This done, each man his candle lights,
Where chiefest seemeth he,
Whose taper greatest may be seen;
And fortunate to be,
Whose candle burneth clear and bright:
A wondrous force and might
Both in these candles lie, which if
At any time they light,
They sure believe that neither storm
Nor tempest cloth abide,
Nor thunder in the skies be heard,
Nor any devil’s spide,
Nor fearful sprites that walk by night,
Nor hurts of frost or hail.
Robert Chambers, ed., The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Collection with the Calendar, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1863), p. 213.

The line between Catholicism and paganism was always a little blurry.

In other custom Candlemas brought a definitive end to the season of Christmas, whose festive decorations of bay and holly and mistletoe were now to be taken down — thoroughly, as another poet warned:

That so the superstitious find
Not one least branch there left behind;
For look, how many leaves there be,
Neglected there, maids, trust to me,
So many goblins you shall see. Ibid., p. 214.

With the ubiquity of electric lights the blessing of candles has lost some of the punch it packed in former ages, and though a couple of my neighbors might heed that warning about goblins, the only Candlemas custom now widely recalled in America is the one about the weather. Since Candlemas marked the coming of spring, it was believed throughout Western Europe that good weather on that day warned of a long winter yet to come and a bad growing season ahead, while clouds and snow or rain heralded an early spring and good planting. Here’s another old rhyme, a Scottish one:

If Candlemass day be dry and fair,
The half o’ winter’s to come and mair;
If Candlemass day be wet and foul,
The half o’ winter’s gone at Yule.Ibid., p. 215.

It seems odd to many people today that foul weather would herald an early spring — but to an agrarian mind, of course, rain or snow was nearly always a good sign, especially when no work had immediately to be done in the fields. People may also have felt that winter was going to have its way sooner or later, and that it was best to get it over with. If so, I sympathize: I can’t help thinking, on these gorgeous seventy-degree February days, that come May it will be a hundred and cut the pea crop short again.

In Germany, one version of this custom held that the badger emerged from his burrow on Candlemas day, and that if he found snow he remained above ground, but if he met the sun he withdrew into his hole. In America, the badger became the groundhog — any small animal will do, really — though I believe it was only in the last hundred years or so that anyone thought actually to go in search of a groundhog; previous generations had looked at the sky and judged for themselves whether one might see one’s shadow. We seem largely to have lost the ability to judge anything about the weather for ourselves, and now rely on television. And so in addition to the National Weather Service we have Groundhog Day, on which morning a poor beast is dragged from his den, shaken from a cozy slumber, cameras pointed into his face, and abandoned after some minutes to his muddy hole, where if lucky he returns quickly to sleep and recalls the whole nasty business one sunny afternoon in late May only as a bizarre dream that he dares not mention to his mate for fear of scornful laughter. Pity the poor Marmota monax, who deserves a bit of doggerel of his own:

If on Candlemas the groundhog sees
His shade beneath the bare-limbed trees,
Then back to bed, and lad and lass
Will yet feel Jack Frost bite their ass.
But if he finds gray sky and snow,
Then spring is coming, don’t you know!
He’ll stay above ground, and soon be startin’
To eat every damned thing in your garden.

If the basset hound fails to see his shadow tomorrow morning, he will continue taking up your entire couch for another six weeks. But he’s likely to do that anyway. (full size)

But to focus on the weather of a morning ignores the salient point, which is that spring is coming, sooner or later. The combination of Southern climate and global warming might sap some of the drama from that realization, but the sky stays light a full hour later than two months ago, the daffodils in the woods are stretching towards the sparse evergreen canopy, the lettuce has sprouted under its cold frame and the chives in the bed by the door. It’s always possible to believe that spring is coming, even in the darkest, coldest nights around the solstice, but we of little faith appreciate the signs. So dig out a candle, a good beeswax one, and ask a blessing on it — you can do this sort of thing even if you’re an atheist, you know; it’s good for your soul even if you don’t think you have one. Light it when the first summer storm knocks out your power just as you were trying to cook your dinner, and remember that the light always does return.

Consider the two ne-plus-ultra examples of Mormon cooking offered by the author: “a fluffy dessert of whipped cream and crushed pineapple folded into lime gelatin,” and “funeral potatoes,” which is “a rich casserole of grated potatoes, sour cream, cheese and cream-of-something soup.” I’ve never seen anything quite like the funeral potatoes, but would they really be out of place at a church supper in Lake Wobegon — or in my hometown, circa 1979? And as for the green Jell-O salad¹ with whipped cream² and pineapple, please: my grandmother made something very like this, and she was Methodist from Delaware. My wife’s mother used to make something like it, and she is from eastern North Carolina, where Mormons may as well have been Martians.

It isn’t only Mormons over forty who have a soft spot for this stuff. This isn’t Mormon food; it’s middle-American white people food. The article does note briefly that in the 1960s, “Mormon women (like most Americans) enthusiastically embraced inexpensive convenience foods like canned fruit, instant potatoes and, of course, Jell-O” and that Mormons took longer than most to “come out of that phase,” but no explanation is offered as to why.

I’ll suggest a possible explanation, while admitting that I know little about Mormon culture specifically: Mormons may be more likely to hang on to those traditions simply because of their separate group identity. If I make Jell-O salad (as I occasionally do) it might be in memory of my grandmother and my own traditions, neither of which exerts all that strong a pull on behavior, and it’s apt to be a private act and thus end with me. If a Mormon makes Jell-O salad and thinks of that food as Mormon, it could be an expression of communal identity, which has a stronger influence and can be more easily performed in public — and thus perpetuate itself. She can do it sincerely, whereas I’m forced to offer Jell-O salad with a bit of irony.³

I see a parallel here to something I do know a good deal about, which is Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch culture. In the twentieth century, Pennsylvania Dutch culture and cuisine were increasingly identified with the Amish, specifically, because they were the most visible of the Dutch and the last to hold onto old ways, particularly the Pennsylfaanisch Deitsch dialect. You can buy an “Amish” cookbook (I have one on my shelf) and find recipes claiming to be specifically Amish that are just traditionally Dutch (stuffed pig’s stomach, souse, oyster pie, pepper relish), or that I ate growing up (chicken corn soup), or that are far more broadly American (cole slaw, seriously). There’s little in those books that’s unique to the Amish.

There was a time when the Amish weren’t much different from their neighbors, who also farmed and spoke German but worshiped differently and didn’t object to buttons, patterned clothes, and shaved chins. But their neighbors changed, and after about 1950, the Amish became a sort of mascot for the Pennsylvania Dutch — a personification of traditional values and practices that could neither be denied nor any longer fully owned. I wonder if now the Mormons are in the same way becoming mascots for middle-American white people who have decided that they’re too urbane and sophisticated for the traditions they grew up with, who can neither let them go nor accept ownership of them and therefore put them off onto another group — a group which is, like the Amish, easily identified by its unique religious strictures and (as everybody has to keep pointing out) special clothes, both laughingly scorned and wistfully celebrated. On the Amish coming to represent the Pennsylvania Dutch generally, see Walbert, Garden Spot, 2002, although I believe “mascot” is my word and not his.

