by Jane Kramer
Here’s what happens at the Sismano sagra. All the otherwise unbridgeable differences between castle and contadini break down (though, this being a nighttime celebration, they are certainly preserved during the day). Our local marquesa, a beautiful and very sexy woman who is usually regarded with longing from a deferential distance, dances with all the men. The village children sit on her lap and wipe their hands on her designer dresses. (I should explain that the local specialty is stinco di maiale, a roasted pork shank you can polish off with your fingers at a sagra, though presumably with a knife and fork at home. The men get drunk and air old quarrels, and end the evening the best of friends. Everybody embraces. Our gardener, a man of such exquisite decorum that he insists on knocking whenever he carries a pail of vegetables to the kitchen, planted a kiss on both my cheeks, and so did the ironsmith who made our lanterns and the base for our porch table.
Here’s what our sagra is not. It’s not a harvest feast, to mark the end of the trebbiatura. The harvest is at least a month away. It’s not the birthday of Sismano’s patron saint; that’s in August. When I ask my neighbors why they’re celebrating, the best they can think of to say is, “It’s time,” and to prove it they go on eating. A lot of celebrations are like that. When the Navajo celebrate the slaughter of a sheep, it’s not for one of the incantational ceremonies known as ways—an enemy way, say, or a ghost way, or a supplication for rain. They don’t even say, “We’re killing the sheep because we’re celebrating.” They say, “We’re celebrating because we’ve killed the sheep; it was time.” The age and readiness of the sheep—that’s the determinant. The Navajo are herders. They were once a nomadic people and their homesteads today tend to be far apart. When a sheep is slaughtered, they come together from all over to celebrate—and of course to eat it. And a far-flung community is rearticulated.
Whether you eat a sheep or a pork shank, you do the same thing, celebrating—even if it’s just two people celebrating an anniversary. You get together, you do something transformative, something that renews the group or the family or the couple. Celebration is civilizing. It deepens the bonds that can keep people who have no choice but to live together from killing each other—and as often as not, it does this with food that’s special to the occasion. On New Year’s Eve in Italy, it’s lentils and sausage. In China, it’s noodles. In France, it’s foie gras; you save for a year to buy the best. What’s more, you tend to get dressed up—a dinner jacket or a slinky gown is enough to transform most people into glamorous, romantic strangers, even if they go to the same dinner with the same old people and eat the same old thing every year. In fact, the most satisfyingly transgressive way to celebrate the New Year may be to stay home in your sweats and eat something different.
On Christmas Eve, the menu is seven courses, and if you’re doing it right in a Catholic country like Italy, it’s fish. On birthdays, by now almost universally, it’s a cake with candles. At Pagan weddings, as I discovered when my friend Margot Adler, who was a Wicca priestess, married, it’s a symbolic display and tasting of a lamb shank and bitter herbs, just like Passover. (I often wonder how many of America’s Pagans grew up in secular Jewish families.) At christenings, in much of Europe, it’s a symbolic mix of salty and sweet, and the rules are strict. I am godmother to two French children, and the instructions presented to me for sweet and savory were as clearly defined as the kind of the gold cross I was supposed to buy for the Catholic baby to wear on a gold chain—solid and plain—as opposed to the one for the Calvinist baby, which, contrary to my expectations, was uncommonly elaborate and came with a little gold bird (which is to say the Holy Spirit) hovering on top. In Morocco, when you break fast at sundown during the month of Ramadan, the celebratory meal always begins with a special soup called harira. Next door in Algeria, the harira is different, but the imperative is the same. In Whatcom County, Washington, at a time when rural poverty was driving people out of their houses and into trailers, they celebrated payday with potluck dinners, the rule for which was explicitly, and defiantly, “Bring trailer-trash food.” At baseball games in New York, everybody eats hot dogs and drinks beer in the bleachers—a ritual you could call “Yankee fans are one people” or “Mets fans are one people.” In Boston, you also eat hot dogs, but there it means, “Red Sox fans are one people, in teams and taste.” After high school proms, it’s twelve kids and a carton of pizza in a stretch limo. At American movies, the celebratory food is popcorn. You are out of the house in a dark room with a couple of hundred strangers, all noisily munching on the same thing. This is a ritual I embrace. I cannot watch a movie without a bag of popcorn on my lap; it would be a kind of blasphemy. I know this because my husband prefers the little gummy candies called Dots, and the looks he always gets from the people in our row are killing.
