At some of our tables, the food not only nourishes the room but is its explanation.
Meals and miracles have the same plate in Christian tradition. Stories, more long before recipes moved in print, came by hunger tales of how saints made a dearth yield, how chances were changed to omens, how folk-lore created a trail of folklore which still occasionally appears in tr truisms, feast-days and even fasteners stuck to garments. These are not written (then) like menus, like maps: of hardship, care, devotion, and the everyday worries that cluster around bread, beer, and fish.
Look at the hermit Neot, of Cornwall and of a town in the Cambridgeshire that is named after him. In a single old legend an angel put three fish in his well, and only allowed him one a day, and the store never ran out, as though the water itself were the measure of it. When disease tempted his servant to steal two, the tale narrows down to a moral concerning moderation: the cooked fish were returned to the well, and they came back to life on touch. The miracle itself is quaint, but it maintains a grave monastic interest, that care will slip so easily into profligacy, that rules will only be seen when they are violated.
Food wonders elsewhere are bound to the body as some of the most direct frailties. A late antique physician-saint, Blaise, remains memorable not because he gave a sermon but because he was called upon at his throat by a choking child: a fishbone in a child, the prompt blessing, the abrupt cure. The result is a cultural and not culinary aftermath, which is reflected in a ritual still maintained at most churches as the Blessing of the Throats, in which crossed candles are moved over the neck to signify that breath should be treated as a ceremonial value which is worth protecting.
The relief of weather and war is preserved after some of the stories instead of illness.
Hyacinth is an itinerant preacher in medieval Eastern Europe whom village memory incorporates using a storm story: devastated harvests, prayer, and fields that are revived into their productive condition. The successive pierogi serves as a form of thanks that has been made into food, and the Polish exclamation, “swiety Jacek z pierogami!” will keep the name of the saint attached to a practical comfort food instead of an abstract halo.
In Wales the saint is not so much eaten but worn. The leek, tacked on coats on the day of St. David is usually justified by a legend of the battlefield: the soldiers used to cover themselves with leeks so they would not be confused. But the tradition is more rooted in the cultural memory; the tradition can be dated back to at least seven centuries ago, transforming a stinking plant into a personal identity badge.
Fish turns back in another key with haddock, the dark marks of which beg a story. A widely accepted Christian interpretation associates the “thumbprints” with the Peter and the incident of the tribute coin in Matthew, the fish with the holy fingers branded in the middle of the capture. Folklore, however, will never be satisfied with one genesis: Scandinavian and Cornwall are also spread with a devilish variant of the mark and the same ingenuity which anoints a fish can be as easily used to burn it.
Ordinary as beer is made to be, becomes bright in the legends of Brigid. At a time when drink was safer than water, the narrative insists that it was better to run out. The most eye-opening thing about Brigid is that it is reported that she turned bathwater the sick used into beer and this is the story that care work is not an incidental part of the work but the location where the miraculous could reach.
In these stories it is not the menu that is important. It is the manner in which communities kept food as a way to keep meaning one fish per day, leek on a lapel, a drink cured, so that the sacred might be recalled along with supper.