I don’t mean disrespect by using the word “mascot” — or, rather, I probably do, but not to Amish or Mormons. And I don’t want to carry this analogy too far, even if the Amish had a Broadway musical once, too.⁴ I see no hope at all, for example, that we’ll elect an Amish president this fall — even though I’m pretty sure he’d be a marked improvement over the current Mormon option.

That’s sixteen dollars a pound for noodles, y’all. Silly me, thinking I’d get a whole pound for just six bucks.

As I have since learned, it isn’t actually all that difficult to make fresh noodles. What’s difficult is making them look perfect. That takes equipment and space. But if you are willing to accept the style commonly known as rustic, you can make fresh pasta for a weeknight dinner. Seriously. You need a food processor, but you certainly don’t need a pasta machine. And depending on how you shape your noodles, it only takes about ten minutes of hands-on work.

I don’t normally recommend anyone use a food processor or a mixer for making dough the first time, because I think it’s difficult to learn to recognize the right consistency without getting your hands in it, and food processors go so fast that you can easily miss what’s happening even if you’re watching carefully. But pasta dough is fairly straightforward; there’s no yeast to worry about, nor do you have to treat it gently like pastry dough. And while kneading pasta dough by hand only takes about five minutes, it makes a disaster of your counter (not to mention your hands). This is a rare case where cleaning the food processor bowl and blade is easier than cleaning up the mess you’d make otherwise.

I’m indebted to Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, from whose book Beyond the Great Wall the original proportions and food processor technique come, in a recipe for “earlobe noodles.”¹ (More about those later.)

Recipe: Homemade noodles

These are rustic noodles, chewy, sturdy, rough-textured, pale yellow to golden from the egg — and quite attractive for all that, not to mention delicious. The recipe goes on a bit, but its length belies its simplicity. It has more variations than Goldberg, but that’s the point: it’s more a theme than a recipe, and you can take it any number of directions.

Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• ½ teaspoon salt (optional)
• a tablespoon oil (optional; see note)
• 1 to 3 eggs
• up to ½ cup warm water

Making the dough

Combine the flour and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to blend. The salt is optional: it isn’t traditional in Italian pasta, certainly, nor in some kinds of Asian noodles, but I like to add a bit, as fresh noodles don’t cook long enough to absorb much if any salt from the water.

With the oil and egg you have several options. Oil is not, again, traditional in many kinds of noodles, but I think it makes the dough easier to roll out. If your context is Asian, go with something neutral, but olive oil is nice if you’re planning Italian flavors. The number of eggs will affect texture and taste: one is good for a basic all-purpose Asian-style noodle; three will give you a fresh Italian-style egg pasta. I usually split the difference and use two.

Whatever you decide, add the oil and the egg(s) to the flour and run the food processor for 10 seconds or so until all is well blended.

Then slowly pour in warm water² while the machine is running. If you’ve used one egg, you’ll need about a half-cup of water; if you’ve used three eggs, you may need only a tablespoon or two. In any case you’ll need to go by eye. Stop pouring when the dough has not quite come together and still looks like a shaggy mess; it will continue to come together over the next several seconds. If it doesn’t, add another teaspoon or two of water. If you’ve added too much and the dough is wet, add a few more tablespoons of flour. The dough should be smooth and just slightly tacky, especially if you’ve used more than one egg, but not dry and definitely not sticky.

Remove the dough from the machine and knead on the counter a couple of times just to check the consistency. Then set it under an overturned bowl and let it rest for fifteen to twenty minutes to let the gluten relax. I find it helpful at this point to open a beer. Dough is a social creature, and more apt to relax if others around it are doing the same. If dinner takes longer to prepare than you anticipated, or if that beer turns into two or three, don’t worry; the dough can rest for an hour or two if need be. Just keep it covered so it doesn’t dry out. (Use plastic wrap for longer resting, but I find that in plastic the dough can get a little sticky.)

Intermezzo

Get your water boiling. (I assume you can handle this part on your own.)

Shaping and cooking the noodles

When you are very nearly ready to serve dinner — table set, everything else simmering to perfection or waiting for a finishing touch — shape your noodles. At this point, again, you have a couple of options.

Option 1: Noodles-as-dumplings

The easiest way to shape them is to make Alford and Duguid’s earlobe noodles, which are based on a noodle from Tibet and are like little chewy dumplings. Divide the dough into eight pieces. Oil your hands lightly and roll each piece into a snake about as thick as your thumb. To shape the noodles, hold a snake gently in one hand and pinch off bits with the other — about as big a piece as will come off neatly between your thumb and forefinger. As you do this, you’ll flatten the pieces of dough somewhat so that they look like — you guessed it — earlobes. Then flick them into the boiling water. With a bit of practice, you’ll be able to do this all in one motion — pinch, squish, flick, and repeat. If you find that you’re very slow at this on your first attempt, you may want to cook the noodles in two batches, but after a couple of times you should be doing it fairly quickly. I find I can get the whole mess of noodles pinched off and in the pot in about a minute.

Boil the noodles for two to three minutes, or longer, depending on how thick you made them. They should be chewy but not doughy. (Al dente. You know the drill.)

Option 2: Roll ‘em out

If you simply must have noodles, you can of course roll out the dough and cut it into long strips. Unless you do this for a living or are extremely pretentious, or maybe just a Virgo, you do not need a pasta machine for this. I had a pasta machine once, and it was a royal pain to use and to clean. If your noodles must all be delicately thin and precisely the same width, get out your wallet and pay someone to make them for you. This is home cooking. A little variability is a good thing in craft work.

On a lightly floured board, roll out your dough to about 1/16" thick. (I do mean, ideally, a wooden board rather than a countertop that can be scratched when you cut the dough — but your countertop will do, of course.) The thickness is really up to you; be aware that they’ll swell in the water to about double the thickness you roll. A sixteenth of an inch will give you chewy noodles that curl and tangle attractively in the bowl. I’ve never bothered to find out what happens if you roll them much thinner.

To cut the noodles, the best tool is a sharp pizza wheel, but you can use a knife. With a pizza wheel you just roll it along to mark off the widths you want, but either way you’re simply cutting the dough into strips. (Or squares! Two-inch squares, or even slightly irregular quadrilaterals, make very nice pasta. So do triangles. Or hexagons, if you have that kind of time.) You will not make the strips all exactly the same width. Some will be narrower than others; some will be narrow at one end and wide at the other. Nobody will mind, unless your guest list includes, say, Ming Tsai, and even he would probably be nice about it. Everybody else will be impressed and delighted that you made homemade noodles.

