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| Fig.1. Crusoe sits down to eat with some dinner guests, notice the bread on the table. |
A few weeks ago, while Facebooking, I stumbled upon a
wonderful photographer by the name of Dinah Freed. Her photo series, entitled Fictitious Dishes, was
imbued of a subject matter I myself dabbled in, albeit on a literary level. Freed’s work involves taking
photos of food and meal settings based on a series of books; have a look and you’ll
better understand.
During my time at Concordia University, I was enrolled in a
class entitled, Literature During the Restoration Period. One of this class’s assignments involved an analysis
of Daniel Defoe’s, Robinson Crusoe, which I read cover to cover with all the
proper haste attributed to a body of work as enthralling, such as it is. What stood out first and foremost for me
amidst Crusoe’s island seclusion was how he fed himself, and the lengths to which Defoe went to make certain his literary food content was accurate. With this in mind, I proposed to my professor
that I might analyze Defoe’s melding of food, sustenance and protagonist, and
how it all fit in within the pretext of a British movement bent on colonizing
everything in its path. She said yes.
To make a long story short, Crusoe was shipwrecked on an
island. He had a choice: he could either
live or die; Crusoe chose the path all conquering Brits took 400 years ago, and took
it upon himself to colonize his island.
One of the first things a colony needs
is food, even a one-man colony has to eat. Fish on an island goes without
saying, but Defoe went further than animal, reaching into the world of fauna: vegetables,
grains and legumes all sowed, reaped and harvested by Crusoe. (and later with help
from his man Friday.) One of the main
staples in Crusoe’s thatched ‘cantina’ was corn meal.
Defoe crammed Crusoe with the zeal and resolve of a true,
conquering British colonist, and colonize he did: the corn on Crusoe’s shipwrecked
boat was planted, harvested and replanted until Crusoe had a corn field big
enough to feed an entire fleet of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy.
However, this was a great encouragement to me, and I
foresaw that, in time, it would please God to supply me with bread. And yet
here I was perplexed again, for I neither knew how to grind or make meal of my
corn, or indeed how to clean it and part it; nor, if made into meal, how to
make bread of it; and if how to make it, yet I knew not how to bake it. These
things being added to my desire of having a good quantity for store, and to
secure a constant supply, I resolved not to taste any of this crop but to
preserve it all for seed against the next season; and in the meantime to employ
all my study and hours of working to accomplish this great work of providing
myself with corn and bread.
It might be truly said, that now I worked for my bread.
I believe few people have thought much upon the strange multitude of little
things necessary in the providing, producing, curing, dressing, making, and
finishing this one article of bread.
First, I had no plough to turn up the earth - no spade
or shovel to dig it. Well, this I conquered by making me a wooden spade, as I
observed before; but this did my work but in a wooden manner; and though it
cost me a great many days to make it, yet, for want of iron, it not only wore
out soon, but made my work the harder, and made it be performed much worse.
However, this I bore with, and was content to work it out with patience, and
bear with the badness of the performance. When the corn was sown, I had no
harrow, but was forced to go over it myself, and drag a great heavy bough of a
tree over it, to scratch it, as it may be called, rather than rake or harrow
it. When it was growing, and grown, I have observed already how many things I wanted
to fence it, secure it, mow or reap it, cure and carry it home, thrash, part it
from the chaff, and save it. Then I wanted a mill to grind it sieves to dress
it, yeast and salt to make it into bread, and an oven to bake it; but all these
things I did without, as shall be observed; and yet the corn was an inestimable
comfort and advantage to me too. All this, as I said, made everything laborious
and tedious to me; but that there was no help for. Neither was my time so much
loss to me, because, as I had divided it, a certain part of it was every day
appointed to these works; and as I had resolved to use none of the corn for
bread till I had a greater quantity by me, I had the next six months to apply
myself wholly, by labour and invention, to furnish myself with utensils proper
for the performing all the operations necessary for making the corn, when I had
it, fit for my use.
