Sacred
Meals
“I love
spending time with my friends and family. The simplest things in life
give me the most pleasure: cooking a good meal, enjoying my friends.”
Cindy
Morgan
Every Southern woman has
a good cobbler recipe. Usually it is handed down the generations and
she knows it by heart. Summer time is cobbler time, so here's my
grandmother's recipe:
Cobbler
Delight
Heat the
oven to 350 and put the baking dish into the over with ¾ stick (1/3
cup) of butter to melt.
Peel and
slice fruit or wash berries and remove stems and leaves. You can use
almost any kind of fresh local fruit—peaches, blueberries,
strawberries, cherries, apples, even pineapple. You'll need about 4-5
cups. Add about ½ cup of sugar, or more if you like things super sweet, and set fruit aside to allow juices to sweat. Alternately, you
can mash ¾ or so cup of the fruit to make juice.
Mix
together ¾ cup of flour, ¾ cup of sugar, 2 tsp baking power, pinch
of salt. Add ¾ cup of milk. Stir together until smooth. Pour evenly
over the melted butter and spoon the fruit over the top. Bake 45 min
at 350. Great served with homemade ice cream.
Families—by family I
mean both biological and family of choice—are bonded by shared
meals. Communion. We share the food and wine (in the South, it's food
and iced tea) and connect generation to generation, friend to friend
by sharing the recipes. Every culture, all over this planet creates
community by sharing food. Eating together nourishes body and soul.
Honestly, I think we could bring about world peace with
shared-meals-diplomacy if we truly wanted to.
My friend, Jessica, told
me just last night about her father, an African American farmer in
rural Alabama, who gave a pig to a friend who is Latino for his
daughter's fiesta de quince anos (15th birthday
celebration). Jessica said the man just broke down and cried. Such a
gift! In that culture, the pig is cooked in the traditional way—in
a fire pit in the ground. The celebration is every bit as important
to Latino families, as a bar/bat mitzvah is to Jewish, or
confirmation and first communion to Catholic. Sacred ceremony bound
and blessed by a shared meal.
I hope wherever you are,
you are sharing an open table with the people you love.
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment