Women in God's Kitchen: Cooking, Eating, and Spiritual Writing

by Cristina Mazzoni

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once noted that "nunneries in the old days were veritable storehouses of the most delectable tidbits." Perhaps that is why the much-maligned Lucrezia Borgia is said to have truly felt at home only in the company of pious cloistered nuns. In his landmark study, Holy Anorexia, Rudolph Bell focused his attention on holy women who survived on nothing but the eucharistic wafer. Cristina Mazzoni, taking the opposite tack, savors the food writings and images of a broad spectrum of Catholic saints and holy women. A native of Italy and a splendid cook herself, Mazzoni accords due attention to her fellow countrywomen, as well she should given the importance of Italian cookery (Catherine of Genoa, Angela of Foligno, Gemma Galgani), but includes numerous other holy women and their cuisines as well: Germany (Hildegard of Bingen, Elisabeth of Schönau, and Margaret Ebner), France (Margaret Mary Alacoque, Thérèse of Lisieux), Spain (Teresa of Avila), colonial South America (Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz), England (Margery Kempe), and even the United States (Elizabeth Ann Seton, who was the first person born in the United States to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church). In her Introduction, Mazzoni invites the reader "to seek out and savor with me...the food concocted, dished out, bitten into, tasted, and swallowed in the writings of holy women: food that may be mundane, unexceptional, and commonplace, but food that may also be delicious, nutritious, indulgent, or healthful. Whether in the form of stockfish and stew or chocolate and jam, whether cooked as lasagna with greens or curdled into a fine or bitter cheese, this food-through metaphors and similes, through anecdotes and memories-leads to mystical connections, underlines the presence of meaning even, or especially, in the midst of seeming meaninglessness, and leads us to share in the pleasure of cooking, eating, and learning at a divine table in God's kitchen."

Genres: Religion, Food

222 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 2005

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is this a book about mystical theology and feminine spirituality or about cooking and eating food? Yes. Professor Cristina Mazzoni applies the tools of feminist literary criticism to many texts written by holy women -- many of them Catholic saints and a few heretics -- to extract layers of meaning and depths of insight. She imaginatively invokes Snow White in her discussion of the meanings of Eve's apple. This is an intellectual treatise, not a quick read, and it ought be read slowly to allow the reader to thoroughly chew on and digest her exposition.

[Amanda Witt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that makes one think about how food can be both a physical and spiritual experience.
Focussing on the lives of 12 holy women from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, each is allocated an item of food or kitchen chore.

[Elizabeth]

I didn't feel like this really gelled -- either as a whole or even within chapters. But I did learn various interesting things, including:

Among feminist and liberation theologians’ favorite stories is Jesus’ parable about the baker who, with flour and a little leaven, prepares to make bread. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:20-21). [...] And though it is the leaven that does the work of puffing up the dough, thus improving its texture, flavor, and digestibility, still the woman’s activity is just as clearly emphasized: she is the one who takes the leaven and “hides” it in the flour (enerkryptsen in Greek, abscondit in Latin: a curious choice of verb), with an action both deliberate and covert.

This parable recalls earlier appearances of bread and flour: Three measures was significantly the same amount of flour used in the Hebrew Scripture by Sarah, when Abraham invited her to make cakes for the three angelic visitors announcing that she was to bear a child (Gen. 18:6), and by Hannah, for the offering at the temple during the presentation of her son Samuel (1 Sam. 1:24). It was a huge amount, enough to feed one hundred people, and unlikely to be prepared at home: in addition to evoking Sarah and Hannah, the amount of flour might have been a comic exaggeration on Jesus’ part, or it might be intended to give the woman cooking for a crowd a priestly role: home baking was for women, but the baking for special offerings was done by priests.2 [...] Paul enjoins his followers to “cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:7-8). Jesus is the main course, the sacrificial lamb, and the faithful are, metaphorically, the unleavened bread accompanying him.

Why are the faithful to be “really unleavened”? In biblical times, leaven, like the starter that is used today to make sourdough bread, was made out of old, fermented, basically rotten and smelly dough [...]. Because it is old and reused from one batch to the next, leavened bread ties the present to what has come and gone---but for a lump of dough. Furthermore. Liberation is associated in the Jewish tradition with unleavened bread: there was no time to wait for the dough to rise when the Jews fled from Egypt, and, in memory of that hasty departure toward freedom, unleavened bread is prepared to this day for the Passover celebration (Exod. 12:39). In addition to its historical importance, unleavened bread is considered pure because it is made with flour that is not fermented and thus is clean and unblemished. Unleavened bread recalls history and the old days, though its connected with the Jews’ flight from Egypt, but, materially, it is a wholly new food, untouched by the contaminations of the past.