Now lift them off the board and drop them individually into the boiling water. This is actually the tricky part, and why I don’t often bother rolling and cutting noodles: they nearly always stick together, and a few of them stick to the board no matter now well I flour it. To minimize that risk, in contradiction to the advice of practically every cookbook I have ever read, do not roll and cut the noodles in advance. If you do, the humidity of the kitchen (you’re boiling water!) will cause them to swell and stick together again — unless you drape them individually over some kind of ad-hoc drying rack, which would take up half the kitchen. (Unless, that is, your kitchen is palatial, in which case I don’t want to talk to you.) Maybe there really is some reason why fresh noodles need to dry briefly before they’re cooked, but I’ve never been able to tell the difference.

So, to repeat: roll and cut your dough when the water is about to boil, and get the noodles off the board and into the water as quickly as possible. And make sure your knife or pizza wheel is sharp, and slice cleanly all the way to the end of the dough — don’t pull up at the end, as I sometimes do, or your noodles will cling and open up like an endless Z.

Here again, two to five minutes’ boil is about right. I know that’s a wide window, but everybody rolls their noodles a little differently, so grab one with tongs, pinch off a piece, and taste it. God gave you teeth for a reason.

Serving suggestions

If you have read this far you must surely have some notion of what to do with these noodles once you have cooked them, but here are my thoughts anyway.

You could certainly make Italian-style pasta. If you cut these as noodles, you’ll wind up with something like chunky fettuccine; pinched off as dumplings you could treat them as oricchiette. Any decent Italian cookbook will give you lots of ideas for fresh pasta dishes. You don’t need me to list them for you. But I don’t recommend anything fussy; these are not delicate noodles. And I tend to think that alfredo would get gloppy on such thick noodles. But chopped fresh tomatoes, slivers of basil, fresh mozzerella, and a sprinkling of salt is fantastic. So is something briefly-cooked and chunky with sausage, garlic, and canned tomatoes.

You could shape them as “earlobes” and call them German dumplings. Put them in chicken soup. Serve them with gravy. Brown them in butter, top them with sour cream and eat them with sauerkraut.

But what I usually do is to make this:

Asian-style noodles with pork and greens

This is one of my very favorite things to cook. And to eat. It’s far too simple for a recipe, but here’s what you do. Let’s say you’re serving three people with one recipe of noodles.

Start with some coarsely ground pork. I use Boston butt and run it through the grinder with the coarse die, because coarse-ground pork has more and meatier flavor than fine-ground, not to mention better texture. You could use regular ground pork, or you could get a piece of pork and chop it finely. Two ounces per person is plenty; it’s flavoring.

Heat a wok super-hot, add a bit of oil and then the pork. Break it up and stir it around until it’s no longer pink, then add, if you happen to have one, a sliced leek. Stir-fry until the leek collapses a bit and then add a couple of cloves of garlic, smashed and minced, some minced ginger (maybe a tablespoon), and a chopped scallion. (If you don’t have a leek, add more scallion.) Stir-fry for a minute.

Now add your greens. The skinny broccoli-looking stuff from the Chinese grocery — I can’t remember its Chinese name — would be excellent here, but I most often use Swiss chard from the farmer’s market, two bunches for three people. Wash them, chop them, and throw them in, with a sprinkle of salt and just a little water to help them steam, no more than necessary. Cover the wok and cook them until the greens are tender.

Drizzle with soy sauce and sesame oil and serve with the noodles in bowls. If you want some spice, add a dab of Chinese chili sauce. (I like the stuff made by the Har Har Pickle Food Factory of Taiwan, and not only because they have the best name of any food company anywhere in the world.)

Variations. If you like, you can turn this into an Italian-style dish: omit the ginger, soy sauce, and sesame oil; use olive oil, add a little red chile flake with the garlic, and grate some good cheese over it when you serve it.

Because I’ll not be out-geeked by a two-centuries-dead president, I’ve made an HTML version of Jefferson’s chart. His handwritten original was quite clever (you can see it at low resolution on the Monticello website) and I’ve preserved the basic design while adding a bit of interactivity: for now just the ability to mouse over headings to highlight rows and columns, but eventually also to view definitions and commentary on various items of produce.

Proper commentary will take more research than I’ve had time for this month, but in the meantime, here are a few observations:

1. Despite the deservedly bad reputation of most early American farmers and the technology-fired notions of “progressive” farmers in the twentieth century, some gardeners, at least, were able to grow vegetables for market over surprisingly long seasons in 1800. Lettuce, spinach, and parsley were available year-round. Cucumbers appeared as early as April. And who grows artichokes commercially on the Chesapeake at all nowadays?
2. Clearly, then, gardeners were using some methods of season extension — hot beds and cold frames, as well as cold storage for long-keeping items like cabbages and potatoes.
3. That said, the bars represent the longest possible season for each item; they begin with the earliest date the item appeared over eight years and end with the latest date its season ended. One early spring and one warm fall, years apart, could make some seasons appear two months longer than in any given year they actually were.
4. Additionally, we don’t know how much of any given item was available out of its normal season (e.g. lettuce in January), or what it cost. Given what I know of early nineteenth-century hot-bed technology (of which I’ll say more in a later post — I know you can’t wait), it was likely quite expensive. We also don’t know what the quality was like — but given the alternative of eating root-cellared turnips and sauerkraut, I imagine people took what they could get.
5. Some fairly obvious items aren’t listed — apples, for example. This doesn’t seem to be a complete list of produce available in Washington.
6. Finally, it’s worth noting that Washington was a very new city in 1801; the White House wasn’t ready for occupancy until November, 1800, just five months before Jefferson was sworn in. Was there a market in Alexandria prior to 1800, and did market gardeners ramp up production when the Federals showed up? Who were these market gardeners? Were they specialists? Planters who expanded their domestic operations? Women selling vegetables and herbs on the side, along with butter and eggs?

I’ll have more to say about this chart in later posts as I do more research into the gardening of that time. I’m also planning to do a version of Jefferson’s chart for a local farmers market in the last decade, for comparison.

But first, as always, a little historical background.

Until about the turn of the twentieth century, yeast for baking bread came mainly from byproducts of brewing beer — either barm, the foam that forms on top of the wort while it’s brewing, or what some colonials called “emptins,” the yeast-rich stuff left at the bottom of the barrel. Brewers started each batch from the savings of the last, and they guarded their cultures carefully, because if a culture soured, to cultivate another properly from wild yeast might take generations of beers. But brewers had enough barm left over to sell for baking, and the best baking yeast — “brewer’s yeast,” in old cookbooks — came straight from the brewery.

Once a housewife had obtained good yeast, though, she too could culture it carefully, using a half-cup or so of her last batch of yeast to start a new batch that she fed with flour, bran, mashed potato, or even pumpkin. (If yeast can eat it, it’s been used to brew beer… and also to culture baking yeast.) The principle is the same as with sourdough, except that it’s the yeast that’s renewed rather than the dough itself. Most Americans leavened their bread that way because they came from brewing cultures, either English or German. In France, where wine has always been far more popular than beer, bread was traditionally leavened with sourdough, because wine yeast doesn’t leaven bread well.

An attentive and industrious housewife could keep a yeast culture going for years, but at the beginning of that chain was always brewer’s yeast. As the temperance movement gained steam in the early 19th century, that fact seems to have bothered some activists, who preferred to avoid supporting the brewing industry in any way. In 1838 The Farmer’s Magazine of London gave instructions for making yeast without recourse to a brewery, by cultivating wild yeast or — less chancy — starting with “tee total barm,” some other abstainer’s live culture.

It’s funny, though, that the recipes were otherwise identical to other contemporary instructions for making yeast. They called for hops, which probably helped to preserve the yeast from souring but also would have made it taste like beer. And, of course, any yeast culture produces alcohol: the yeast consume sugar and give off alcohol and carbon dioxide as by-products. In bread the carbon dioxide leavens the dough and the alcohol bakes out, but one way or another, alcohol is being produced. Not to mention that once a housewife had a yeast culture going, whatever its source, she wasn’t supporting brewers to keep the one she had.

“Tee total barm” doesn’t seem to have caught on; this is the only mention of it I’ve run across. I’m sure those English temperance reformers felt good about themselves while it lasted, though, even if they didn’t topple the brewing industry. Or even avoid producing alcohol.

(As a postscript, I’m working up some experiments with homemade yeast, so check back in a month or so for a lab report.)

Eliza Leslie, in her monumental 1837 Directions for Cookery, offers recipes for four different “fish sauces” intended to flavor melted butter or gravy for all sorts of fish and meat: Scotch sauce, Quin’s sauce, Kitchener’s sauce, and Harvey’s sauce, all based on anchovy.

The usual way of eating these sauces is to pour a little on your plate, and mix it with the melted butter. They give flavour to fish that would otherwise be insipid, and are in general use at genteel tables. Two table-spoonfuls of any of these sauces may be added to the melted butter a minute before you take it from the fire. But if brought to table in bottles, the company can use it or omit it as they please. Eliza Leslie, Directions for Cookery, 10th ed. (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey & A. Hart., 1940 [1937]), p. 171.

This was about the time that A-1 sauce was first made and that Lea & Perrins began selling their Worcestershire sauce — which, for those of you who think you don’t like anchovies, is also at bottom an anchovy sauce. At the time Leslie wrote, fish sauces were available bottled from grocers — in fact this section of the book is titled “Store Fish Sauces” — but I gather that, as was her tendency, she was sufficiently unimpressed with most of them to know how to make them herself.

I settled on the Scotch sauce, because two of the others required other prepared ingredients like mushroom ketchup or walnut pickle, and the fourth called for rather a lot of cayenne, which wasn’t what I was after. Here’s Leslie’s recipe:

Take fifteen anchovies, chop them fine, and steep them in vinegar for a week, keeping the vessel closely covered. Then put them into a pint of claret or port wine. Scrape fine a large stick of horseradish, and chop two onions, a handful of parsley, a tea-spoonful of the leaves of lemon-thyme, and two large peach leaves. Add a nutmeg, six or eight blades of mace, nine cloves, and a tea-spoonful of black pepper, all slightly pounded in a mortar. Put all these ingredients into a silver or block tin sauce-pan, or into an earthen pipkin, and add a few grains of cochineal to colour it. Pour in a large half pint of the best vinegar, and simmer it slowly till the bones of the anchovies are entirely dissolved.

Strain the liquor through a sieve, and when quite cold put it away for use in small bottles; the corks dipped in melted rosin, and well secured by pieces of leather tied closely over them. Fill each bottle quite full, as it will keep the better for leaving no vacancy.

This sauce will give a fine flavour to melted butter.

The technique is simple enough, but the ingredients were far from obvious; what I had to work with didn’t much resemble Leslie’s pantry. I did my best, and the result… well, it is pungent, complex, a delicious sauce. The flavor is stronger than that of bottled Worcestershire sauce — of course; practically all flavors seem to have been stronger in 1837 than today. These were the days when men were real men and condiments were real condiments. Your modern Worcestershire is mainly a sweet-and-sour affair; by contrast you can taste the anchovy in Leslie’s Scotch sauce, along with a good snootful of horseradish and a bouquet of other aromas.

In the end, good as it was, it wasn’t what I wanted for a really nice piece of beef. Only a few drops were enough for the sauce to draw attention to itself, and more than that overwhelmed the delicate flavor of the beef. I’m thinking oysters, though: a little Scotch sauce in some melted better on some very lightly steamed oysters. And huzzah, as they say.

What follows are my notes on ingredients — which really are the complicated part — and an adaptation for the modern kitchen. It’s written in the second person, as if you are actually going to make this stuff. We both know you won’t, of course, but you’re not going to make most of the stuff in those cookbooks you got for Christmas, so we’ll suspend our disbelief and plunge ahead.

If you do make it, I should note that the ingredients for this little experiment ran me a good fifteen bucks… for a pint of sauce. It’s a luxury item, you don’t need much to make an impact, it ought to keep in the fridge for a few months, and it’s Christmas. But it ain’t cheap, and you can bet your first-edition Virginia Housewife I will be finding some uses for this stuff in the weeks to come.

The ingredients

[Not] sugar

The most interesting ingredient is actually one that isn’t here: sugar. Bottled Worcestershire sauce contains corn syrup as well as raisins, and Emeril Lagasse’s recipe for Worcestershire calls for six cups of corn syrup and cane syrup in what ultimately makes 3 pints of sauce — which means that his Worcestershire sauce, which never struck me as especially sweet, is actually as sweet as pure corn syrup! But 1837 fell into a window of a few centuries after the (late medieval) time when sugar was so rare and prized that anyone who could afford it put it on practically everything, and before the (recent) time when sugar is so cheap that we put it on everything. As a result, Leslie’s sauce is more pungent and complex than modern commercial Worcestershire.

Anchovies

Leslie’s anchovies would have been, I assume, dried and packed in salt, hence the need to soak them. Salted anchovies are still best, but they’re expensive and hard to find, not worth the trouble (I thought) for an experimental recipe. Despite all the additional strong flavors, though, this is a fish sauce, and worth the best anchovies you can reasonably afford. (Though not, I think, the four-ounce jar for which Whole Foods wanted eighteen dollars.)

Anchovies packed in olive oil don’t need to be soaked, but I doubled the vinegar to make up for the missing soaking liquid and added a teaspoon of salt to the finished sauce. Drain jarred anchovies well before adding them to the pot; you don’t want the sauce to be oily.