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In 1967, when I was writing a book about Allen Ginsberg and his friends, we made a ritual climb of Mount Tamalpais, near San Francisco—a mountain sacred to the tribes that had first settled Northern California. We were celebrating “being.” The climb was arduous, made more so by the fact that we were chanting Sanskrit mantras as we climbed. Our goal was to make a joyous circumambulation of the mountaintop. No one could say whether the Native Americans ever did that, or whether the Tibetan guru with us did the same thing, back home in the Himalayas. But the love generation was very syncretic—so we just did it. I sprained my ankle crossing a rocky stream on my way down, and was “healed” with a joint, accompanied by a mudra to take the pain away. At the bottom of the mountain, we trooped to an ice-cream store in our beads and boots and sweaty clothes. I ordered a cone of fudge ripple. Allen stopped me. “The flavor has to be rocky road,” he said. “It’s part of the celebration. We eat it every time.” The ritualized repetition of a menu is part of what makes celebrating so satisfying. Every year, on my husband’s birthday, I make linguine alle vongole, which started out as a simple dish with Manila clams steamed open in a white wine and garlic sauce, but has become incrementally tastier and more elaborate, for which I credit Mario Batali’s sublime addition of diced pancetta, red onions, and hot pepper flakes to the recipe, not to mention my own self-appointed license to double the amount of whatever ingredients I like best, especially the clams. On our anniversary, we go out. At first it was always to the modest (okay, cheap), bring-your-own-bottle Afghan restaurant on St. Mark’s Place where we spent what could be called our first date, meaning that he paid my half of a bill which, as friends, we had always split. Thankfully, the restaurant closed before I could deliver an ultimatum. We went to Le Bernardin, and I never looked back.
Every year, I wait for Easter, Passover, and the Muslim holiday I knew in Morocco as Eid al-Kabir to fall in the same week (the odds are astronomically high) so that for once the three monotheisms could be celebrating a feast whose origins they in many ways share—food rituals involving the sacrifice of a lamb which over time have morphed into celebrations. The difference lies in how we celebrate and why and what our celebrations symbolized in a past that we will never know completely. The Torah says that the Hebrews sacrificed a lamb to commemorate their exodus from Egypt—a moment when their firstborn sons were spared death at the hands of an avenging angel by the trick of marking their doors with the blood of a slaughtered sheep. There is always a lamb shank on display at a Passover seder, just as there was at my friend’s Pagan wedding—celebrated, by the way, on Martha’s Vineyard—but the food of choice at American seders, at least today, is chicken. The question is why? Is it for the broth of the boiled chickens, which can then be used for matzo ball soup. That is, for thrift. Or is it simply that for centuries Jews have preferred chicken, and it eventually became their go-to holiday dish? The early Christians celebrated Easter with lamb because Jesus is said to have eaten it at the Last Supper, which was a Passover feast, and because, sacrificed and resurrected, he became “the lamb of God.” The Catholics and Orthodox Christians of Southern Europe still eat lamb at Easter, but in the north of Europe, ham is the dish of choice. Why
again? Ham was a symbol of luck in the Pagan north, so perhaps it’s that. But it’s worth noting that early Christians in the Middle East were also said to have preferred ham, because it proved that they were Christians, celebrating the resurrection of the Messiah, and thus no longer bound by Hebrew food proscriptions. Muslims, on Eid al-Kabir, slaughter a lamb, have always eaten it, and still do. Each family who can afford to does this, but they do it to commemorate the story of Abraham and Isaac. Theirs is the one “why we do this” meal that has never been contested by, say, a chicken—or, understandably, by a ham.
There are probably as many theories of celebration as there are writers or academics to invent them. Mine is that people often celebrate because they’re bored. “It’s time,” as the Navajo say. But given that my favorite celebration is Thanksgiving, and that I write about our national holiday at every chance I get, I should add that what I love most about it is the ritual discipline it instills in most of us, the guilty feeling when we have to miss it, even the excuses I make to myself when I’m happily celebrating it at the “wrong” time in the “wrong” country, and the recitation I feel compelled to offer of all the authentic dishes I would be cooking at home in New York. In this, our Thanksgiving dinner has somehow become a sacralized celebration, the binding agent in the secular melting pot of the republic, which may in fact be why it continues to fascinate me as a subject—a theological puzzle I can never solve. Who, for instance, are we supposed to be thanking at Thanksgiving—God? Country? Mother? The harvest? The turkey? The Pilgrims who were feckless enough to climb into three creaky boats and make the trip to Plymouth? The answer remains a delicious mystery. My husband, who endures nights of terrible takeout dinners while I’m cooking my way through Thanksgiving week, thinks that I should be thanking him. So I have begun to call it the feast of the First Forgiveness. His. There is in fact a strong element of forgiveness involved in the run-up to our national groaning board, given that something inevitably goes wrong, starting with the quality of the pad thai and the soggy tempura and the oily mopu tofu and the cartons of cold greasy pizza sped by kamikaze cyclists to just about every apartment in every building in New York that week. Or the turkey is undercooked, the turkey is overcooked, the white meat is dry, the dark meat is raw, the Brussels sprouts are burned, the sweet potato purée is lumpy. And worse, the Indian pudding, three or four hours in the oven, has failed to firm.
In the course of my research into Thanksgiving eight years ago—the part that wasn’t in the kitchen—I consulted a book called Readings in Ritual Studies, which included an essay with the title “Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day.” Out of kindness, I will keep the authors—there were two—nameless. Their first theory was that over the centuries, Thanksgiving had gone from being a harvest celebration to being a celebration of “consumerism,” a celebration of—this is a quote—“not just a moment of bounty, but a culture of enduring prosperity.” The thought was interesting, in a kind of mean-spirited Marxist way. And in any event, the professors were wrong about harvest celebration. The first Thanksgiving, at least, was a hunt celebration; the Pilgrims caught the wild turkeys, and a party of Wampanoag braves went into the woods with bows and arrows and supplied the deer. I would add, pace Cardinal Richelieu, that sitting down to a feast with your real or imagined enemies can go a long way toward keeping the peace. (Still, it’s worth remembering that the cardinal did take the precaution of banning daggers from his dinner table.)
But the idea of Thanksgiving as a consumer sport was nothing compared to the Freudian hypotheses that the authors offered next: Thanksgiving, they said, being “mythically connected to the infancy of the nation,” represents the “oral stage of development, allowing each participant to return to the contentment and security of an infant wearing comfortable soft clothing who falls asleep after being well fed.” In fact, they likened the smushing and mashing of food around on your plate—that tasty American Thanksgiving habit—to a return to baby food. Christmas, they said, was the “anal stage”—a “cultural negotiation of greed and retentiveness.” New Year’s Eve, which from their arid perspective—they lived in Arizona—must have looked like a bacchanal, was a time of “hedonic sexual fulfillment.” The genital stage. After which, they said, Americans returned to “the everyday world of adult instrumentality.” Whatever that is.
Lately, I have come to the conclusion that celebrating Thanksgiving is about affirming and reaffirming a connection between generations past and future, and especially generations of women, about a continuity of family—my mother’s Thanksgivings, her mother’s—that now includes my daughter, presiding over her own Thanksgiving table and extends into the future with her son grown up and his children smushing their food around. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that even our most secular ceremonies involve a kind of magical thinking, in the way of prayers.
Weddings, of course, are the universal ritual celebration, and perhaps the most magical, in that prayerful sense that Pascal called a pari, a wager—and it doesn’t matter if they’re royal marriages with three billion people inexplicably tuned in, or the boy and the girl down the street. What’s universal, among other things, is the presence of food that’s somehow attached to one’s idea of the people getting married. I remember the wedding of two Chinese friends—they were married at the groom’s parents’ house in Greenwich (the Connecticut Greenwich)—and how odd it seemed when the dinner began with trays of deliciously briny oysters on the half shell and went on to hot boiled lobsters from Long Island Sound. The groom, a linguistic anthropologist, was properly speaking Chinese-American. The bride, a well-known writer from Beijing, had done her graduate work in New York. They were a worldly, sophisticated couple. He loved lobster. She loved oysters. So why was the menu bewildering? Perhaps because the celebration was otherwise quite traditional. The bride wore a red Chinese wedding robe, and the groom’s father, a master of classical Chinese poetry—which exists, calligraphically, on several levels of reference and meaning—wrote the epithalamium. (On one level of the poem, the newlyweds went out in a boat, and the bride fell in the water and presumably drowned; but a few levels deeper, there they were, living happily together ever after.) What I mean to say is that the guests expected a Chinese banquet, not the truly delicious New England seafood feast they got. It was like the shock of pork chops at a Thanksgiving dinner.
