Second Terrace

Wormwood's Back and Celebrated

A New York Times piece marks the legalization and return to the West of the real, wormwoody absinthe.

Until recently, the green stuff marketed in shops contained replacement ingredients for wormwood, because wormwood contains a terpene called "thujone." This substance was thought to induce the mind-altering effects rhapsodized by the likes of Hemingway, Wilde, and van Gogh -- three stellar figures who did not shine with Phoebus, but orbited in black velvet with Selene. But the distillers of the old pre-ban recipe were able to prevail on European and American authorities to permit the sale of the $60+ bottles of the Green Fairy Potion. I guess with a commodity like that you have lots of money to lobby with, as opposed to the Corn Squeezin's Kartel squirreled away in the smoky woods where I grew up (clear stuff, not green, poured in old Pepsi bottles).

It is entertaining to see the gourmand and sophisticate community doing cartwheels, joyous and revisionist, over absinthe's restoration from its ban in 1912. Wannabe artists and writers (not the most dangerous kind, just annoying and cloying) shudder like debutantes over the allure of -- get this -- "visionary consciousness."

I thought that term belonged to the hesychasts. Imagine my surprise at finding out that it was Oscar Wilde who beat them to the punch.

[Sorry about that last line: I must remember that punishment is the absinthe of humor.]

For those of you who wonder what went wrong with the modern age, which began its extrusion out of La Belle Epoch and Cubism, and went through puberty in the Really Big War (i.e., I'm one of those odd ones who conflate WW's I and II), the Green Muse is certainly one of the signs. Witness these remarks from Edward Rothstein's piece in the Times:

... even those who hailed absinthe saw unsettling shadows. Wilde explained: “After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”

Absinthe’s effects suggested, it seems, an inherent instability to perception, as if mixing and distilling the shimmer of Impressionism, the nightmares of Expressionism and the skewed images of Surrealism. Van Gogh made a glass of absinthe vibrate with energy. And when Manet, Degas or Picasso painted absinthe drinkers, they appeared introspective, alienated, not because they have been drugged into oblivion, but because they have seen too much.

At least in imagery, then, absinthe reflected a certain view of modernity: A firm, reliable order weakens, giving way to bleak uncertainties.

I guess if you want your kids to grow up like Wilde, van Gogh or Hemingway, teach them the fine art of the louche, drop by drop in the glass. It's fancy, pretty, and exotic, and carries just the right flavor of darkness -- which is exactly what the modern mind is all about.

On feasting and fasting, and a few good books that cook

There are just a few cookbooks I like. They occupy space on my bookshelf, near my St. Gregory’s (Nyssa and Nazianzen), Dante, St. Maximus, Pelikan, Homer and Amis’ The King’s English.

If you’re interested, here they are:

The Joy of Cooking, nth ed., Rombauer, Rombauer Becker, and Becker.

The New Food Lover’s Tiptionary, by Herbst (unbelievably helpful).

Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts, which is full of rare tidbits like “Clam Cakes with Kidneys and Bacon,” how to play poker and win, and a short course in how to read a book by Mortimer Adler (I don’t care what Joe Epstein says about him, the cur).

And

The Supper of the Lamb – a culinary reflection, by Fr. Robert Farrar Capon.

You might have noticed a paucity of ethnic cookbooks in this list. I am surprised, too, given my penchant for most dishes Rusin and Greek. I suppose I would rather go over to the church kitchen and help the ladies pinch pirohi, bake nutroll and stuff halupki. Why bother doing that sort of thing on your own, when a solo effort would only end in despair? Also, if I want baklava or lamb, my neighborly Greek friends are just a few blocks away at the Presentation of the Lord Church.

And I certainly don’t need a recipe for prosfora: that’s a thing you do with your hands and your soul, kneading flour, yeast, a soupcon of salt and the water of warmth until the elements combine into the substance of man’s strength. When I was a new priest, the making of the loaves was as hard and self-conscious as a dimwitted searching for a boy in the wilderness who had been long-sighted enough to bring a lunch – oddly enough, one loaf for each thousand.

Now, I add the fine white milling, the leaven and mined preservation, and the spring until a single stuff forms, annealed, grasped (like St. Thomas) and touched with caloric effort and supplication: with every knead, I call for mercy.

In holy bread, work and prayer make faith. But then again, faith and prayer make work. And come to think of it, work and faith make prayer. I know it doesn’t make much arithmetic sense, but there you have it: daily bread.

Here are a few tidbits from Capon’s delectable work:

On the evils of virtual (not “virtuous”) eating

Against all that propaganda for fancy eating and plain cooking, I hope to persuade you to cook fancy and just plain eat. First of all, it is better for your soul. Only a daily renewed astonishment at things as they are can save us from the idols; it is our love of real processes and actual beings that keeps us sane.

On feasting and fasting

I would rather have one magnificent meal followed by a day of no meals at all, than two days full of ambitious mediocrities at close intervals. In this vale of sorrows, we should be careful about allowing abundance to con us out of hunger. [Hunger] is not only the best sauce; it is also the choicest daily reminder that the agony of the world is by no means over … Fast, therefore, until His Passion brings the world home free. He works through any crosses He can find. (145-146)

On luncheon

If you take all your meals seriously, none of them gets a chance to matter. On the other hand, consider lunch … it need be nothing more than a crust, a leaf, and a glass of wine.
Light meals, therefore – or none at all – until we can use our appetites for their true and human end: not simply to satisfy ourselves, but to confer greatness on what we love.

On cheese, wine, friends and bread (practice for paradise)

May you be spared long enough to know at least one long evening of old friends, dark bread, good wine and strong cheese. If even exile be so full, what must not our fullness be? (147-148)

I carry a strong affection for Capon’s book. It is one of the few volumes that cheers me instantly with a winsome, fireside and musk-smelling inn-feeling that is rare, that is the atmosphere of friendly humanity. He insists, as do I, on the simple fact that one of the many reasons why the divinely-ordained evening dinner that glues a house together has failed so rottenly in America is because of this horrifying fact: men and children and the worker-bees that come home for dinner are not interested simply because they are not hungry. They have grazed all day on the pouched stuff of the Brave New World.

I call, like this good Episcopalian priest, for fasting, and we certainly do a lot of that in the Orthodox Church. But where we are deficient, my friends, is that we have forgotten how to feast. (Few things are so ironically symptomatic of this deficiency as the sad fact that we pride our Lenten cookery for its similarity, in taste, to secular cooking -- that is a defeat of the purpose of the former, and an indictment of the latter).

Conviviality is a lost art. There is no civilization without it.

And one cannot really fast until he first knows how to feast.