Claret or port wine

Ruby port is the simplest thing to use here. Claret is hard to come by these days. Don’t use the cheapest in the store, because you’ll taste it in the finished sauce. But you’ll also taste a lot of other things, so don’t feel compelled to buy a nice bottle, either.

Horseradish

“Scrape fine a large stick of horseradish,” she says. You want fresh horseradish root, obviously, not that wilted musty stuff in the bottle. Most sticks from the grocery store are six to eight inches long, which seems plenty. Mine yielded a cup or so peeled and coarsely grated — coarse being fine enough, I think, since this is going to simmer for a couple of hours.

Onions

Ah, the ever-annoying “large” onion. How big were Leslie’s onions? Mine were enormous (see photo), so I used only one and a half. It’s all really to taste anyway.

Parsley

It’s too late in the year for parsley from the garden, and I forgot to buy any. If I were to include parsley, for economy’s sake, I’d likely use the stems only and save the leaves for another purpose.

Lemon thyme

A good reason for trying this sauce, as opposed to any of Leslie’s other fish sauces, is that I have lemon thyme in the herb garden outside my front door, and much as I love its flavor I have trouble finding uses for it. (Strewn on fish is a good one.) Many women kept extensive herb gardens before the mid-nineteenth century, even in towns, and made daily use of them for both culinary and medicinal purposes. The available herbs varied with the family’s tastes and the season, but fresh or home-dried herbs would have been at hand all year, and in far greater variety (and of better quality) than we can get from grocery stores today.

Since you can’t buy lemon thyme from a grocery store, you can use fresh (“regular”) thyme instead, perhaps with a teaspoon or so of grated lemon zest. If you have an herb garden, though, try growing some lemon thyme or some other old varieties of thyme; there’s no point being bound to standards when you’re doing it yourself!

By the way: I detest stripping thyme leaves, so if I’m adding fresh thyme to anything that’s going to be strained, I throw the sprigs in stems and all.

Peach leaves

Leslie called for peach leaves in pickles and puddings. I have no idea what sort of flavor they would give, but the choice (like that of lemon thyme) makes sense: if you had a peach tree, you had not only fruit but another herb. I don’t have a peach tree, but I do have a bay tree, so I substituted fresh bay leaves. Dry would do if that’s what you have. After all, there are two ways to strive for historical accuracy here: you can emulate Leslie herself by getting hold of exactly the ingredients she used, or you can emulate one of her readers by making reasonable substitutions when necessary.

Spices

These are more straightforward. The quantities may seem too great; they are not. I had to substitute two teaspoons of mace for whole blades, which I don’t have and can’t get except by mail-order. Do follow her instructions as best you can, though, and don’t use ground spices unless you have to, which will give a flavor both stronger and muddier. The spices should be cracked, not actually ground to a powder.

Cochineal

Cochineal is a red dye made from the bodies of insects, also conveniently called the cochineal. Until the last decades of the nineteenth century it was the only way of coloring foods red without adding flavor. If you want to emulate the red color of Leslie’s sauce you can add a few drops of red food coloring, but if you don’t mind the faintly purplish brown color that the sauce is naturally, I wouldn’t bother.

Vinegar

Finally the vinegar, which actually gave me the toughest decision. Leslie says to use “the best vinegar,” but what was that? Common household vinegar might be made of nearly anything, as Lydia Child explained:

It is poor economy to buy vinegar by the gallon. Buy a barrel, or half a barrel, of really strong vinegar, when you begin house-keeping. As you use it, fill the barrel with old cider, sour beer, or wine-settlings, &c., left in pitchers, decanters or tumblers; weak tea is likewise said to be good: nothing is hurtful which has a tolerable portion of spirit, or acidity. Lydia Maria Francis Child, The American Frugal Housewife (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1830), p. 17.

That would not be the “best” vinegar. Leslie offered a few recipes for good homemade vinegar, including one from cider, but I’m guessing that what she considered best was her “white vinegar” made from whiskey:

White vinegar. — Put into a cask a mixture composed of five gallons of water, two gallons of whiskey, and a quart of strong yeast, stirring in two pounds of powdered charcoal. Place it where it will ferment properly, leaving the bung loose till the fermentation is over, but covering the hole slightly to keep out the dust and insects. At the end of four months draw it off, and you will have a fine vinegar, as clear and colourless as water. Directions for Cookery, p. 409.

Christmas dinner being considerably less than four months away, I settled on plain white distilled vinegar, but on reflection something like three parts white to one part cider vinegar might give a more historically accurate flavor.

Adaptation: Scotch Sauce

This adaptation makes about a pint of sauce. The ingredients take a bit of preparation, but the sauce can simmer largely unattended.

• 2 3.5-ounce jars anchovies in olive oil, drained
• 1 teaspoon peppercorns
• 9 cloves
• 1 whole nutmeg
• 2 teaspoons ground mace
• 2 bay leaves
• several sprigs fresh lemon thyme, or regular thyme plus a half-teaspoon grated lemon zest
• a handful of parsley sprigs, or stems only (optional)
• 1 6–8-inch stick horseradish root, peeled and grated
• 1½ to 2 large onions, chopped
• 2 cups ruby port
• 2 cups white vinegar, or 1½ cups white plus ½ cup cider vinegar
• 1 teaspoon salt, or to taste

Chop the anchovies coarsely. Crack the whole spices in a mortar. Place all ingredients in a pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer about 2 hours, or until the mixture is reduced by about half and lightly coats the back of a spoon. Strain through a fine strainer. Add salt to taste. Cover tightly and store in the refrigerator.

Recently I was listening to another ancient carol and trying to explain it to my daughter. It begins with these lines:

This is the truth sent from heaven above,
The truth of God, the God of love;
Therefore don’t turn me from your door,
But hearken all both rich and poor.

The verses that follow tell of the creation of mankind, the fall of Adam and Eve, the promise of God’s redeeming grace, and the birth and teachings of Jesus. The text is strictly Biblical; it’s a poetic reading of standard Western Christian theology. But this is no church hymn — despite, as I had to protest, the way it is sung in my recording. The third line makes clear its purpose, which is to be sung as a carol, door to door, and to imagine it in that context is to rethink it completely. Door-to-door singing is not the performance of a well-tempered choir; its good intentions and hearty spirit have to cover a pronounced lack of precise tuning and time. The air being cold and the carolers’ throats dry after such vigorous use, at the end of each performance the householder is supposed to offer refreshment — alcoholic refreshment, in the form of wassail, spiced wine, punch — the effect of which is to enhance the singers’ good intentions and hearty spirit but not their precision, and so what may begin as a meekly offered song of thanks and praise is likely to end as a rousing, boisterous chorus. Not that carolers switched to “Jingle Bells,” but that verses like this gained a little gusto:

O seek! O seek of God above
That saving faith that works by love!
And, if he’s pleased to grant thee this,
Thou’rt sure to have eternal bliss.

