Other guests came into the living room area. Music was playing and we talked about the days we had, and what was in store for us when we got home. Our son, up from his nap, was brought in by the nurse. He was so at ease in my arms. I smelled the top of his head, locking eyes with my husband, and I think you’d assume this was a tender moment, but our look also communicated bewilderment and awe. This was our ten-month-old son who we were about to bring home, whose last eight months of life had been in one tiny room, and sometimes a small outdoor courtyard where he was entranced by a single tree growing on the other side of the barbed wall.
We were completely out of our world, about to take him out of his, and during my time here I kept wondering how to bring a part of this city home—for us, for our son, for our family.
The coffee ceremony was satisfying some of this yearning. The women were singing, the smoke was in the air, and then the coffee was being served expertly—the pot held high above the cup, and I felt like I was part of an archaic ceremony, an induction of sorts, and the ritual seemed to be just what I needed to mark this time, to reduce many emotions into a taste, into an unforgettable blend.
I took a sip of the coffee—it was beautiful, though probably more so because of the process itself, the gift of it and the time it took, the elegant steps. It was a kind of culinary tai chi, though not quiet or solemn—I wouldn’t have liked it as much. The women spoke loudly—and they were usually quiet in the kitchen and soft-spoken with us. People were laughing, kids playing on the floor.
The coffee was making another round and the translator told us that after this, one more cup would be served, the grounds are brewed three times.
‘Awel is first cup,’ he said. ‘Then kale’i. The third is bereka.’
I didn’t think I could take another. Just one cup felt like three shots of espresso.
‘It is rude to stop halfway,’ the translator said, as if reading my (and perhaps everyone’s) mind. ‘The third serving is a blessing.’
Well, then. I kept drinking, wanting to be both polite and blessed, and wishing the same could be said for a third glass of wine. Voices were getting louder, laughter seemed more deep and true. We sat for more than an hour, and it made me think of all the times I carefully prepared dinner only to have it virtually chugged, the set table abandoned within twenty minutes. I wanted to take this ritual home with us. I wanted to take back the slowness.
I was on the last cup. There was a lift in my voice, my face and heart. I got the sensation of being so far from home, and yet finally embraced—which always seems to happen when you’re about to leave a place. We were embarking on something, changing the voltage of our lives.
Food and drink is so much more than food and drink. When we consume them we are engaging in a backstory—the effort and attention, the craft and history, the community and connection, and the ritual itself, which harks back to unknown people and places. A coffee ceremony—I see us from a distance, a nook on the planet, and like the aroma and smoke: rising, blending, disappearing all together.
Our son is three now. I drink my coffee with him in the morning. I still bustle around, making lunches, checking email, and he sits at his little table eating his cereal and he tells me in his somewhat Italian-sounding voice: ‘Sit, Mommy sit. Right here. Sit,’ and I sit and I slow down, and I drink the things behind the coffee, remembering that moment. Food, a feast, a single bite, a sip—they can uncork those memories wherever you are. You can take it with you.
NAOMI DUGUID is the author of many award-winning books about food and travel. Her most recent, Burma: Rivers of Flavor, celebrates the food cultures of Burma in recipes, stories, and photos. To learn more, visit her website naomiduguid.com.
MEAT ON THE HOOF
Naomi Duguid
When I was a kid, every two years we’d travel out west to visit my grandparents, always in the summertime, and always by train. They lived in far northern British Columbia, where they’d settled after the First World War, homesteading on a quarter section of land, living in a log cabin full of books. They had no telephone, no running water, no electricity. Their water came from the creek; their garden vegetables (hardy crops were all that grew that far north) were stored in the root cellar; their fruit (gooseberries and raspberries and crabapples, as well as wild-gathered berries) was made into jams or preserves by my grandmother, all on her woodstove. Every year my granddad would shoot one moose, which my grandmother ‘canned’ in glass jars and which helped feed the family through the winter.
