In aid of kitchen virtue

I've made the decision - someday, I want to buy a food processor. And thanks to the good folks at Cooks Illustrated and Cuisine at Home I know which one: the glorious Kitchenaid 760, with its blade storage, mini bowl and mini blade, and extra work bowl. It slices, it chops, it juices, it cuts butter into flour, kneads batter into dough, purees, shreds, grates, and probably could do cartwheels if the motor weren't so heavy.

It is also the priciest model I could have possibly settled on, so the price-hunting has begun, and will likely continue for months on end until a great deal comes along, so why am I, thrifty-hearted (or 'tight', Drumstick's most loving epithet) that I am, willing to shell out such a chunk of change?

All in the aid of a proper feast, of course! One which we can put on without exhausting ourselves so much that we can't enjoy as well as we would like. Quick work will be made of chopping carrots, onions, nuts, pureeing sweet potatoes, slicing potatoes, and suddenly Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and just plain ol' Tuesday night with the family can delight the cooks even more.

A virtuous appliance, indeed.

How to do Thanksgiving, from two greenhorns flushed after a modest success

So we had our first ever "on our own" Thanksgiving last Thursday, which was a blast. A few people brought drinks and starters--including a lovely tart by Anne and a salad by John--but we handled all the classic dishes, which is no mean feat when you don't have a car and live in a country that: (1) doesn't understand the use of pumpkin in desserts and the wonder of cranberries, and (2) thinks stuffing ought to be little balls of gluey breadcrumbs.

Well, it all came off ok, although I still find turkeys stressful. And we learned a few things for the record. First of all, I realized how much can be done ahead of the day to make the day easier! Second, I realized the IDEAL Thanksgiving is a potluck, where everyone brings a part of the show, and the host just handles the bird. So here's what we did:

Wednesday PM
- make cranberry sauce
- bake sweet potatoes and puree
- prepare pie crusts

Thursday AM

- finish pies
- make up and bake: stuffing, sweet potato casserole, honey-roasted parnsips

Thursday afternoon
- pop in turkey and prepare gravy
- peel potaoes

Just before dinner
- take out turkey and pop in rolls to warm/bake
- boil potatoes
- take out rolls and put in stuffing, sweet potato casserole, parnsips in oven to re-heat
- finish gravy
- warm peas and any other veg
- carve turkey

then...FEAST!

So here's the deal - if other people bring the stuffing, sweet potatoes, veg, potatoes, rolls, cranberry sauce, and pies, then all you have to do is pop other peoples' work into the oven for the 30 minutes while the turkey is resting. Then all you've done is turkey and gravy! OR if you're 'people' all you've done is one casserole or some such. Ahhhhh....sweet bliss...

For us, it all turned out amazingly well, although not the hottest food ever, and one of the 3 (!) small birds for 22 people+ was a leeeetle underdone, but no matter. We expected bumps in the road, so that when they came it was quite all right. The pumpkin chiffon pie plooped on us, but still tasted nummy. It was a great feast too, lovely atmosphere, good friends, lots of wine but never too much quaffed, just good fun, and much generosity of spirit.

Art in Everyday Life

Here's just an example of Drumstick's ability to see the art in everyday life.
His eye turned a piece of pragmatism into a composition:

Woman, with headpiece and flowers in the morning. 2006.

Moroccan food, anyone? - updated

In other news, I'm working on a Moroccan feast for Friday night's graduate student Christianity Explored course. I'll try to take a camera and post a picture on this post then! Here's the plan so far:

• hummus, marinated olives, and spiced carrots, served as a starter with warmed pita bread (closest I can get to Moroccan flat bread and broad bean dip)

• lamb and date tagine for the meat eaters, pumpkin and lentil tagine for those veggies, served with buttered couscous with raisins, pistachios, roasted almonds, pine nuts, and cinnamon

• figs with a dollop of greek yoghurt, topped with honey and pistachios, and served with macaroons. I'm going to quarter the figs lengthwise so they look like flowers with honeyed yoghurt pistachio centers - pretty!

• coffee, tea, etc.

