Years ago, my mother’s housekeeper passed on a bit of gossip to a neighbor.
“You know, Mrs. Fedon actually reads cookbooks.”
While most women at the time opened a cookbook to locate a recipe, my mother had a gourmet cooking, stitchery and gift shop. To her, reading cookbooks was a passion, as well as good business.
As her daughter, I proudly follow her reading habit. A good cookbook is not just a collection of recipes it can be a roadmap for a slice of life.
Gaia’s Kitchen is such a cookbook. Marina and Koen sent it to me for Christmas via the UK bookseller, Book Depository, which, by the way, ships books all over the world—for free.
Gaia’s Kitchen is a collection of vegetarian recipes put together by Julia Ponsonby and friends at Schumacher College in Devon, England. Marina was introduced to the book at an Art of Hosting training, co-sponsored by a group calling themselves the Schumacher Sprouts (because they are Belgian and attended Schumacher.)
Never having heard of Schumacher, my first journey in the book was learning that the College was founded in 1991 to promote the values of E.F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful. The school’s curriculum is based on a new vision for human society and its relationship to Earth. (Journey No. 2: requesting Small Is Beautiful from the library.)
Third journey: Who is Gaia? Well, it turns out she is Greek, the goddess Mother Earth. Apparently I slept through that chapter in high school mythology.
Anyway, back to Schumacher College. It is an international college for Ecological Studies offering Master’s degrees such as Ecological Design Thinking or Holistic Science, as well as short courses for a weekend, week, or more. Classes are coupled with the community experience of living on campus and working together in small groups to mop floors, chop celery, weed the salad patch, scrub potatoes, and wash dishes. This way participants from all over the world share skills and stories while building community through social exchange.
I found the section on cooking for those with special dietary needs—substitutions for eggs, butter, wheat, milk, sugar, cheese, nuts, salt—to be important for those of us who often attend potluck events. If nothing else, label your dish! And, each recipe includes ingredient amounts for a family, as well as for a crowd (30-40).
The section called Juggling with Onions illustrates that chopping onions brings tears, no matter which hemisphere you live in. The author’s 10 tips, gathered from many kitchen visitors, includes such tricks as putting a slice of white bread in your mouth, with it hanging out like a tongue, to wearing a pair of swimming goggles. You still may cry while juggling onions but everyone else in the kitchen will laugh hysterically.
Other gems from Gaia’s Kitchen:
- The information. I’ve always known basil’s scent, either in the garden or the kitchen, is heavenly. But I never knew that the herb is considered sacred in India where it is known as tulsi.
- The description. While writing about quinoa being a complete source of protein, Julia Ponsonby writes that each cooked grain is wearing a “tiny white halo”. The recipe, following this train of thought, is called Angelic Quinoa Salad.
- The delightful UK lingo on page after page. Sultanas (white raisins) and aubergines (eggplants) sound so exotic, and yet the description of one recipe, “quite fiddly to make,” sounds like it’s straight out of Mary Poppins.
- The creativity. A healthy cake invented by a vegan at the College named Sophie is described as sophisticated, with a lot of “naughty-but-nice flavor” you get when using butter, eggs, sugar and wheat (but it has none of those). It’s called Sophisticakey but there is nothing sophisticated about the instructions written in “fistfuls”, ie. 2 fistfuls of desiccated coconut, 1 fistful raisins, 1 fistful cashew pieces, etc.
- The personalities. The College’s house manager William claims the “avocado pear” is one of four conclusive proofs of the existence of God. The other three: black olives, grape juice and Mozart’s ‘Ave Verum Corpus’.
There are plenty of recipes for my lazy Sunday afternoon kitchen experiments, including Spinach and Mushroom Plait (UK term for braid) with how-to-plait-puff-pastry instructions and the brewing secrets for William’s pot of Masala Chai.
The people within Gaia’s Kitchen come alive and led me to the College’s short course website. What fun to visit England and take a course on “An Exploration of Eldering,” a term I had never encountered, to learn how to turn Age-ing into Sage-ing.
After scanning courses on forest gardens and soulful communication with trees, I traveled to an instructor’s website where I fell in love with the Mud Maid Earth Woman at the Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall. This giant sculpture by Susan Hill is a sleeping woman covered in moss, ivy, and ferns—a woodland beauty in one of the most popular botanical gardens in the UK. How I envied the images of the Lost Gardens.
The next morning, I took Sandy IV for our usual walk in my dad’s Secret Garden. I saw it with new eyes.
The fire pit became The Ring of Fire. My dad’s hand-chiseled marble figures, although not as large as the Mud Maid Earth Woman, have the patina of moss and lichen and decades of weathering. Tree stumps and roots offer perfect hiding places for forest faeries. Sometimes a good book, even a good cookbook, brings you home. Laurie Lynch
Written on Slate: “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” –Thomas Berry
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