcomed, we entered the hall. This is where I recalled the church hall dinners: long tables lined three walls, laden with food. Behind each table were the women, waiting to explain what they had prepared for us: the snails, the ash-cakes, bread, pastries of wild greens, wild onions, artichokes. Potatoes, lemons, fava beans, omelettes. Rabbit, chicken. The men were piling platters with the meat off the charred bones from the fire.
Kostas led us round the room, translating, as the women spoke quietly about their dishes. It was a humbling experience, for these were the most personal of gifts. Each had not only prepared her dish, she had grown or cured or foraged its ingredients. The men had raised the animals, and seen to their deaths.
At the end of the trail of tables, we came to the wine: 12 different kinds, according to Kostas. Made from village grapes, these wines were presented in old and new plastic bottles of all shapes and sizes, including gas cans, and we drank from plastic cups while we ate. Afterwards, someone pulled their car near to the building and blasted folk music from the stereo so the men could dance, in their black boots and brown trousers, their Cretan daggers tucked into their belts.
Replete doesn’t describe our state by the end of this day. The feeling was more of a cultural satiation: Vistagi’s table had been lavishly laid just for us, twenty-four strangers who could barely pronounce our local thank yous, but we’d become, however briefly, part of the village by sharing in its food. In the words of Popi’s poem: ‘We are all brothers when we eat’.
A Moveable Feast Page 2