Terroir
A deep time kitchen encounter
To create the set and setting for the new kitchen metaphysics project, I am posting several pieces about food and culture in times of breakdown and loss. This story is an extract from After Ithaca, a collection of essays and memoir about reconnecting with the Earth, based on the myth of Eros and Psyche. In the heart of the story you find four tasks the uninitiated girl is given by the goddess Venus to recover the love she has lost – a fairy tale that embeds the ancient alchemical mysteries like the kernel of a fruit. Her first task is the Sorting of Seeds.
Before you select your batterie, you need an encounter with an unknown territory that changes the way you engage with life – with plants, with places, with people. These mythic moments happened to me with members of the legume family; one with black beans in the New Mexico desert, and the other with golden peas on a small island in the Aegean.
Fava
HERE IS THE STORY OF THE FIRST TASK in a peapod, the story that is not yet told. Psyche goes to the island each summer, lured by Eros. Eros leaves her in the white house with the lemon tree. Inside the stone room it is dark. The sea is blue, he tells her, the wine is rough, the sky is hot. Some years, she stays with her sister when he is no longer around. In the long hot afternoons the curtain blows out and in, and she watches it, feeling the vastness of the stones it blows over beyond the small window: the brightness and the sea that wrinkles like a piece of material, this ancient inky sea. There is a table and a chair in the room, a jug of water and the skull of a horse by the door. The wind is blue, Eros writes from the mainland, and the sea is rough.
Yanuklari comes to visit after he has returned from the stony fields. Area is one word she knows in Greek. Poli area. Big wind. He smiles and raises his glass. Whiskaiki. Small whisky. The young girl and the old man sit together in the dark limewashed house, with an oil lamp burning and the wind outside. The melteme, the north wind that presages the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, is howling in the chimney. All the visitors have departed the island now, only she is left. When she goes this time she will not return. She will stand on the boat and wave the island goodbye until it becomes a dark speck on the horizon.
And yet this place will remain with her all her life, the place of light and dryness. The place with the wells in the courtyard and the talking under the vine, the clack clack clack of the beads the men who do not smoke hold in their hands. It is a place she wanted to live in but cannot. It is not her destiny.
Throughout her life Psyche will feel abandoned by people, or forced to leave places she loves – but the truth of the matter is more complex. People took her to places and then left her to work out what she was doing there. Often it does not occur to her until later that she was on a return mission.
What she does not know at this point is that Eros will not return in the form she once knew him, as the boy with the spear among the dark rocks, appearing as he did there, laughing, a line of fish around his waist, an octopus in his hand. It is if his territory were broken into a thousand pieces and she had to collect them all, in the small moments in the decades that followed. The lightness of the sky will fade and the depths of the indigo sea become shallow. For ten years she will be yoked to a life in the city, cataloguing the shifts of markets and dressing rooms; for another ten, on the road, in search of desert places and high mountains; and yet another forging grace in a time of fall. The light of the Aegean will be dimmed, the doors that were once open will slam shut and she will be forced to remake and remember these things inside her.
Here is our story, my story and yours in ways we do not know yet.
TERROIR
You may ask why Greece, when my native land is neither dry nor light. Why at the beginning of things did the autumn wind, the time of departure, tug so powerfully inside me, in places I had no words for? Some territories pull you: they give you an entry point into the landscape that speaks to what people used to call the soul. Destiny or fate is a Greek concept, built into the vast mythological landscape of rock and sea that still existed, even in the 20th century on this small Cycladic island. It was a direct encounter with forces that were both physical and metaphysical. It was mine and also not mine. The time of departure was also the mood of the late civilisation I was born into.
I chose this ancient Mediterranean myth (or did it choose itself?) because in the Western hemisphere everything in our educated minds comes from the classical world; our mathematics, our philosophy, our literature, our political debate. Our reason is underpinned by the logos of Athens, our laws and soldiery dictated by Rome. If you need to find the way out of a conundrum you need to go to the territory where it was forged. You use the techne of the master’s house to get out of his house. Keep what is important and discard the rest.
Because the first lesson that caught my eye came from a book with a pink and green cover called The Legends of Greece and Rome. When I was eight years old I knew everything about Persephone and Zeus and Pan. So when I stepped off the boat into the bristly arms of the harbour master, it felt like coming home. Like coming out of the Underworld for a brief summer.
Because leaving was always a key move I was to make.