UPDATE: Here's the main course! Click here for more

New Criticism, 3

5. “Our reading of a work should be ‘disinterested’….In other words, our reading should be neutral, impartial, not distorted by prior ideological assumptions” or preconceived ideas. This idea is traced to English empiricism and the notion that “We should experience the text directly rather than applying ideas to it.”

Again, we have here in New Critical ideals the presumably detached, neutral observer of the ideals of modern science. There remains something to recommend in this position, insofar as it also grows out of a firm commitment to trying to listen to the text as much as possible on its own terms instead of only appropriating it to one's own interests. The difference now is our sense of how much this is possible, our awareness of the limitations and challenges faced when trying to engage with the otherness of the text (please excuse the trendy invocation of the word 'other' but I couldn't think of a better word -- suggestions welcome!). All reading is now commonly regarded as interested, filtered, and--at its most pessimistic--partial and distorting.

The pendulum has swung from the objectivist ideal of the New Critic to the subjectivist distopia, from the denial of the self to the rejection of the another self. Note also that a corollary of the objective observer is the possibility of neutral, objective evaluation potentially capable of dispassionate, universal acceptance; likewise, the dominance of hyper-subjectivity renders evaluation of worth an impossibility, even should such worth be granted to exist.

Other, more measured ways of voicing an ideal similar to the New Critic's disinterestedness but without modernist baggage would include the concept of reading with 'good faith' or reading charitably, a notion whose various forms dot Christian history all the way back to Augustine at least (as with so many other things, good ol' Augustine). Both the idea of 'good faith' and 'reading charitably' attend to reading as an interpersonal encounter which can indeed produce knowledge--both interpersonal knowledge and otherwise--even though the mystery of that encounter precludes anything like Cartesian certainty. For myself, I can neither read as an everyman nor an island; neither depersonalized nor radically isolated; the former is at best a god-like illusion, the latter a vice masqueraded as necessity.

Current thinking on 'preconceived ideas' stresses without them, one cannot read at all. Not my bag to prove that here (haha!), but just a brief comment: the problem with preconceived ideas seems to me to be not that we have them, but that we bring to bear on the text ones that don't belong. And, despite appearances to the contrary, doing so outside certain set limitations and fashions is still called bad, far-fetched, or just plain silly in degree programs. What I aim for, at least, is to fill out my intertextual knowledge of the text's historical moment so that I have more and more at my fingertips the preconceptions and even some of the sensibilities that are more likely to belong that those natural to my own cultural and personal moment. I am under no delusion that I can be a 15th century reader, but neither do I despair of sharing some of that reader's means of approaching the text. In fact, such a practice as I have outlined is not merely an exercise of historical imagination or literary appreciation; it is also potentially an act of charity. I think I have Augustine and many others in the Church with me in preferring to try and love. So with this assumption of New Criticism, I would partly accept the goal of taking the text somehow as much as possible on its own terms, but change the language of objective detachment to a language of charitable interpersonal encounter.

New Criticism, 2

3. “Human nature is itself unchanging, and it is because of this that certain works have a timeless and universal appeal, since they issue from and appeal to this unchanging human nature. We each have our own unique individuality or unique ‘essence’, yet there is also a common store of ‘humanity’ which we all share.”

This tenet attempts to negotiate between a sense of common humanity and a sense of the individual…and thus the age-old question of the One and the Many enters into literary study. With some of the insights offered by reader-response, one could also add that a reader brings both her humanity and her individuality to a text, rather than just her humanity alone, and the two interact together in the reading act (as, presumably, they do in all other human acts). “Unchanging” is the flashpoint here, especially if you feel you must link up a discussion of human nature to a Darwinian model of speciation. However, it should be noted that one can take human speciation on board without dumping human nature into the primordial slop; see Leon Kass’ work for an example of retaining both. Without a relatively stable human nature, though, it seems to me at first glance that only radical individuation remains, and the reading encounter becomes yet another chimera to disguise the self.

--

4. “The best literature carries its meanings within itself; the ‘words on the page’ are enough for a true appreciation of a literary work. We do not need to know about an author’s life or intentions or about the historical or cultural context of a work to appreciate its literary value.”

Let’s set aside the way this statement assumes that a major reason to read is to appreciate literary value, which in turn is predicated on the idea that literary excellence exists (see previous post) and can be apprehended as such. Thus we’re back to the issue of evaluation with this one.

