food museum blog

Easter for Grownups

A substantive Easter basket is filled with foods with which to break your fast on Easter morning. In Ukraine these would include the garlicky sausage, kovbasa, hard-boiled eggs, baked cheese, paska or yeasty Easter bread, along with cinnamon babka, butter, horseradish and beet relish. ( A macchiato, too, please!)

The egg as pagan symbol of the life-giving sun ( see yolk) somehow became enmeshed with the blood of Christ ( red), and the tears of Mary ( many colors.)

The Ukrainian eggs or pysanka shown here are the work of artist Sofia Zielyk.

Expressive Chocolate Statue Draws Ire

Apparently a statue of Christ on the cross made from 200 pounds of chocolate is mightily annoying the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. 

According to today's AP story,  "This is one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever,” said Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, a watchdog group. “It’s not just the ugliness of the portrayal, but the timing — to choose Holy Week is astounding.”

Dubbed " My Sweet Lord," the piece is the work of Cosimo Cavallaro and is to be put on display this Monday at the Lab Gallery of Manhattan's Roger Smith Hotel. ( You can view the statue well on the artist's website. )

Again, according to AP, " Cavallaro, who was raised in Canada and Italy, is best known for his quirky work with food as art: Past efforts include repainting a Manhattan hotel room in melted mozzarella, spraying 5 tons of pepper jack cheese on a Wyoming home and festooning a four-poster bed with 312 pounds of processed ham."

Wow!

Since the hotel has been besieged by angry phone calls, it's possible the gallery may not go ahead with plans to display the 6 foot tall, anatomically correct chocolate Christ.

Can't help but wonder what will happen to all that chocolate....

Fasting with Veggies

Just had a call from a person about to begin a fast for spiritual reasons. He asked if a potato were a fruit or a vegetable--apparently veggies are ok on this fast. So I said that the spud was  in the vegetable column and definitely not a fruit. I explained, however, that many veggies , botanically speaking, are fruits because anything edible that develops from a flower is a fruit.

But the potato, an underground tuber, the storehouse for the potato plant of excess nutrients the plant does not need at the time, may not exactly be what the spiritual fasting gods ordered either, growing in the dark as it does.....

People of Baghdad Attempt to Celebrate Id al-Fitr Despite Continuing Violence

These excerpts from a Sunday story in the NYTimes once again highlight the food factor underlying much of what is ongoing in Iraq: 

"Attacks have spiked in Baghdad since the beginning of Ramadan, the Muslim period of fasting and repentance that will come to an end this week with the three-day holiday of Id al-Fitr, when Muslims traditionally gather with their families to celebrate the end of the fasting period...

On Sunday, shopping areas in Baghdad were crowded as residents stopped by bakeries to purchase sweets and picked through racks to buy new clothes for the coming holiday. ... a bomb exploded and wounded four people near the al-Farasha bakery in eastern Baghdad, where shoppers were lined up to buy holiday sweets."

Id al-Fitr is the event celebrating the end of the month-long fast of Ramadan, this year starting October 24, when families and friends gather to eat and renew the ties of community. It begins with prayers thanking the Creator for their blessings, and expressing joy, forgiveness and peace.

Typically the first food eaten at the close of Ramadan is the date, considered by  many to be the fruit of the world's oldest food producing plant.

Rice Flour Flower--India

Foodie just looked through photos taken by her niece,  a teacher,who recently spent four months exploring India. She turned up a few food tales along the way for her eccentric relations at The FOOD Museum. Here's one--  in India's southernmost state, Tamilnadu,  she encountered women drawing a flower in rice flour every morning, as a kind of welcome mat at the entrance to their homes. These "kolams" are evidently always done by women, and they are done as a blessing but also a literal offering of food to insects and other small crawly critters who relish rice flour. In return, the small beings bless the household.

Google informs us that the flower is probably a pumpkin flower, and that a wad of cow dung often forms the center.But Foodie wonders about this as the pumpkin, and all squashes, are natives of the Americas.... ( No issue with the cow dung!)