I can’t think of any weddings that don’t include eating—from the potlatch feasts of the hedge-fund billionaires who get married in places like Phuket or Patagonia or Patmos to a champagne and finger food reception in the backyard to the restaurant lunch after a quick trip to the marrying judge at city hall. And the magical thinking behind most of them, especially the truly excessive ones, are the hedged bets that they involve—the wagers, as Pascal would say, that the more elaborate they are, the more enduring the marriage bond will be. Hindu weddings can last for days and feed hundreds of people, many of whom were not invited. Muslim weddings, too. The elaborateness is considered propitious. I was once—I guess you could say—a bridesmaid at the marriage of a thirteen-year-old Berber girl from a tribe in the Middle Atlas. It was arranged as an exchange, because the groom’s village had been losing its young men to the bride’s village, and needed to replenish its supply of girls in order to earn back the animals it had been paying out in bride’s prices. The wedding itself was a three-day celebration. It began in the bride’s village, with the bride sequestered and decorated with henna, and course after course of food for the male guests, each course cooking while they ate the one already on the platter. The etiquette was that the men ate until, literally, they dropped. The second day was taken up with the bride’s ceremonial trip to, and arrival in, the groom’s village, where she would be taking up residence in his mother’s house. The third day was spent in preparation for her deflowering, followed by the presentation of a bloody cloth on a copper plate, and then another feast. The bride was missing from the feast, though I was the only person who seemed to have noticed that. When I fo
und her, she was passed out on the floor of the wedding room, still tied up for her initiation into wedded bliss. I was horrified. The first thing she said to me when I managed to revive her by burning incense was “Go eat. It’s over, and they’ll be serving dinner.” I often wonder if it would have all gone better if the dinner had been served first.
The collapse of that particular marriage began at the dinner, when the men of the two clans started fighting, and the bride’s family fled to avoid being killed. The bride, of course, stayed. A few weeks later, when a goat that was being saved for another wedding died, she was accused of bringing bad magic to the village and became a pariah in her new family. The marriage itself survived. The feasts had cost too much to bear repeating.
In the West, the order of food and sex at a wedding is, of course, reversed. The tribal wedding I just described didn’t involve Islam. It was a thoroughly secular economic exchange of what you could call goods and services. The Western wedding, whatever the reality, is a pointedly religious exchange of vows if a priest or pastor or rabbi officiates. A couple is joined “under God” with all the attendant promises of fidelity, longevity, and devotion, not to mention its admonitions to “bear fruit” and to “let no man put asunder.” And never mind that, at least traditionally, a wedding was mainly what you needed to go through to have sex. That’s clearly not necessary now, but it’s my guess that in those late, unlamented days of blushing virginal brides and horny, anxious grooms, the unspoken function of the wedding feast, with its cheerfully leering toasts and endless courses, punctuated by an exhausting amount of dancing, was an even more liminal ritual than the ceremony itself. It linked, eased, and extended a fairly flagrant transition from sacred to profane—in time, distraction, and alcohol. It wasn’t so different, in this, from the Sismano priest calling a week’s respite between the sagra and the procession of the Madonna. Or for that matter, from the long Last Supper in Xavier Beauvois’s beautiful film Des Hommes et des Dieux (translated backward, in English, as Of Gods and Men). The film—set in Algeria during the violence of the early nineties—is about a small, remote community of French Trappist monks, a doctor among them, who have peacefully taught and treated and farmed with their Arab neighbors until the fighting reaches them and everyone’s lives are abruptly shattered. Actually, it’s about the monks waiting to die, knowing they are marked by Islamists for assassination and celebrating life—and the things of this world—in the face of death. They spend their last day working, chanting, praying, and most satisfyingly, as the sun sets, at their kitchen table, feasting. They open two bottles of rare French wine, prepare a last supper, and calmly and silently await the attack, nodding, tearing, and even at times smiling to the music of an old, scratchy record of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Their last supper has all the joy and solemnity and futility of ritual. With its intimations of sacrifice, it is as liminal—and as transformational—as human beings can get.