Of all the statements so far, this is the one I would most readily part company with. In an attempt to avoid biographical or intentional fallacies, it thoroughly isolates the text from both author and reader (whether that reader be the author’s contemporary or no). Such a strategy is perhaps partly indebted to a certain sort of modernist attempt at scientific objectivity, which separates the object of study from its environment and reduces as much as possible the variables at play in order to get at the ‘object in itself’ (e.g. the self in Descartes Mediations). What I find problematic with this approach is that understanding this ‘object in itself’ does not also give one an understanding of the objects’ being in relation. It is of course the temperment of our age to emphasize the object/text’s place in a network of relationships, contexts, etc., and this so even in theology with the advent of personalism. I personally find this to be a healthy correction of New Criticism. The opposite to the fallacy of ignoring the relational aspects of a text—its context, intertexts—is taking one of those aspects, say material circumstances or power relations, and making that the sole key to unlock the significance of the text. Both oversimplify.

We should not regard the text as a gnostic might, radically separating it from its embodiment in this time and place, speaking with and to this culture and textual antecedents, by this author (when known); nor should we come to it as materialists, subsuming the text (and its ideas) to its material and social con-texts. Embodied imaginations is what we have before us, not disembodied minds or infinitely permeable bodies.

New Criticism

I sat in a crowded undergraduate lecture theatre today ( I'm in England, so that's theatre) listening to a Cambridge don introduce these kids to 20th century literary theory. One of the themes of the lecture was pointing out the theory-laden training that the students have received thus far. Without their knowing, they have acquired skills in 'close reading' that carry with them a certain sort of literary theory highly indebted to the New Criticism of the early 20th century. It seemed that one of the points the lecturer wanted to impress upon the students is the key assumptions behind 'close reading' and New Critical stances towards literariness. What theory offers, she claims with Jonathan Culler, is ways of disputing what would normally be regarded as 'common sense' in reading, what we take for granted as the 'natural' way of reading.

Carefully avoiding taking a position herself, she destabilized students' notion of 'how to read' by casting suspicion on some of the assumptions of close reading. She did not take them apart completely; rather, she indicated their instability as concepts, their debt to an early 20th century moment, and their 'religious' sensibility. Interestingly enough, she spent a fair amount of time listing and then noting the instability of the liberal humanist approach to the idea of 'literature' and 'reading'. What seemed sad to me is that many of these concepts, though they may seem naive to a critically informed reader, can be powerfully defended and better nuanced with the insights offered by contemporary literary theory than the lecturer indicated. It was a bit of a debunk, it seemed to me, and the underlying message was 'while Cambridge may require you to learn to be a close reader, that choice of reading is somewhat arbitrary, culturally conditioned, and indebted to the sensibilities and values of the past.' As a student, I might have come away with a sense that I've been 'taken in' by my past teachers. Anyhow, I thought I'd list her set of assumptions of the 'liberal humanist' approach to literature and my re-articulations of some of them. See which ones you would tick off--and which ones you would seriously miss!

1. "The best literature is timeless and universal in its appeal. When we talk about a 'classic', we are referring to a work that transcends the vagaries and contingencies of history, local custom, class, gender, race, sexuality, etc."
- Note: the key words that tip this idea towards being out-dated are: 'universal' and 'transcends'. A more nuanced point would acknowledge the embeddedness of a classic within its time and the work you often need to do to understand a text culturally distant from you. Also, and this will come up again later, this statement assumes something like a shared 'human nature' that would enable universal appeal. The idea of a 'human nature' is, as you might be aware, quite suspect in academic circles these days. Even so, it is not uncritically naive to conclude that such a thing exists.