[...] Biblical bread is understood as pure and unleavened or as leavened and impure, as either naturally fresh and raw or as cooked and corrupted by culture. Jesus challenges this clear distinction in his parable by finding divinity in the unclean, his kingdom in bread dough, God in the kitchen. So Jesus’ baker, hiding a small amount of leaven in a huge quantity of flour, points to a sign of the divine, she announces an impending epiphany beyond her work space: this epiphany is visible---as well as, more suitably, tangible---in the batches of dough mixed, kneaded, and risen before her own.

When fleeing from slavery in Egypt, the Jews took along unleavened bread: they were escaping and in a great rush. Leavened bread takes time: it takes time for the small amount of leaven to spread and multiply through the floury mass, producing bubbles of carbon dioxide which, trapped within the dough, make it rise. Leavened bread requires connections: the baker must rely on a previous batch of dough to make her own. But dough inevitably does rise, revealing how God may take the apparently corrupt and contaminating, God may require the work of the seemingly unholy, to bring holiness into being. The transformative potential of leaven, small and suspect as it is, corresponds to the transformative power of the reign of God, taking place over time, taking place inevitably, taking place through the work of a woman, and, of all places, in a kitchen. Under her hands and in her work, God establishes connections with a beloved people, provides meaning for their existence, and promises them, in the divine presence, pleasure as sustaining and life-giving as bread.

-pp. 18-21, from Chapter 1 “How to Bake Wonder Dough into Miracle Bread: Byzantine Saints and Catherine of Genoa”

2. Ben Witherington, Women in the Ministry of Jesus: A Study of Jesus’ Attitudes to Women and Their Roles as Reflected in His Earthly Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 40-41. More on this parable may be found in Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2000), 290-91; and Herman Hendrickx, The Third Gospel for the Third World, 4 vols. (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2000), 3A:293-95.

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Among the protagonists of the volume Holy Women of Byzantium, for example, a collection of ten such hagiographies edited by Byzantine specialist Alice-Mary Talbot, one finds: a couple of transvestite nuns, Mary/Marinos and Matrona of Perge, who disguised themselves as monks; the former prostitute Mary of Egypt, who so enjoyed her trade that she required no payment in exchange for sexual favors; victims of domestic violence such as Thomaïs of Lesbos, a lower-class woman, and Theodora of Arta, an empress; and the dragon-slayer Elisabeth the Wonderworker.6
-p. 21, from Chapter 1 “How to Bake Wonder Dough into Miracle Bread: Byzantine Saints and Catherine of Genoa”

6. Alice-Mary Talbot, ed., Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996).

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In The Spiritual Dialogue, a discussion between body and soul, bread is a process rather than a product, an activity more than an object of desire, need, or consumption. Catherine [of Genoa]’s humanity, allegorized as human frailty “realized that the Spirit wanted it to work with human misery as if it were kneading bread and even, if need be, to taste it a bit.”26
-p. 30, from Chapter 1 “How to Bake Wonder Dough into Miracle Bread: Byzantine Saints and Catherine of Genoa”

26. Catherine of Genoa, Purgation and Purgatory--The Spiritual Dialogue, trans. Serge Hughes (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 130.

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The meaning of cinnamon (and, in the earlier passage, of balsam) is not exhausted by the richness of its aroma, for spices represented more than sweetness and added flavor in the medieval period. At the time when Elisabeth [of Schönau] was writing, balsam was so rare as to be almost unobtainable, and cinnamon, though somewhat less scarce, was nevertheless very expensive. Still, among the upper classes, the quantities of spices used are astounding to the modern, post-seventeenth-century palate: it was not unusual for a dish serving twelve people to call for a half pound of spices!19 While they were not used to disguise the flavor or rotting meats nor as a preservative (though both of these claims were common assumptions for a long time, food scholars no longer believe them, as spices were expensive and thus used only by the rich---those who could certainly afford fresh meat), spices were believed to aid in the process of digestion, medically regarded at that time to be a sort of “cooking” that took place in the stomach: the “heat” of spices (a temperature-based metaphor still in use today) was believed to radiate from the digestive tract, allowing food to be absorbed faster and better. For this reason spices were not only used in cooking but also eaten at the end of the meal or before going to bed, often in the form of a confection. Thus, for example, Thomas Aquinas allowed for the consumption of candy during Lent because, eaten in the form of sugar-coated spices, or comfits, they were taken not as nourishment---and therefore food---much less as a treat, but as an aid to digestion, a form of medicine. Confectionery, seen today as the very opposite of healthful eating ironically began as a pharmaceutical practice.20 The high cost of spices made them unattainable for the poor, whereas for the rich, they were a much sought-after object of desire and a status symbol that was the privilege of a few.
-pp. 56-7, from Chapter 3 “How to Taste Sugar and Spice: The Flavors of Elisabeth of Schönau”

