{"id":160647,"date":"2022-07-13T14:01:08","date_gmt":"2022-07-13T18:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=160647"},"modified":"2022-07-21T17:03:56","modified_gmt":"2022-07-21T21:03:56","slug":"cooking-with-dante-alighieri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/07\/13\/cooking-with-dante-alighieri\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooking with Dante Alighieri"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photograph by Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

For the past fourteen months I have been on a path of conversion to Catholicism. In addition to going to mass, trying to memorize prayers, and worrying about my singing voice, I attend a staid biweekly discussion group moderated by a priest. We are slowly reading a book of contemporary Italian theology. My conversion was spurred by a specific\u2014and specifically Catholic\u2014experience of grace. I am confident about it, but less so about reconciling myself with the many dogmas of Catholic Church. I have struggled especially, as a previously secular person<\/span>, with believing in sin. As a category, it has always seemed socially malignant, an excuse to burn witches. And in my personal life both gluttony and lust might be problems, especially because they don\u2019t really seem like problems: sex and food are good things.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe ideal way of reading The Divine Comedy would be to start at the first line and go straight through to the end, surrendering to the vigor of the story-telling,\u201d writes translator Dorothy Sayers. Photograph by Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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And so I was overjoyed to find an articulation of sin that makes sense to me in T<\/i>he<\/i> Divine Comedy<\/i>, by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), a three-volume work wherein a pilgrim travels through nine circles of hell and then seven cornices of purgatory, before reaching paradise. The version I\u2019m reading was translated and annotated by English mystery writer Dorothy Sayers, who was also a theologian, and I found her work on natural and moral law, laid out in the book The Mind of the Maker<\/i>, helpful as background to understanding Dante. Natural laws, Sayers wrote, are \u201cstatements of observed facts inherent in the nature of the universe\u201d\u2014along the lines of \u201cif you hold your finger in the fire it will be burnt.\u201d The religious viewpoint says there is also a \u201c<\/span>universal moral law,\u201d which is itself a natural law, \u201cwhich consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man.\u201d By behaving in conformity with moral law, \u201cman enjoys his true freedom\u201d\u2014a state available in this life, which we might call happiness, or a kind of soul-deep fulfillment. Behavior that does not conform with the moral law \u201ctends to enslave mankind and produce the catastrophes called \u2018judgements of God,\u2019\u201d Sayers says. Sin, then, is behavior that does not conform with moral law; behavior which is spiritually and soulfully bad for us and will hurt ourselves and others. Injunctions on sin do not exist to deny us pleasures but to save us from harm.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The pleasures that landed a French pope in purgatory: fried eels and sweet Vernaccia wine. Red Vernaccia Nera bubbles sourced for me by spirits consultant Hank Zona. Photograph by Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Viewed through this lens, The Divine Comedy<\/i> becomes the page-tuner Sayers claims it is, offering \u201cthe drama of the soul\u2019s choice\u201d in this life. And while my general-secularist understanding of sin has been that it condemns activities that really aren\u2019t bad at all, what I found in the lowest rings of The Inferno<\/i> were behaviors that did seem like our human worst. In the last trench of circle eight, for example, alchemists are punished. These are \u201ctransmuters of metals,\u201d as Sayers puts it, \u201cevery kind of deceiver who tampers with the basic commodities by which society lives.\u201d Dante indicates that their behavior breaks \u201cthe general bond of love and nature\u2019s tie\u201d between people\u2014almost the worst thing you can do. I imagine today\u2019s alchemists as makers of poison baby formula or builders of shoddy public housing; circle eight, trench ten is just what they deserve. Just below them are three giants whom Sayers believes are \u201cimages of the blind forces which remain in the soul and in society\u201d when the general bond of love is withdrawn. The giants are \u201cblocks of primitive mass emotion\u201d representing \u201cnonsense,\u201d \u201csenseless rage,\u201d and \u201cbrainless vanity.\u201d Reading this, I thought about the contemporary internet and especially the impacts of social media\u2014which seems to me located between rings eight and nine of hell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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An Italian preparation of eels asks for a marinade of garlic and bay leaves. For more authenticity, substitute a white Vernaccia wine for the vinegar in the recipe. Photograph by Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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In this moral universe, my own sins of lust and gluttony turn out to be the least bad sins, punished in the first two circles of hell and purged on the last two cornices of purgatory. Both my vices are what Sayers calls sins of \u201c<\/span>incontinence<\/span>\u201d produced by \u201c<\/span>self-indulgence, weakness of will and easy yielding to appetite.\u201d Their mitigating factors, according to Dante: they are not related to desire to do harm; they often concern pleasure and mutuality.<\/span> But there are ways in which these behaviors often just don\u2019t work for us. Punishments throughout the Divine Comedy<\/i> are \u201c<\/span>simply the sin itself, experienced without illusion,\u201d Sayers writes. What unrepentant sinners did in life, they will do forever in hell, without the illusion that the sin was pleasurable.<\/p>\n

In hell, for example, the lustful are swept along by a black wind. \u201cThe bright, voluptuous sin is now seen as it is\u2014a howling darkness of helpless discomfort,\u201d Sayers says. This helpless discomfort is of course not located in all forms of sexuality\u2014but I know it can be found there. And gluttony, a sin which begins in mutual indulgence, leads, according to Sayers, by \u201cimperceptible degradation to solitary self-indulgence.\u201d I\u2019d understand that to mean that it\u2019s not the dinner and drinks with friends that are the problem but the binge-eating afterwards. And if we take the lessons of The Divine Comedy<\/i> seriously, perhaps one leads to the other more than we realize. The gluttonous in Canto VI wallow in the mud, being torn by the claws of Cerberus, an experience Sayers calls \u201ca cold sensuality, a sodden and filthy spiritual wretchedness.\u201d This description dovetails with my experiences of binge-eating\u2014enjoyment of food gone too far.<\/p>\n

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Instead of stuffing oneself with eel, Dante recommends: \u201cBlessed are they whom so great grace illumes, \/\u2026 that in their bosom\u2019s core \/ The palate\u2019s lust kindles no craving fumes.\u201d Photograph by Erica LacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Equally important, Dante\u2019s gluttonous are responsible for \u201cprey[ing] on people and things,\u201d Sayers says, a concept that relates to our increasing awareness of food systems and food ethics. If your consumption preyed upon others in life, in hell you are turned into the prey of a three-headed dog. In purgatory, the punishment for gluttony is starvation\u2014a fate which also seems illuminating when we think in the network of global consumption. I turned to this concept, with Purgatory<\/em> as my guide, in order to cook from Dante. Dante describes the this fate in Cantos XXII-XXIV; the emaciated shades of the gluttonous are teased by a tree \u201cgreen with laden boughs\u201d whose \u201ccrop of tempting fruit ambrosial odours spread.\u201d The tree tapers from bottom to top, so the shades cannot reach its fruit, and it is cascaded with spray at the top from a mountain stream, also out of reach of\u00a0 the thirsty sinners. Beneath the tree we meet people who ate and drank too much. One is a Frenchman named Simon de Brie, who died from a surfeit of \u201cBolsena eels and sweet Vernaccia wine.\u201d Another is Ubaldin dalla Pila, \u201ca liberal and cultivated man, with a great knack for inventing new culinary recipes,\u201d as Sayers explains in a note. (As an inventor of recipes, I am concerned!) In contrast with these peoples\u2019 behaviors, Dante celebrates a \u201cprimal age \u2026 beautiful as gold\u201d when \u201cHunger made acorns savory to its need\u201d and \u201cStreams for its thirst like rills of nectar rolled.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cGluttony tends to be, on the whole, a warm-hearted and companionable sin,\u201d Sayers wrote. I served the scones made from these acorns to as many friends as possible. Photography by Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n

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I decided to make a combination of gluttonous and virtuous foods: I\u2019d serve \u201cbad\u201d Italian-style fried eel with Vernaccia wine, but would also make \u201cgood\u201d scones with tree fruit and acorns. And a third dish would be a mixture of bad and good: an apple, taken straight from the tree of the knowledge (and my favorite fruit, incidentally), sweetened virtuously with honey. Dante remarks that \u201clocusts and honey were enough to feed \/ The Baptist in the desert.\u201d The usage of acorns seemed especially appropriate to counteract gluttony, since I have tried to make acorn flour before and discovered that processing acorns is so time-consuming, finicky and laborious that the results must be energy-negative. Acorns are also the kind of foraged and wild-crafted food recommended for a more sustainable lifestyle (though humans should harvest them only in years when they are bountiful in order not to negatively impact squirrel populations).<\/p>\n

I had acorns in my freezer from a previous adventure cooking from the work of Mary Shelley<\/a> and began working on them about a month in advance; there was no easy gluttony in this task. Acorns are bitter and very tannic, and their interior meat is encased in a tightly fitting husk that might be poisonous (sources conflict). I tried various methods recommended online to remove the husk, including boiling the acorns, which didn\u2019t work, and shaving it off with a knife, which did, but was incredibly slow. Since I was doing penance for my sins, I dutifully shaved acorns in my free time for about a week before discovering, mostly by accident, that the husk falls right off previously frozen acorns cracked and left out on the counter to dry for a few days. Leaving the acorns exposed to the air makes the outer flesh oxidize and turn black, but it didn\u2019t seem to affect the color of the final flour. In fact, my final flour was lighter in color than that of the commercial kind I\u2019ve bought before.<\/p>\n

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My flour, during the cold-leaching process. The finished product was worth the time. Photograph by Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Once the acorns were peeled, I had to leach out their tannins, a process that can take between three days and two weeks depending on the type of acorn. I ground my acorns with water in the blender, making a mixture that looked like a coffee milkshake, and then placed it in a large jar in the refrigerator. Once the mixture settled, I began pouring off the water and refreshing it twice a day. Internet sources instructed me to preserve the white layer on top of the flour, allegedly the fat and starch, by straining the mixture through cheesecloth with every refresh. I tried, but my cloth was too porous and my fat and starch layer was lost\u2014perhaps better from the standpoint of gluttony. At first, the mixture was overpoweringly oaky and bitter and smelled strongly of vanilla; but as promised, after two weeks of assiduous leaching, it became bland and pleasant with an oaty, milky scent. At that point I drained it and spread it out on a cutting board, fluffing and stirring it with my fingers every day or two until it dried. This might take a few days in a warm climate, but for me it took a week. I then ground it again (by the three-quarters cup in a coffee grinder\u2014also a slow task) and set out to bake the world\u2019s most hard-earned scone, using a recipe I\u2019d previously had success with using commercial acorn flour, and substituting dried figs, a classic Italian ingredient, for the foraged dried apples I\u2019d previously used.<\/p>\n

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A recommendation to preserve the flour\u2019s fat and starch by draining the water off through cheesecloth was not effective. Photograph by Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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My three dishes were some of the ugliest food I\u2019ve ever made\u2014which made me happy morally, if not creatively. To see ugly truths behind illusions is, I think, the first steps toward the kind of spiritual self-improvement I\u2019m seeking. I thought the unaesthetic results might also reveal my sins from a new angle. I propagate photos of pretty foodstuffs on the internet\u2014which I have located between circles eight and nine, don\u2019t forget\u2014a practice that encourages appetite in others and supports a lazy subconscious assumption that our food is all pretty and good. Yet we know the stories behind it are often ugly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In terms of taste, my dishes fell neatly into the categories of bad, mixed, and good, almost as if Dante had placed them there. I have never had much success cooking eel. When cooked well, it is tender and melting, but mine always turns out tough. Neither the texture nor the oily, fishy flavor would tempt anyone to overconsume. The baked apple was fine, a reliable dish of moderate sweetness. I ate it but thought it really could have used some ice cream. (Would this have been a sin?) And the homemade acorn flour scones were incredible, and even grew on me as I polished them off over several days. The flour had a sweet, nutty, faintly oaky flavor, and a unique brawny toothsomeness. Its relative lack of fat and starch made the scones crisp-dry on the outside and perfectly pillowy in the center. I\u2019ve since made a second version without figs and with pecans, which was even better, and the recipe below reflects the changes. The virtue of restraint, in this case, really was its own reward.<\/p>\n

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The fruit tree which taunts the gluttonous in purgatory with unreachable branches is \u201ca scion of the self-same stock \u2026 which fed that greed of Eve\u2019s,\u201d Dante wrote. Photograph by Erica MacLean.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The wine for my meal was a Vernaccia, a type which appears frequently in medieval and early Renaissance Italian literature. My spirits consultant Hank Zona<\/a> explained that in that time period, it was a lightly macerated sweet wine that could have been made from any number of grapes. Today the term refers to wine made from a specific Vernaccia grape, of which there are several. Hank chose a bubbly red Vernaccia Nera from Italian producer Paris Rocchi, a second-generation vineyard run by a brother-sister team<\/span>. He said that bubbles and fried food go well together, and that the eel\u2019s meaty flesh would pair with the earthy, dark-berry notes in the wine. The wine went a long way towards improving the dish, and unlike the other sinful food, was delicious.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I enjoyed drinking the wine and pulling together the meal,\u00a0 odd as it may have been. Despite the complexities, I hope such enjoyment is \u00a0not a sin\u2014but I suppose, someday, I\u2019ll find out.<\/p>\n

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Fried Eel <\/b><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00bd pound eel fillets
\n2 cloves garlic, smashed
\n3 bay leaves, crumbled
\nSalt
\nPepper
\nOlive oil
\n1 tablespoon champagne vinegar
\n\u2153 cup flour, for dredging
\nLight flavorless oil for frying
\nLemon wedges to serve<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Chop the eel fillets in three-inch pieces. Set them in a flat-bottomed dish, topped with garlic and bay leaves. Season with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil and vinegar, and set aside to marinade for at least an hour or ideally overnight. When you\u2019re ready to cook, place the flour in a shallow dish, season with salt and pepper, and dredge the eel pieces. Heat the oil in a large skillet to approximately 350 degrees and fry the eel until browned and crispy, being careful not to crowd the pan. Set on paper towels to drain and serve with lemon wedges.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Acorn Scones <\/b><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For the acorn flour: <\/b><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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1 gallon freezer bag filled with acorns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For the scones: <\/b><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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1 cup white flour
\n<\/span>\u00be cup acorn flour
\n<\/span>1 tablespoon baking powder
\n\u00bc cup sugar
\n\u00be teaspoon salt
\n8 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, diced
\n<\/span>\u2153 cup pecans, chopped
\n3 tablespoons buttermilk
\n1 egg<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To make the acorn flour:<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Pre-freeze your acorns for at least a day. Remove from the freezer, crack the shells, and spread them out on a countertop to dry for two or more days, waiting until the inner husk of the acorn falls off easily. The acorn flesh will turn black, but don\u2019t worry about it. When you can easily remove the husks, do so, then process the acorns in your blender in batches, using about a 1:2 ratio of acorns to water. Put the resulting mixture in a large jar with a lid, refrigerate, and wait for the flour to settle to the bottom. When it has, you can pour off the top of the liquid, add more water, shake and repeat. Refresh the water in this way twice daily until the tannins have leached out and the flour is bland and pleasant to taste, anywhere from three days to two weeks. If you are not sure if the flour is bland enough, give it more time. When ready, drain and spread out in a warm place to dry on a large baking sheet, anywhere from one day to one week. At this point you\u2019ll have a chunky, polenta-like meal. Grind again in a coffee grinder until fine. One gallon freezer bag of acorns produces about three cups of flour.<\/p>\n

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To make the scones:<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Preheat the oven to 375. Mix together the acorn flour, white flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt in a medium mixing bowl. Add the cold butter and cut in with a pastry blender until the mixture is mostly combined and any remaining chunks of butter are smaller than pea-size. Add the pecans and stir. Make a well in the center and add the egg and the buttermilk. Whip with a fork to combine, and then start pulling in the flour mixture, stirring until the entire mass is moistened. Use your hands to crunch the dough together until it is homogenous and forms a single ball. Place the dough on a baking sheet, flatten slightly with a rolling pin, and cut it into six wedges<\/span>. Pull the wedges apart a little so they don\u2019<\/span>t stick together when they cook. Bake for sixteen minutes, until puffy and cooked through.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A Single Baked Apple<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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1 apple
\n2 teaspoons honey
\n1 teaspoon chopped pecans<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Preheat the oven to 350. Cut the cap off the apple and remove the core. Fill with the honey and pecans, place in your smallest baking dish, cover the dish with foil, and bake for thirty to forty-five minutes, until the apple is soft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York.\u00a0Read earlier\u00a0installments of\u00a0Eat Your Words<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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