This doesn’t have to be incompatible with drunken revelry. One ought to be happy about the prospect of eternal bliss, yes? We’re all such a bunch of screwups, aren’t we, but it’s going to be all right in the end? I’d drink to that.

That’s the paradox of Christmas, and always has been. It’s a deeply serious religious observation, celebrating the incarnation of the One True God and the promise of humanity’s redemption from sin, heavy stuff indeed, grafted onto a pagan festival, a desperately necessary celebration of light and warmth in the darkest, coldest nights of the year. The two origins don’t necessarily contradict, and in fact for much of the premodern era, at least, they seem to have been happily married. Quite a few Christmas songs from the late medieval and Renaissance Europe are obviously intended as dances; listening to them it’s almost impossible not to move to the music — and yet we’re not rocking around the Christmas tree; the lyrics are about the baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary, the miracle of the incarnation, the three in one. There’s even a traditional English song sung as Jesus, in the first person, telling his autobiography from birth (“thus was I knit to man’s nature”) to death, descent into hell, and resurrection, all in the form of a dance: “This have I done for my true love,” and the song’s title and first line are “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day.”

Dancers kick up their heels in an illustration from a 13th-century Bible.

Then along came the Puritans and ruined everything. Religion must be solemn; frivolity would be an offense to God. Christmas had to go. Ironically for a sect based on the individual’s relationship with and faith in God, they couldn’t show enough faith in believers to risk permitting the wrong outward forms of devotion, and so for periods in both Old and New England Christmas was banned. It continued in most of the rest of Europe, but a great many English traditions were lost, and in both England and later most of the United States, there was a gap of centuries in the meaningful celebration of Christmas. Maybe at that point Christmas should have been allowed to die a peaceful death, but, of course, it wasn’t.

When the Victorians revived it, borrowing willy nilly from Germanic traditions as well as their own, they couldn’t bring themselves to take too seriously the miracle of the incarnation; miracles were everywhere being replaced by machines. By then Puritan sternness, too, had lost its spiritual underpinnings, leaving only a singular devotion to business: Ebenezer Scrooge is what the Puritans had come to, their Calvinist work ethic devolved into parsimony and meanness. Dickens replaced the miracle of the incarnation with a hardheaded social gospel: Scrooge is not merely a miser; he openly condemns the poor. “Are there no prisons?” he famously replies, when asked for charity; “And the union workhouses? Are they still in operation?” Told that “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die,” he growls that “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” No tidier condemnation of the “one percent” in its own words has ever been penned.

It’s true that, as Dickens believed, a generous spirit would both “keep Christmas” in the pleasantly frivolous way of Scrooge’s nephew and do his level best to drive out ignorance and want, but the two don’t keep good company at a festival. The announcement of the word made flesh in the meanest of estates is a joyful promise of salvation, but the pinched and twisted figures beneath the Spirit’s cloak are dreadful reminders of earthly suffering. The former was a promise (if you’ll forgive the journalistic allusion) to the ninety-nine percent, the latter an admonishment that most of us are, in our own way, one-percenters. It’s a sobering thought, not a prelude to fun and games.

That left the mannered frivolity of parlor games and gift exchanges. We follow the Victorians’ lead today, in ways ever more frivolous and ever more mannered (in the sense of being scripted, if not in that of being polite). We throw “the season” a bone by making perhaps a few year-end donations to charity to ring up the tax savings. I was recently treated to a version of A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge’s famous lines about the poor were deleted and he was made to be merely a grump, the Grinch without the green makeup, the better not to spoil our holidays. You can, the message is — no, you should be frivolous, simply for its own sake. Not to be frivolous makes you a Grinch, a Scrooge, a Puritan.

Revelry may lift our spirits, but it needs have spirits to lift. Revelry is mere hot air, but it’s mere hot air that lofts a balloon — and yet without the structure and limits of the balloon, that hot air dissipates on the wind. A celebration of the sacred that verges into drunken reel isn’t going to send anybody to hell; it’s the guy who pulls his hat down around his ears and sets out to get drunk we need to worry about. Joy to the world, the radio sings while we fill our shopping carts, but joy needs spirit and revelry, both — revelry to give it life and spirit to give it direction.

So give me revelry, by all means, give me joy, but spare me the mannered frivolity. The last of my Methodist upbringing cringes in the corner of my soul to hear it, but I’m with the kid: Give me a rollicking medieval dance about Baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary and — I’ll add, for myself — a good mug of spiced wine. Stuff Santa back up the chimney. Christ is born in Bethlehem, and I’ll gladly drink to that.

The Belsnickel — which roughly translates as “Nicholas in furs” — came to Pennsylvania with settlers from western Germany in the 17th and 18th centuries. Instead of Santa, the Christ child, or Kristkindel, visited children with gifts. (His German name evolved into Krischkindel and then the Anglicized Kris Kringle.) The Belsnickel, though, was Santa gone rogue. Here’s an explanation of the difference from an 1890s guide for Pennsylvania Germans learning English (hence the short, simple sentences):

In the evening the Kristkindel goes around to the houses and distributes Christmas presents. The children await him. Sometimes Belsnickel comes and frightens them. He throws chestnuts around, and when the children run to pick them up, he hits them with a whip. A. R. Horne, Pennsylvania German Manual for Pronouncing, Speaking, and Writing English (Allentown: National Educator Print, 1896), p. 71.

Now there’s the Christmas spirit I’ve been searching for! Offering kids treats, then beating them when they take them! In other traditions the Belsnickel took over the Christ child’s job, and in one story he walked around town in dirty clothes or furs, carrying a stick or a whip, asking children to recite a Bible verse. If he approved of their answer he’d give them candy, nuts, or little cakes; if not, he’d beat them.

In practice the Belsnickel may not have been quite so nasty: a cousin or uncle likely dressed the part, rapping on children’s windows, asking them if they’d been good, tossing candy on the floor and switching them lightly just as a reminder. There might also be a sort of mummery, with bands of people dressed as Belsnickels (Belsnickeln?) going door to door and demanding, rather than bringing, treats such as sugar cookies.

By the end of the nineteenth century, just as the Pennsylvania German dialect was losing out to English (with the active backing of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I might add), the Belsnickel was melting into Santa Claus, whose worst punishment was a stockingful of coal. And the door-to-door mummery, of course, was co-opted into Hallowe’en.

Not everyone approved of this, of course — either the Belsnickel or Santa. In 1894 a Lutheran minister complained in a letter to The Lutheran Witness that his congregation would not be dissuaded from incorporating Santa Claus into the Christmas festivities. “The festival of the Nativity is not to be turned into an exhibition of childish theatricals…. Let no Belsnickel fright nor Santa Claus buffoonery defile the temple of the Lord.” Letter from E.F.B. to The Lutheran Witness, 12:17 (Feb. 7, 1894), p. 135. And the poor man hadn’t even dreamed of Rankin-Bass yet!