My next concern was to get
me a stone mortar to stamp or beat some corn in; for as to the mill, there was
no thought of arriving at that perfection of art with one pair of hands. To
supply this want, I was at a great loss; for, of all the trades in the world, I
was as perfectly unqualified for a stone-cutter as for any whatever; neither
had I any tools to go about it with. I spent many a day to find out a great
stone big enough to cut hollow, and make fit for a mortar, and could find none
at all, except what was in the solid rock, and which I had no way to dig or cut
out; nor indeed were the rocks in the island of hardness sufficient, but were
all of a sandy, crumbling stone, which neither would bear the weight of a heavy
pestle, nor would break the corn without filling it with sand. So, after a
great deal of time lost in searching for a stone, I gave it over, and resolved
to look out for a great block of hard wood, which I found, indeed, much easier;
and getting one as big as I had strength to stir, I rounded it, and formed it
on the outside with my axe and hatchet, and then with the help of fire and
infinite labour, made a hollow place in it, as the Indians in Brazil make their
canoes. After this, I made a great heavy pestle or beater of the wood called
the iron-wood; and this I prepared and laid by against I had my next crop of
corn, which I proposed to myself to grind, or rather pound into meal to make
bread.
Infinite
labour is exactly the mental picture Defoe means to paint. Defoe’s detail in outlining his character’s
woes and goals calls to realization just how much we take for granted, as well
as what we’re capable of doing if determined and goal oriented. Faced with a daunting ‘to do list’, Crusoe is
un-wavered in his tasks, and ultimately, succeeds in making corn bread, as the
author himself succeeds in emboldening his audience with a juxtaposed awareness
of humility toward what we eat, along side an obnoxiously greedy approach
toward hoarding and conquering other lands.
To
say we take our food for granted now would be an understatement. The hardships
Crusoe endured just so he could have bread are hardships still endured by the
majority of people living in impoverished countries right now. An ounce of culinary humility would do us
well, and there’s plenty of humility in every spoon of corn meal.
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| Fig.2. Polenta with liver sauce and mozzarella. |
Polenta With Liver Sauce And Mozzarella
Serves
6 to 8
In
Italy, the importance of corn bread exists as a testament to the ingenuity of
mothers and grandmothers alike. In times
of strife and extreme hardship, no food better served a society better than
cornmeal. (Except for Ireland during the potato famine. The Irish were given
cornmeal without any instructions on how to cook it, and as such, could do
nothing with it. The mass hysteria and desperation of millions of starving
Irish dismissed cornmeal as a useless alternative to potatoes.) Traditional polenta was pretty bland 100
years ago in Italy, salt was very hard to come by, so the nonna’s figured out
that tastiness would have to come from the top: Enter tomato sauce. And since meat was also scarce, the less
expensive parts of the animals found their way in the sauce, and on top of the
polenta: the offal, the parts of the animal with the most pronounced flavor,
spread over a bland base worked perfectly.
And it still works today as most Italians will tell you that polenta
with liver sauce is something that most of us traditionalists look forward to
every year. The mozzarella is my addition.
Ingredients:
1
cup finely ground Corn meal
1
tbsp salt
For
the Sauce:
8
cups of tomato sauce (we always use the ‘Sunday Sauce’ when making polenta.)
2
large onions, diced
8 to
10 Liver sausages-out of their casing. (you can buy these at most Italian
grocery stores)
Sliced mozzarella, fresh
Sliced mozzarella, fresh
Directions:
Bring
4 cups of water to a boil in a large pot.
Once the water is boiling, add the polenta in a thin stream while
stirring constantly with a whisk. Once all the polenta is in, replace the whisk
with a wooden spoon and stir until thick. (The polenta should be the consistency of thick oatmeal
and it should pull away from the sides of the pot.) Spoon the polenta into a
cookie sheet or aluminum rounds (anything thin and oven proof will do) and set
aside.
Add
some olive oil to a pan set over medium high heat. Add the onions and the liver
and cook until tender, do not over cook, about 10 minutes. Add the liver and onions
to the tomato sauce and mix. Spoon the sauce over the polenta, top with the mozzarella slices, and place in a 350
degree, pre-heated oven for 12 to 15 minutes, or until hot and cheese melts Sprinkle with Parmiggiano Reggiano and some
chili flakes and mangia.
.
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| Fig.3. I like using these small aluminum trays, but going old school and spreading it out on a large wooden cutting board is fun too. |
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