Right behind the house, on the other side of the fence that marked the edge of the garden, lay miles of government range. It was thick, almost impenetrable forest, ‘the bush’ as we called it. The only way through the bush was on trails that had been laboriously cut by my granddad. When he was younger he used them to get to his traplines in the winter. Well into his eighties he still used them to go cut firewood every year for the woodstoves that were the only form of heating in the house.
One August morning long ago my brother and I rode out into that bush with my mother and her brother Greg, looking for moose. My brother was 15; I’d just turned 13. I was bareback on Timber, a tall bright bay gelding who was a comfortable ride, with nicely padded withers. The others had saddles, western saddles: my brother on my granddad’s horse, Sam, my mother on a young, barely broken mare called Sunset, and my uncle Greg on Sunset’s mother, Susie, a wall-eyed skittish pinto.
We were headed to the high country around the Dome, a rocky hill four or five miles east. It was a wide-open area where Greg and my mother thought we’d find moose, or at least traces of them.
Greg had made a trail up to the Dome about ten years earlier. It hadn’t been used for a while and was very overgrown. The going was slow but beautiful in a dense-bush green and fertile kind of way. Branches and leaves would whip us in the face if we didn’t pay attention; ‘duck!’ was an ongoing call from the person in front to the person behind. The real obstacles were the windfalls, big trees that had fallen over and now blocked the trail. Each time we came to a windfall we’d have to find our way around, through dense bushes and other trees, a tedious process, scratchy sometimes, and awkward.
The bush always felt claustrophobic to me, a place to escape from. And so I was very relieved when we finally came up out of the thick, clogged greenness and into the open, green meadows near the hump of the Dome. Suddenly there was light, and a view.
The details of the first part of the day are now just simple snapshots in my memory: the musky familiar smell of sweaty horse as we loosened the girths when we stopped for lunch; making a fire to heat water in the kettle we’d brought, and then the luxury of sandwiches and tea as the horses meandered around, foraging for mouthfuls of grass; scrambling up the rock of the Dome and looking all around at 360 degrees of wild landscape, as Greg parsed it with binoculars, searching for likely moose haunts. We could see for miles. The mountains of the coastal range and the huge beautiful glaciered bulk of Hudson’s Bay Mountain framed the view to the west, and greenness undulated away from us in all directions.
We rode around the high open muskeg country in the afternoon, seeing traces of moose, but nothing recent. Then as the shadows lengthened we reluctantly started back along the trail, the light dimming immediately under the dense tree canopy. I was daydreaming along when suddenly there was a bang, and I heard the sound of crashing and more crashing off to the left ahead. Greg had spotted a moose in the bad light, grabbed his rifle, and shot it. In all his time hunting one or two moose per year to feed his family he never used more than one bullet per animal. This time was no exception. But his shot had hit the lung, we discovered later, so the animal made it a good fifty or sixty feet off the trail before collapsing. I couldn’t imagine how he’d seen her, let alone got off an accurate shot.
Then there we were in the rapidly failing light with a moose to locate and to butcher. We tied the horses to trees and headed into the bush, up and over one fallen tree, a walk along another, looking for the clearest r
oute to where we thought the moose had ended up. Finally there she was. She was still hot, of course, tumbled awkwardly over a small log, her legs tangled, and quite dead. There was a silence, an absence; the life no longer breathed in her. Now she was a carcass. And she was a logistical and practical problem, a treasure of food to not waste.
It’s a big responsibility, butchering. First chore: gut the animal. Yards of intestines, green with half-digested leaves and grass and steaming-warm in the cool air, came spilling out of the first incision. It took a while to sort through the belly, in the course of which the intestines got nicked and the stench of fermenting greens enveloped us. No fun. Once the intestines and stomach were moved aside, Greg could get at the organs he wanted to retrieve. We had several burlap bags, large ones, and into one went the kidneys and dark red-brown bulk of the liver. The heart, so big, went into the other, later joined by the long dense weight of the tongue.
The only way to manage that size of carcass is to cut off the unwanted pieces (legs below the knees, and also the head), and divide the body into quarters. Working with his hatchet and his knife, Greg got the carcass halved, then separated off each of the quarters. He worked fast and deftly, but still it took a long time. With the shinbone section of the legs gone, each quarter was a huge floppy weight of meat (150 pounds or more) attached to a length of leg bone.