Today, the Belsnickel is nearly forgotten, and most of what remains of the original tradition comes from a poem by Henry Harbaugh, written in the 1860s. It’s written in Pennsylfaanish Deitsch, the Pennsylvania German dialect, which means that the words and spellings aren’t standard Hochdeutsch (high German) and may confuse even those of us who supposedly remember our college German. Happily the Pennsylvania German Society offers this English translation, but here’s the original Deitsch:

First they took our language, then they took our Belsnickel. I certainly never heard of the guy growing up. As lost cultural heritage goes, this one maybe isn’t so bad. But if we’re going to revive Germanic traditions, could we at least revive the ones we brought here in the first place and made our own, before we gave them up for Anglo-American commercialism? (Now that I mention it, clearly there’s an opportunity for franchising here. “O kennscht du den weischte, den gaschtige Mann?” sung to a tune reminscent of “Here Comes Santa Claus” by the Ray Conniff singers? A Rankin-Bass-style stop-motion Belsnickel turns in his whip when he learns the True Meaning of Christmas?)

Friends, Pennsylvanians, German-Americans, lend me your ears: Show some damn pride! Learn your own history! And bake some Belsnickel cookies, while you’re at it. They’re just sugar cookies, but if you call them Belsnickel cookies, it will make you superior in precisely the way you’ve been hoping listening to NPR and attending Krampuslaufen would do. Trust me.

Recipe: Belsnickel cookies

This is lifted straight from Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking, first published in 1938. I’m assuming these cookies were intended for Belsnickelers who went door to door demanding treats, but the book doesn’t explain. It was a book written for tourists, and maybe the author found the whole Belsnickel thing embarrassing.

I’m reprinting the recipe below as originally written. A couple of notes: This is a very rich, soft, dough. You absolutely must chill it before you can plausibly roll it out, and even then it will be difficult to work with; if you are lucky enough to have a marble paste-board, now’s the time to use it. When taken from the oven they should be lightly browned and set at the edges, and they are definitely worth the trouble, rich and crisp and just sweet enough. And finally, although it’s not traditional, I sprinkled them with cardamom sugar. I’m Pennsylvania Dutch, and so if I do it, that makes it Pennsylvania Dutch. Enough said.

• 1 cup sugar
• ½ cup melted butter
• 2 eggs
• 1½ cups flour
• ½ tsp. baking soda
• pinch of salt

Pour melted butter over sugar in a bowl and beat until smooth and creamy. Add the eggs, beating one at a time, into the mixture. Sift the baking soda thru the flour add the salt and add to the cake mixture. Stand the dough in a cold place for an hour. Roll out on floured board, quite thin. Cut into small rounds or other shapes. Sprinkle with sugar and bake in hot oven (400°F) for 10 minutes.

Still, you know, I couldn’t just find a recipe and bake it. I don’t think I’m capable of that anymore. And, anyway, if I did, what would I have to blog about?

This started with a recipe from Gourmet magazine, 1971, which I found republished in the The Gourmet Cookie Book, where I was, seriously, doing research. There was the recipe for speculaas, and I knew it was St. Nicholas Day. Fate, what?

Speculaas is a spice cookie, but it’s not gingerbread — it has a more complex array of spices than English gingerbread, which is usually a wallop of ginger — and I wanted to play up the differences, because I have eaten a lot of gingerbread these past couple of years. So I took Gourmet‘s advice and flavored it with rum, because I’ve never seen rum in a gingerbread recipe. I replaced some of the flour with ground almonds: Most traditional speculaas cookies are made with ground almonds, and I suspect that’s a holdover from the 17th century, at least, when English gingerbread was also based on almonds. The spice blend I liked best contains cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, white pepper, ginger, and cardamom; it’s from The Dutch Baker’s Daughter, who says that the basic ingredients and proportions date the the 15th century. It seems plausible to me.

I also found that nearly every recent recipe called for half again as much sugar as that 1971 Gourmet recipe, which is typical of cookies generally: over the past half a century not only “boughten” cookies but a lot of cookie recipes have grown markedly sweeter. It’s unnecessary; in a lot of cases the extra sugar detracts from the flavor of the cookie. Not to mention the whole matter of fattening us up.

Every recipe I found had what I consider to be too much chemical leavening: up to two teaspoons of baking soda (with no acid to neutralize it) and up to four teaspoons of baking powder. But every recipe published since 1850 has too much chemical leavening. It seems to be reflexive on the part of recipe developers. Why that is takes up about three chapters’ worth of my book, so forgive me if I don’t go off on an extended tangent here.

Then there was the question of how to roll them out and shape them. I found photos on the Web of speculaas in all sorts of delightfully fussy shapes that I didn’t feel like messing with. Gourmet‘s photo showed rectangles with slivered almonds pressed into them, which looked easy enough to me and fancy enough to suit my daughter. I rolled them thinner than I think most people would. Not sure why. Maybe I was feeling gingersnappish.

In any case, I like them. I think they are a damn fine cookie. As with all good cookies, I could eat half a box, but I don’t have to because one is satisfying — spicy, chewy, rich, flavorful. As for authenticity, well, as I often say, authenticity is a conceit anyway. I have no idea whether these would satisfy any Dutch person as “authentic.” Traditional as they are, everybody’s grandmother has her own recipe, and I would assume therefore that everybody could nitpick mine in some way. They taste good, and that’s all I have to worry about.

Recipe: Speculaas cookies

• about 1 1/2 cups almonds
• 2 cups flour
• 4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon white pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon cardamom
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter
• 1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon dark rum
• sliced or slivered almonds for decoration
• egg white for wash

Man, that is a lot of ingredients. Step one, don’t panic.

Step two, grind the almonds to a meal in a food processor. A few visible crunchy bits are fine. (Ideally you’d use blanched almonds, but I didn’t have any, and regular raw almonds worked fine. I imagine roasted would be fine, too. Just not salted.) Measure out a cup of the almond meal.

Cream the butter and sugar together until light. Beat in the egg, then the rum.

Whisk together the flour, spices, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Whisk in the almonds, and stir all this into the butter-sugar mixture until it comes together as a dough, which will take a minute.

If the dough is too sticky to roll out, which it probably will be, you can refrigerate it for awhile. Or, if you’re in a hurry to get that speculaas love, just use a little extra flour for rolling and don’t get too fussy about how you cut them out. Roll the dough 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick and “shape them to your fancy,” as they used to say. I used a pizza wheel to make quick rectangles. Then, if you like, press sliced almonds into them and brush them with a bit of beaten egg white to make them glossy.