Saintly September Stuff-Fests, Italian Style

The first time young Foodie tasted mussels ( drowned in marinara sauce,) was in New York's Little Italy during the San Gennaro Festival celebrated in September along Mulberry Street. The 11 day event is a lovely exercise in Italian-food gluttony, with cannoli sampling high on the list.

Around 300 AD, the eponymous saint from Napoli, whose crime was ministering to imprisoned Christians, survived being tossed in an oven,  placed on the rack,  and presented to wild beasts for their delectation in an arena. ( "What am I to you, " he wailed, "Just a cut of meat?!) He did not make it, however, through his beheading.

In any event,  San Gennaro became revered and New York has been putting on his festival for 78 years.  The folks on the other coast have been in the biz five years now. Los Angeles Italian-Americans, like the people in New York, created a foundation to host their festival and both efforts fund philanthropic undertakings for those in need. In LA you can play boccie with "Hollywood's most prominent Italian-American celebrities," and all the ricotta cheese you can eat comes from Precious, the company whose name is imbedded in the official festival title.

In a neat piece of synchronicity (?), in New York the statue of San Gennaro is paraded around Little Italy and then  returned to its rightful place at the Most Precious Blood Church on Mulberry St.

Total Disclosure: A PR lady emailed me about the LA San Gennaro event---but hey--some people like to plan their foodie adventures well in advance, right? So mark your bi-coastal calendars now.

Another One:  Las Vegas   http://www.sangennarofeast.net/

Other Italian Festivals: http://www.italylink.com/festivals.html

( Love the smoking Mt Vesuvius behind S.G. )

High Tea Ruled OK by Supremes, in Sacramental Settings

The Supremes have spoken unanimously in favor of allowing followers of a tiny religious sect to continue to use hallucinogenic tea called hoasca in their ceremonies.  And as the Brazilian-origin sect known as O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal exists right here in Foodie's territory of New Mexico, this is indeed pertinent news. The Washington Post reports this , Feb 22:

"In his opinion, ( Supreme Court Chief Justice John) Roberts wrote that everything the government said about the DMT ( dimethyltryptamine)  in hoasca also applies to the mescaline in peyote, which Native Americans have been allowed to use in religious ceremonies for 35 years.

"If such use is permitted . . . for hundreds of thousands of Native Americans practicing their faith, it is difficult to see how those same findings alone can preclude any consideration of a similar exception for the 130 or so American members of the UDV who want to practice theirs," Roberts wrote."

Known more commonly by the Quechua word ayahuasca, hoasca refers both to the Amazonian rainforest vine itself and the brew made from it. Wikipedia provides an exhaustive look at this sacramental tea often tied to shamanic ceremonies.  It is listed as a Schedule I drug under the U.S. Controlled Substances Act of 1970.

(Photo of hoasca from www.gameshout.com.)

Utah Mormons Weigh More, But Less Than Before

OK, so they weigh less more than they did in 1996.  More than non-Mormon Utahans. True. Foodie really should focus on the improvement--according to a Brigham Young University study reported by AP February 14, back in 1996 Mormon adults were on average 5.7 pounds heavier than their non-believing fellow citizens in Utah, with a 34 % chance of being obese.

Today Mormon adults only weigh 4.6 pounds more than those other Utahans and have a 14 % likelihood of being obese.

So Mormons in Utah are slugging down fewer Cokes than they did 10 years ago. Foodie can attest that her in-person gustatory encounters with Mormons have always included massive offerings of Coke--so she figures cutting back on the sugary syrupy stuff alone could account for this dramatic improvement.

"Danish" Redux

Following up on the Danish-renamed-Mohammed controversy, this report from Reuters confirms that Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency says "Danish pastry," all made in Iran,  will henceforth be called "Roses of the Prophet Mohammad." 

Speaking of roses, they use rose water extensively in Iran as a sweetener, an ingredient Foodie came to dread as a Peace Corps volunteer there.  The real stuff is made from rose petals, and as such, Foodie thinks it should remain an ingredient in cosmetics, not food. ( Yes, Foodie knows that many fruit trees are related to the rose.)

         

German-Born Pontiff Puts His Own Mark on Mass

( Don't get your knickers in a twist, folks, this is a JOKE! Thank you.)