And so off we set, my brother and I, to haul the first forequarter out to the trail. We each had two hands on the leg, gripping tightly. We hauled it across the ground a short way then reached the first of three or four fallen trees that lay between us and the trail. We did several ‘one-two-three-HEAVEs!’ before we managed to get the quarter up onto the tree. It balanced there for a moment like a heavy rug, before it fell forward and down with a kind of sickening slither-flop. And so it went, the hauling, the 1-2-3 heave, the moment of rest at the top, and the slide onward.
I remember grinning with relief and satisfaction at my brother when we finally made it out with our first quarter, and his grin back. But then came a feeling of dread as I thought of the weight of work that still faced us: three more quarters to haul. In the end we did two more and my mother and Greg did the last one. The burlap bags of organ meat came too, of course. We left the rest for the scavengers in the bush.
Greg decided that we’d leave two of the quarters there, as well as the bag with the liver and the kidneys. That meant throwing a rope up over a tree branch, then slowly hoisting the quarters up until they hung high above us, hopefully safe from hungry wolverines or other animals. The plan was that we’d come back for them the next day.
And the other two quarters? They couldn’t go on Susie, who wouldn’t let any meat near her, nor on my brother’s horse, Sam, who was also skittish about it. I was bareback so I could carry only the sack of heart and tongue. That left Sunset, the slightly goofy young mare my mother was riding, to carry two quarters, about 350 pounds of meat. She stood quivering as we lashed them onto the saddle horn. They hung down in front of the saddle, one on each side, and rubbed her at every step.
I remember watching her eyes roll as my mother got on, adding yet more weight to her. Would she buck and protest? It seemed likely. But perhaps because the day had already tired her out, she stayed docile under her load as we headed down the trail. It was late night by then, the darkness opaque under the forest canopy. Greg led the way. From my place at the back I caught very occasional glimpses of the white patches on Susie’s pinto rump. Mostly, though, there was just darkness and a few sounds: the muffled thud of the horses’ hooves on the dirt, the breathing of my horse Timber, the hoot of an owl.
I fell into a dazed kind of trance, one hand clutching the burlap sack with its load of meat, the other loosely holding the reins, and my head nodding with each stride. Life and being were reduced to the now, the physical sensations of the horse moving under me, the feel of his hide, the weight of the sack, the coarse familiar texture of his mane, and the supple leather of the reins. And beyond that there was nothing but the horses ahead of me in the dark, and the scent of the bush at night, a chilly moist woods smell.
It took an eternity, that ride. And then sometime after midnight, like a hallucination, a flicker of light appeared on the trail ahead of Greg. It was my granddad, who had come walking up the trail on foot carrying a lantern, worried that something had happened to us. He refused a ride back, and so we went on ahead of him the last half mile, to unload Sunset’s meat and to rub the horses down and put them out to pasture.
I have no other memory of our arrival except of the relief I felt as I crawled into my bed in the warm silence of my grandparents’ log house.
The rest of the work—or perhaps I should say the rest of our obligation to the moose—came next day. Greg and my mother went back up the trail early in the morning to get the other quarters and the rest of the organ meat, which had survived untouched up in the tree. My aunt spent the day cutting the meat up, and various kids and I helped wrap each piece in butcher paper and label it. The meat would go into their meat locker, a large storage freezer in town, food for the family that fall and winter. My aunt made a slow-simmered pot roast that night—the moose meat cooked through and succulent—accompanied by her pillowy homemade bread and followed by fruit pies. We were ten or 11 people around the table, digging in with pleasure, grateful for all of it.
The moose story returns to me from time to time now, all these years later. What’s this about? I wonder. In part, as with all momentous events lived, it’s time-travel that pulls me there. Both my mother and my brother are long dead, and in reliving this story I get to be with them again, working shoulder to shoulder, feeling their energy.