ISLAND
Yanuklari had a herd of goats and here he is carrying the evening milk in a pail made of an old olive tin. Later he will sell us some of the fresh cheese he makes. For some reason I am transfixed by the ingenuity of this bright blue and green bucket with its carved wooden handle. Sometimes he comes round in the evenings with Yanuko, his burly friend with a wide Cretan-style moustache. Yanuko’s big hands have fashioned the skin and horns of a goat into bagpipes which he plays ferociously so the walls shake. For some reason I have been given the drum to keep the rhythm. After several whiskakis and ouzikis we wend a Dionysian path down the stone steps towards the main village in the darkness. People wave and laugh as we enter. I don’t notice that I am the only female being in the cafe.
One night we take our music to the threshing floor on a cliff top outside the village for the annual celebration of one of the island saints. It is a round plaza made of stones where the wheat and barley are trampled by the hooves of mules, and then tossed into the air, so the chaff is blown away by the salt wind. We drink a lot of rough pine-flavoured wine and dance around the circle, arms around each other’s shoulders. The men wave white handkerchiefs, leap into the air and hiss like snakes.
Afterwards we fall asleep in a pile. I have never slept outside before and the stones are hard and unyielding. Just before dawn I see the priest and the singer in a doorway of golden candlelight, chanting in the small chapel, swinging a silver necklace fragrant with frankincense to and fro. The people of the village are sleeping, stacked like sheaves of corn under the stars.
When we wake the sky is blue, the sun is hot.
doorway of golden candlelight, chanting in the small chapel, swinging a silver necklace fragrant with frankincense to and fro. The people of the village are sleeping, stacked like sheaves of corn under the stars.
When we wake the sky is blue, the sun is hot.
LARDER
One year I came to the island in spring. There were few boats in those days and no harbour, so when the sea was very rough you had to disembark on the northern side of the island. Small fishing boats came and went from the anchored ferry and piled up people and suitcases, families coming home for the Easter celebrations, clutching orange peel toward off sea sickness. Half-drenched we walked up the steep goat path to the village above, as the donkeys came down to collect luggage and supplies.
There was a different mood to the village when we arrived: there had been fasting for weeks and there was no food to be had in the one taverna. Famished after a ten hour boat ride, we went to the kafeneon and asked if there was anything we could buy to eat. Then a woman with a pale baby appeared at the door. The baby, her fifth child, was famous for never sleeping, and stared at us with her large sea-glass eyes. The women disappeared and then came back with two plates of fava - yellow split peas - with halved boiled eggs on top, and bread. She smiled and told us to eat. We fell on the food.
There are meals you have that are delicious, they are artfully cooked, feasts that remind you of places or people. But the food you eat for which you are truly grateful is the food that really matters, that sinks into the memory in a place you don’t forget. The woman was from the poorest family on the island, and yet her instinct was to feed two hungry visitors, who were almost strangers. It was there that the germ of a different larder began. The yellow peas. The smile. The sleepless child. An island covered in daisies.
In the evenings I would watch the sun go down from the upper village. The women would sit in the doorsteps beside the basil plants, and a donkey raise its lament to the sapphire-coloured sky. They would talk to their neighbours as they sorted the rice, or beans or other pulses, discarding any small stones. Sometimes the women would tell stories that began: today is a yellow day.
Sometimes I woke to find a basket of grapes left on the doorstep.
THE COOKS
Into the post-war dining rooms they came, the travelling cooks, from the South of France, Alexandria and Rome: they brought with them the scent of the marais and harbour quays, and their paperback guides were soon to become stained with olive oil and red wine in the aspiring households of Northern cities. Their books liberated our pale and snobbish cuisines and made us all yearn for the sun. I learned to cook in their generous shade, visiting those fields and terraces in my imagination - and then one day when I was 20 I went there. The Mediterranean food I knew came from the painterly slopes of Provence or Tuscany - but Greece was a wild unknown, rocky, barbarian. It came with the odour of goat and salt fish.
Greece was a wild unknown, rocky, barbarian. It came with the odour of goat and salt fish.
Patience Grey writes her seminal cookbook, Honey from A Weed following her husband, a sculptor, to the marble quarries of Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia. In Greece she lives on the island of Naxos, documenting the cycles of fasting and feasting in a culture that had not changed the way it harvested and ate since the Bronze Age. While The Sculptor and quarry men sing and get drunk in old-fashioned piazzas and anarchist bars, around shepherds’ fires in the hills, his wife observes how the women cook and gather, noticing how different fuels are used for each dish - apple wood, chestnut, dry sage, cistus, lentisk, vine cuttings.