19. T. Sarah Peterson, Acquired Taste: The French Origins of Modern Cooking (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 7.
20. Claude Fischler, “La morale degli alimenti: l’esempio dello zucchero,” in Fra tutti i gusti il più soave… Per una storia dello zucchero e del miele in Italia, ed. Massimo Montanari, Giorgio Mantovani, Silvio Fronzoni, 3-33 (Bologna: CLUEB, 2002), 4, 17; Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food, trans. Carl Ipsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 60-61.

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Scholars have attributed to the cooking of convents and monasteries the invention of gastronomy: just as the large numbers of people eating every day at the same time and in the same place led to organized ways of distributing food, for example, so also the desire to break the monotony of daily feeding during the special yet frequent times of fasting, abstinence, and religious holidays led to creative ways of preparing the foods that were allowed, available, or encouraged.
-pp. 74-5, from Chapter 5 “How to Confect Convent Treats: Sweet Traditions and the Martyrdom of Saint Agatha”

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In late medieval England brewing was a vital enterprise; people normally avoided water, which was often contaminated, and thus drank ale as a regular part of their daily diet. Brewing, furthermore, was a small-scale, unorganized, local business in the hands of women. Ale was made with fermented malted barley, since beer (i.e., ale brewed with hops) only became common in England as the fifteenth century progressed. Hops contain natural preservatives that ale lacked, and thus before the advent of beer it was necessary to brew frequently that beverage that medieval people consumed in such vast amounts: ale deteriorated very quickly and it tasted best when produced locally (so much for local microbreweries being a contemporary fad!). Before the introduction of hops and beer in the fifteenth century, brewing was done primarily by women: “alewives” or “brewsters” (both terms referred to female brewers only), who sought to supplement the household income. Significantly, with the introduction of beer and the transformation of the brewing industry into a centralized, larger-scale, profitable industry, women were squeezed out of it and men came to dominate it.5
-p. 106, from Chapter 7 “How to Skin Stockfish and Chop Stew: Margery Kempe’s Sacrifices”

5. Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (New York: Oxford University, 1996), 53.

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Teresa [of Avila]’s was the sacrifice of a woman who, judging from some of the metaphors and images she uses, knew well the pleasure that this food can bring. And yet it is also clear that this pleasure is not perceived as being, in itself, sinful: she and her sisters are not vegetarian because meat is bad, but because meat is good. Only good things can be offered up to God in sacrifice. And hers is a joyful, not a resentful, sacrifice. The perils of gluttony in her autobiography are not at all the focus of her passages on food, on the contrary: food is good, and good food is better. Eating and drinking, like sleeping, are not annoying to her soul because they are evil or sinful, but because the intensity of her spiritual journey periodically requires a focused recollection.
-p. 123, from Chapter 8 “How to Boil and Fry in God’s Pots and Pans: Teresa of Avila’s Kitchen Secrets”

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(chocolate was also a favorite Catholic drink because, though nutritious, it was liquid and therefore not believed to break the obligatory fast of Lent, Fridays, and the hours before taking the Eucharist).14
-p. 168, from Chapter 11 (“How to Indulge in Divine Delicacies: Gemma Galgani’s Tasty Treats”)

14. On chocolate and religion, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “Chocolate, Catholicism, Ancien Régime,” in A Slice of Life: Contemporary Writers on Food, ed. Bonnie Marranca, 375-78 (Woodstock and New York: Overlook Press, 2003).

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One can only verify whether the behavior of the soul as regards this world bears the marks of an experience of God.

In the same way, a bride’s friends do not go into the nuptial chamber, but when she’s pregnant they know she has lost her virginity.

There is not fire in a cooked dish, but one knows it has been on the fire.

On the other hand, even though one may have seen the flames under them, if the potatoes are raw it is certain they have not been on on the fire.

-Simone Weil, The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay Company, 1977), 428, as quoted in “Conclusion: Eating and Cooking Lessons,” p. 192.