I rolled mine 1/8 inch thick and baked them for about 11 minutes at 350°F, at which point they were set around the edges but still soft in the middle. As they cooled they hardened at the edges and stayed chewy in the middle, which I liked, but I think another two minutes in the oven would have left them crisp, which would also be fine. Note that I have a convection oven, so you may want to try 360 to 375° and a couple more minutes’ baking. If you roll them thicker, you’ll want to keep the temperature on the low side of that range and, I think, definitely take them out while still soft in the middle. Finally, I baked mine on parchment, which meant that I could slide the parchment straight onto the rack for cooling and didn’t have to deal with transferring thin, soft, floppy cookies with a spatula.

Substitutions: Everybody has their own spice blend for speculaas, so don’t think you have to go by this rule. Gourmet suggested brandy as an alternative to rum, or you could leave it out and add the leftover egg yolk you’ll have if you do the egg white wash. Some recipes call for lemon zest. Maybe there’s some happy little lemon zest in your cookies. It’s your world, man. And last, if you don’t have a food processor, you could just skip the almond meal and use 3 cups of flour, unless you want to pound the almonds in a mortar. I don’t know about you, but there’s only so old-timey I want to get.

I was thinking about this question after reading my local newspaper last week, which wants me to breathe easier about Thanksgiving.

Do you make a pie from scratch or hurl a frozen Frisbee in the oven? Do you slowly whisk gravy from drippings or quickly whisk gravy powder into water? Do you give your turkey more treatments than a spa weekend, or go straight from plastic wrapper to pan?

There is room at the table for all kinds of Thanksgiving styles, from laid-back convenience to full-scale kitchen assault…. There’s no shame in shortcuts. Raleigh News & Observer, November 16, 2011, p. D1.

The sidebar lists “5 Handy Gadgets” you can buy to make your feast even more simple and convenient, including an electric carving knife and a fat-separating cup.

I am, actually, a believer in simplifying things, but simplifying is not the same as taking shortcuts. Simplifying is running a 5K instead of a 10K; taking a shortcut is driving your car to the finish line. Simplifying means serving fewer dishes with fewer ingredients; taking shortcuts means serving as much as you can cram onto the table with as little effort as humanly possible. Thanksgiving being such a deeply American holiday, it’s not surprising the latter gets the ink. But it’s not the way to be thankful.

The purpose of a feast of thanksgiving was, originally — not to be didactic, but it bears repeating — to give thanks. Specifically, to give thanks for the harvest. Practically every culture that has ever had agriculture has had some sort of harvest festival, and practically all of those harvest festivals involved rituals of gratitude — to one or another god or goddess, to the earth, to the grain itself — for food to last another winter.

If you are living in an agrarian society in which you will be fed solely from the fruit of this year’s harvest, you had best be thankful, because there are fat years and lean years, and you have known the lean ones, or at least heard your elders tell incessant stories about them. You also know that whether the year is fat or lean is largely not under your control. You may work hard, you may do everything right, and you may still not reap what you sow. Rain or sun or wind may sweep it all away and your children starve. If the sun lies late abed and never dispels the morning cool, if the afternoon breeze makes you wish for a warmer coat, and yet you know that you have food enough that your children won’t starve before spring, then you know that things could be worse. And so you are thankful. And you have a feast — simply because you can.

That was the reality even in New England until about 1820, two centuries after the Pilgrims’ original “starving time,” when commerce and agriculture improved to the point that people no longer worried about going hungry in the early spring when their winter stores ran out. It has been the reality for most of human history, but it isn’t ours. A terrible number of children will go hungry in America this winter, but serious malnutrition is extremely rare, famine is something we see on television, and indeed obesity is a far greater threat to the health of the poor than hunger. The suffering that exists has little to do with failures of agriculture, nor only rarely the vagaries of the weather. We are, for the most part, an extraordinarily pampered people, who take bounty as a postulate; we believe ourselves to be in control of everything, and when something goes wrong, we quickly assign blame to maintain the illusion. In a modern urban context, surrounded by human construction, human artifacts, human invention, it’s hard not to assume that humans are, or ought to be, in control of our destinies. The modern urban context is all about control. But to what or to whom, then, can we be thankful? I’ve heard it said that gratitude is a state of mind, but it’s a state of mind inspired by the knowledge that we are not, after all, in control, and that if we are well off, the credit is not entirely our own.

It’s no coincidence that a generation after New Englanders largely quit worrying about feeding themselves, their traditional harvest festival was thought so debased and endangered that it had to be preserved as a formal, institutional, national holiday. Since the reformers themselves were far from being farmers, of course, the notion of a harvest festival became mere decoration, and the new holiday celebrated not the blessings of the harvest but the blessings of being an American. The latter were, if still allegedly God-given, rather more smugly received and less sincerely thanked-for than the former. And if we still celebrate with a feast, it is an industrial feast, the product of factories and machines rather than of the earth and of our own hands—stuffing from a box, cranberries from a can, a turkey engineered to convert feed to meat with maximum efficiency. To whom should we be thankful for that? ConAgra?

On Thanksgiving Day, if we are to celebrate and be grateful for our blessings with a meal, then that meal needs somehow to embody gratitude. Paradoxically, I find it easiest to be grateful for a meal when I did the most to create it. With produce from our garden gratitude comes easily, however carefully we planned it and however hard we worked, because I know how often it’s failed in the past. The first meal entirely of home-raised food (eggs, potatoes, mushrooms, tomatoes) seemed nearly a miracle. Barring that it helps me to know the people who did grow the food, who worked hard and risked failure and gave me the meal. I have a half-dozen farm families to thank for the food waiting in my kitchen for Thursday afternoon. A few of them I’ve known fifteen years.

But if you don’t know where your food came from, you can at least know how it was prepared. That you can do yourself. Whatever you can do, do it. I am not suggesting that your board needs to groan the praise of Martha Stewart, or that you ought to spend days and nights in the kitchen, unless that genuinely makes you happy. But you can cook something, thoughtfully, attentively, with your own hands, to the best of your ability, from ingredients you can recognize as something that once came from the earth. If your ability is limited, prepare something simple and be proud of it — but test your skill. If it isn’t perfect, well, what is? Repeated success just makes us smug; it’s the possibility of failure that encourages gratitude. Bake bread in the knowledge that grumpy yeast or a cold kitchen could make a heavy loaf. Embrace the uncertainty. The humility will make you grateful.

And the work? Consider it a devotion — to whatever you believe in. Consider it a reminder that there is, somewhere, somehow, by someone, a price to be paid for your cornfed stupor on the couch later on, a price you ought to take Thanksgiving Day to pay in something more meaningful than cash.

If doing from scratch, for yourself, with your own hands means simplifying a dish or culling a tradition, then so be it. A feast can be simple. But a feast of thanksgiving has to be honest. It must be made and shared joyfully, or it isn’t a feast of thanksgiving: it’s only a pro forma prelude to the orgy of Black Friday. Industrial abundance isn’t going to make us grateful. Neither will shortcuts and gadgets. But a little honest craft just might.