‘The secret of cooking is the release of fragrance and the art of imparting it,’ she writes and starts her treatise with a recipe for soffrito, the finely-chopped herbs and vegetables that underpin many of these dry, stony-land dishes.
Pulses form the staple diet in these places, especially in the lean months (which coincide with the time of religious fasting). The core cooking vessel, the earthenware two-handled pignata holds the beans or chickpeas, carefully simmered over four hours with hot peppers, tomatoes and garlic, ready for the return of the men from the fields. It is the details of the hearth and kitchen table that pull you in:‘ ‘The best frittata is made with wild asparagus shoots’, she declares. ‘the tomato paste only dries with the help of the North wind, and if the sirocco is blowing it is no good’.
She writes a whole chapter on collecting weeds in spring: the early shoots of thistles and daisies and mustards, picked before the flower heads formed to cleanse the body after winter. Dandelions are prized for their bitterness especially – the whole plant washed thoroughly in the village fountain, boiled then and eaten with lemon and olive oil.
Thus did an imaginal tap root described by these writer-cooks anchor a culture where food could be ‘life restoring not just the satisfaction of appetite’. Food that galvanised not just our bodies but also our etiolated souls and connected us with an inheritance we shared across geographies in deep time.
The larder that formed the soffrito of my life began on the island: something became etched in my bones forever, in the techne of those earthenware pots, the dusty neighbourhood store with its bags of rice and flour, the spiny lemon trees, the lessons on how to chop an onion in your hands and prepare beans in a great tin to bake in the communal oven. The feeling of a place where everything was connected, hospitable, open.
‘Whenever independence flowers, austerity and fellowship combine.’ Grey wrote of her times among these tough Mediterranean and Aegean communities. When austere times return and the larder become bare, it feels necessary to remember the conviviality and rhythm of these ancient places, to search in our imaginations for these caches of corn and chickpeas, hidden in desert rocks, among the ruins of Babylonia, Turkey, Sumeria, Palestine and Greece.
One morning she went south with Eros and his companions in the blue caique. They anchored for the night in a cove, where the first naked statue of Aphrodite was carved by the sculptor Praxiteles. The next morning at sunrise as the men lay sleeping below deck, Psyche steered the boat with her bare foot on the tiller out into the open sea, the dark rocks against the sky, dolphins leaping, following in their wake. She did not think the world would ever be more beautiful.
GROUND STATE CALIBRATION
I look at my hands and they are holding a paper bag of dried brown beans, grown in East Anglia where I now live. The year is 2016 and I am introducing a discussion about the future of food at a Dark Mountain gathering called Base Camp. The beans I am telling the audience are a magical ingredient. The foolish boy in the fairy tale plants a handful of coloured beans and his fortunes entirely reverse. Next to me is an activist called Molly Campbell who holds a bag of wild rice from Minnesota, and an artist called Anne-Marie Culhane a bag of heritage wheat grown in a community-sown field in Lincolnshire.
These hands once held dead hares and fish and fowl and now no longer do. These hands have written in these last ten grassroots years about a powerdown kitchen, about food that keeps the navoti, the spirit of life alive. Whenever I have stood up to speak in those years the shape of that island village I once loved would come to me with its intactness, the smile of the woman whose name I no longer remember. As we sat down at our community meals, learned again to bake bread, to ferment cabbage in winter, to forage for wild leaves in spring, to eat a humble dish of grains, I saw the caper flowers that grew between the stones, the fig tree by the bridge.
One day when a group of us set about the task of reimagining the world, we drew maps of dishes we had brought to share for our supper, listing the provenance of each of the ingredients. My own was fava. The bowl of golden peas was sprinkled with olives I had bought from a Palestinian refugee in the city market, sliced red onions from a smallholding by the coast, fresh eggs from a neighbourhood roadside stall, parsley from my own garden.
When he chose to map inheritance, Mendel chose the humble pea to work on in his monastery garden. He discovered one chromosome difference in their genetic make up made either yellow or green peas. When we chose to map a new world that might arise from this old one: we looked for the seeds that could give us resilience in hard times, that allow us to relinquish an old story, and most of all restore ourselves and the wrecked soil of our homelands. The legume family of which fava, the yellow pea is one member, is a key nitrogen fixer, which means it gives to the soil, rather than depletes it. Just by being present it nourishes the land and all who crop it – the four and two legged and the winged, who feed from its copious nectar.