2. It is possible to construct a canon with broad consensus and only minor disagreements. "The idea of a canon, like the idea of a 'classic' work of literature, assumes that it is possible to evaluate literature."
- Note: here the key word is 'evaluate', not 'canon'. What is red-flagged here for the lecturer is the claim that this work is better, more worthy, than another; that this work is worthy of a certain kind of attention, even a certain kind of respect because of its having certain kinds of excellences that can be perceived as such. Again, while it is not straightforward to create a list of criteria of excellence, nevertheless, it is still intellectually legitimate to critisize! Not my interest to show that here, though... ;)

OK, back to the PhD - will edit this post and add more later. Just wanted to highlight first of all the trouble with the ideas of human nature and evaluation in order to suggest a possible question for later: ought a Christian literary theory recognize as one of its givens a certain sort of human nature and an ability of humans to discern literary excellences? ALSO, and this is just half-baked at the moment (like so much of our blog! lots of goo and little true crumb), would a recognition of human nature in terms of ensouled bodies make a critic better able to negotiate some of the tensions between the situated and the transcendent that plague theory? Currently the move is often to debunk the transcendent as a power ploy, but perhaps that is inhumanly materialist, just as an over-emphasis on the transcendent could be regarded as a gnostic rejection of embodiedness?

On Table Manners and Worship, 1

Warning: the moralizations and gross speculations of a shade tree theologian follow (unfortunately we don’t get much sun in the UK, and thus we don’t get a whole lot tree shade either… what this means for what follows I’ll leave for the reader to figure out)

I want to suggest that table manners, can become genuine instances of and opportunities for Christian worship.

One argument that I’ve dreamed up roughly runs this way

1. Table manners are ascriptions to the worthiness of mankind (another way of saying this is that they are expressions of human dignity)

2. To ascribe worth to something is to say, in whatever measure, that it is beautiful or good or both.

3. Christians believe that beauty and goodness are qualities rooted in the character of God. They are not free-floating concepts with an existence all their own nor are they merely linguistic tags identifying human feelings about things. It is possible to speak of a thing’s beauty and be more or less right or wrong in saying so. ya ya… a controversial statement but read C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man.

4. Christians believe that God’s goodness and beauty are expressed in his creation. Beauty and goodness in creation are derivative of God’s beauty and goodness.

5. To express the worth of something (its beauty and/or goodness) in creation is to express appreciation of God’s worth – even if indirectly, or unintentionally – who has made it so.

6. Worship is essentially proclaiming the worth or worthiness of something. The word ‘worship’ is a shortened form of the word ‘worthship.’

THUS!> The practicing of table manners can be a means to worship God. HA!

I’ll try and unpack this a little more in my next installment.

Ruminations on a Moral Imagination

Bourgeois Baby started a rant that I couldn't help participating in a bit. I'm still working towards the notion of a 'moral imagination' that is not equivalent to a legalistic imagination. Perhaps I should adjust my terminology?

Food for Thought: Some Thoughts about Food

On Monday, I overheard on BBC Radio 4's Food Programme a few startling words in relationship to small-holding farming in West Virginia: "more noble," "elegant," and "creation stewardship". (If you want a listen, there's a cordial debate between the farmer, Joel Salatin, and his ideological opposite, Dennis Avery, former agricultural analyst for the US State Department and small-holder himself.) So much of self-proclaimed evangelical Salatin's vocabulary regarding his farming enterprise seemed flavored by Aristotelian ethics, that we couldn't help but check him out further. "No Bar Code" is an article by Michael Pollan (very much in sympathy with Salatin), while "Dining Dilemmas" is a review of Pollan's book on Books and Culture. We're interested in trying to collect more informed points of view from the different sides as well, but we both are really struck by the notion of paying attention to a chicken's "chicken-ness" and crafting an ecosystem as well as an economic system that pays attention to the nature not only of animals and plants, but their human consumers. All very glowingly idealistic -- can it still feed the world? Avery doesn't think so (and for credible reasons), but Salatin is optimistic. Is there any way to balance these two together?

On a related front, here's a healthy reminder by my new favorite journalist Agnieszka Tennant not to get blindingly self-righteous about the relationship between our purchasing and our virtue!

The theme here - thinking about the relationships between what we eat, where it came from, how we purchase it and prepare it, and cultivating virtue and creative stewardship of the earth.

Appetizer

From Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature:

"...nature rightly understood might turn out to be a suggestive teacher. Nature might yield a pointing-toward, a hinting-at, a promising-forth of a wholesome direction, a propitious attitude, a dignified and fulfilling posture for our lives. Nature, and even natural necessity, might yet point the way to virtue."