But the deeper pull of the story, I’ve come to realize, is that it’s about life and death and human responsibility. Once the moose was killed it was up to us to take care of the meat, to not waste it. The death had to be earned, perhaps that’s one way of saying it. My uncle and mother were in charge, and my brother and I did as we were told, just as children have for generations helped with the harvest of meat, fish, grain or produce. And in the moment there is no questioning, no room for doubt or tiredness or holding back. There is only necessity.
Author and documentary filmmaker TAMASIN DAY-LEWIS has published 12 books and writes on all subjects related and unrelated to food. Her forthcoming book, Smart Tart, is a crowd-funded book and can be found at www.unbound.co.uk
THE CATCH
Tamasin Day-Lewis
When you are young there are continents of new flavours to explore. The caches of sophistication, of knowing golden Oscietra from black beady Beluga, foie gras d’oie from canard, the Widow Cliquot from Cristal—these are things you either get to know about or they never cross your culinary threshold. Food snobbery and good taste are not necessarily bedfellows: aspirations and connoisseurship can be a million miles apart.
I didn’t know, when I was allowed to stay up to the dinner table one night, that picking my grandfather’s grouse bones was not a common experience for a nine-year-old, but what I did know, innately, having been inculcated unbeknownst to me with the virtues of a good table from an early age, was that my tastebuds had come as pretty close to heaven as they ever had and that grouse was not a realm of taste I had previously entered into.
It was like shrapnel, a bombshell exploding in my mouth.
It was surprising, rich, rare, gamey, bloody, only back then I had neither the adjectives nor the knowledge to describe it.
It wasn’t yet a memory. It was an experience.
It led me to believe there must be other similar experiences that would hit me explosively and knock me off my culinary everyday feet. And in due course there were.
To begin with, you string together the rare jewels of edible experience like you are mapping the unmapped for the very first time, a frontiersman, a budding gourmand, adding and subtracting, snipe with woodcock, scented mirabelles with Alfonso mangoes, sweetbreads, wild sea trout, salmon with their fat, coral fleshiness; sappy green or juicy whit
e asparagus puddled in hot butter; the first artichoke, leaf after leaf, to its secret-hearted choke. The smack of salt and sea from an oyster.
Yet in Victorian London oysters were poor man’s food, beef steak and oyster pie was the food of inns and trenchermen, what we now consider a luxury was an economy, like cockles, whelks, mussels, eel pie and mash. It was the Irish stew of the sea making up for in vitamins and minerals what the grinding diet of poverty and monotony eschewed, leading, as it did, to rickets, scurvy, malnutrition and death from dirty water.
Glut and gluttony, unparalleled choice, wealth and slenderness, poverty and morbid obesity, we are one planet yet several worlds of culinary extremes at the turn of this twenty-first century. From la cucina povera, eaten at the tables of both the rich and the poor in Puglia, to the rarefied extremes of the three-star restaurant, the food that we put into our mouths and bellies influences every area of our lives: our brains and body, our health, our pleasure and desires, our senses, our imagination, feelings, intellect and understanding, our children, our philosophy, our income. Our food defines us as people, wherever we live, whatever our attitude to it.
The excitement I have always felt about food and cooking was not, like some undimmed passion, finally extinguished once I had eaten my fill of the exotic and highly prized foods from around the world and cooked for friends, family, my three children, over four decades of cooking life.
No, the nature of excitement has merely shifted so that what once was an apogee of a dish no longer enthrals in the same way. I don’t mean it disenthrals, I mean it has become part of the tapestry of my taste memory, while I have gone on searching for the perfect dish with greater attention to simplicity and truth.
Let me explain.
If I order a slice of chocolate sachertorte I order it knowing there will be less surprise but no less gratification. It was what, as a child, I most associated with pleasure: my half-term treat at Fortnum’s Fountain with my indulgent grandmother and my brother, after the dentist. Accompanied by freshly squeezed orange juice and blackcurrant ice cream with a thick fan-wafer that shattered like glass on the tongue and a light cloud of cream to dip into with it, the teas we had were sacrosanct and unchanging. Whatever else was on the menu was paid no attention to.
A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature) Page 21