The island was one of the most stripped-down places I ever visited, and the most nourishing. There were no cars, few houses had electricity and everyone drew water from wells and a communal spring. The diet was rough and plain, archaic: vegetables and pulses, with meat and fish on feast days - Easter kid, snails, sea urchins, octopus and bream. Food was dried and stored on the rooftops of the white houses, the bread baked in a communal oven in the side of the hill. The people were largely self-sustaining, their olive oil and thyme honey the most fragrant I would ever taste. It was food with meaning, grown with roots that sank deep in the earth, in time. The food of the cities, produced by industrial agriculture, has none of this connection, neither with place nor people, nor the memory of the heart. So we have needed to remake those links in our imaginations and find another kind of provenance.
The food of the cities, produced by industrial agriculture, has none of this connection, neither with place nor people, nor the memory of the heart. So we have needed to remake those links in our imaginations and find another kind of provenance.
‘These beans tell a different story, a Jack in the Beanstalk story, about a boy who exchanges his mother’s cow for a handful of beans that reverse their fortune. These beans, have been grown here since the Iron Age and formed the staple diet of early agricultural people across Europe to the Middle East.’
I am telling the gathering how these beans have been returned into small scale modern production, followed by red, blue and black peas, then quinoa (grown not in the Andes but in the flatlands of Essex), lentils, chickpeas, naked barley and oats, where they would normally be imported, grown in fields that would normally host monocultural commodity crops for the global market.
We spoke of moves by small farmers and co-operatives to return the land to its proper use, to put the tools of growing back into the people’s hands, about land rights and fossil fuel dependence, and many of the counter-stories a regenerative food culture can bring to share at the table. Molly tells her story about helping the Ojibwe people harvest wild rice and prevent oil companies from destroying the Northern lakes where their heirloom food plant grows - and in Dakota how she and others are working to bring back the buffalo to the prairies that once hosted millions of them. All the flowers start returning as they do, she says. The creatures hold all our stories, their hooves regenerate the land and the people.
FAVA
When you recover yourself, you yearn for the simplicity of that white room, for those afternoons that once stretched out, a sense of the future that existed like the vast wrinkled sea beyond the island. To gain a right relationship with food means to regain a relationship with place, remember the part of ourselves that knows about seeds and earth and rain. Sometimes this memory is hidden away somewhere we don’t want to go, down a path in time, that bites sharply like lemon and brings with it a pain to the heart.
To gain a right relationship with food means to regain a relationship with place, remember the part of ourselves that knows about seeds and earth and rain.
In June the night is filled with the thundering of the pea harvesters, as the fields are stripped by vast machines, and the sweet green smell of crushed pods hangs in the dark warm air. I’ve taken to sleeping outside most nights in a tent under the greengage tree until the big frosts come. I like to feel the hard ground under my body, the sounds of birds above my head in the morning, their whirring of wings, the sound of the sea when the wind is in the east, the rise and fall of temperatures.
The body holds a different story to the one we tell each other. Our hands know things our minds do not. You can pick up an axe and without being told, know how to chop wood, as you know how to knead dough, wrap the dead or hoist a sail. When I was 29 and ran away to Italy, a man placed an egg in my hands. It was warm and smooth. Listen! he said. Tap tap tap: a chick was pecking its way out of its shell into the unimagined vastness of the world. I had been wrapped up in myself, far away from Earth and suddenly I was looking into his eyes. ‘I wanted to get through to you,’ he said.
To break out of the small spaces we need an encounter with life, with the terra beneath our feet. When you put your hands back into the earth, you burst into laughter or tears, filled with feelings that have no name. Then those hands start to work: searching out roots, pushing seeds, pulling weeds, throwing out flints. Something happens when your hands take charge: something unsusceptible to the eye, that thunders inside you and breaks. You think it is your heart. But it’s not. It’s your isolation.
Can you sing praises to field beans and yellow peas?
The Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai sings praises to cucumber and spring onions:
Times are bad. I take an oath of loyalty to the table
coated with white Formica.
His fellow countryman, the Palestinian poet, Mourid Boughati, advises us to speak of real things in these times, to hold everything dear. In a world steered by abstractions, by the high-flown rhetoric of empire, to cherish the concrete with words is the radical act of writers and chroniclers. To acknowledge time and place, to engage in the physical breathing and growing world is radical. Cooking is radical. Tasting the fruit of the earth, knowing where it comes from and whose hands grew it.
I take a stack of peapods grown by Malcolm Pinder in his smallholding in Darsham and sit on the doorstep by the southernwood, and start shelling the peas into a small bowl. The evening sun is in my face. Tack tack tack.
Today is a red day.