Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Sap Moon

March moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We have moved into the lunar cycle known as the Sap Moon in the Old Farmer's Almanac -- a name based on the traditional calendars used by the indigenous peoples of the northern woodlands. This is the time of year when the sap begins to run in the Sugar Maples, and northern dwellers would tap the trees for that sweet stuff, cooking it down into maple sugar and maple syrup in huge iron kettles in the snowy woods.

But before I delve into that cauldron of sweetness, you may have already noticed that my eletter is coming from a new address. I have a new and improved website: www.wisefoodways.com; and a new program managing my eletter list. Please don't hesitate to let me know if you have any trouble receiving your Cauldrons, and please do check out the new website and let me know what you think! And now back to the sweetness of the Sap Moon...

Ah, sweetness -- that great metaphor for goodness, comfort, and joy. When I was a perpetually hungry teenager, fighting what seemed like endless cravings, one of my primary urges was for sweetness. When I was miserable, I had a vague notion that a candy bar or some other sweet thing would put everything to right, would solve all my problems. But I did not crave maple syrup or any other "natural sweetener" during those dark nights of the hungry soul. I craved white sugar. I craved one of the endless array of baked, boxed, packaged, and frozen confections sold everywhere in this country.

Later I would understand that sugar acts on the body somewhat like a drug, and can be similarly addictive. It was no wonder that as a hungry, struggling youth I turned again and again to sugared sweets for comfort and pleasure. Like much of America, I was hooked. Yet the indigenous peoples who ate maple sugar in sometimes large quantities did not experience the addiction, nor the diabetes, obesity, tooth decay, demineralization of bones, or other problems that are associated with white sugar in modern diets.

As I was working on The Sap Moon chapter of my book, I began to contemplate the many important differences between the sweetness in indigenous diets and that in our contemporary diets. One difference obviously has to do with whether the sugar is in a more natural or a more refined state -- maple sugar is simply maple sap cooked down until it crystallizes, while white sugar is highly refined until all that is left is pure sucrose. But another big difference has to do with how the sugar is made use of in the food system -- what it is combined with and when it is eaten.

The concept of dessert—of a whole sweet course in a meal—was a culinary notion popularized during the eighteenth century in Northern Europe. This was exactly when white sugar was in need of a rapidly expanding market. Desserts came to Europe riding on the tail of the juggernaut of white sugar, and then to much of the rest of the world on the tail of the juggernaut of European influence.

This fact was brought home to me when I worked as a chef at a residential arts center. Each evening, I prepared dinner for anywhere from ten to a hundred people. As a cook who is fascinated by cuisines around the world, I usually made a meal that reflected a particular part of the world and its special culinary traditions. One night dinner might be North African, the next night East Asian, and the next Southern United States. I found that in my quest for creating authentic meals, I was often stymied when it came to preparing desserts. For European or American meals, there was never any difficulty finding the perfect sweet thing to end the meal, but with other cuisines it was harder.

As I scoured cookbooks, I often found very few true authentic desserts within a given culinary heritage. I found Chinese desserts a particular challenge. We think of fortune cookies as the classic end to a Chinese dinner, but they were developed here in San Francisco and are not at all authentic to the cuisines of China.

My contract at the art center actually stipulated that I had to make dessert, and at one point I protested to my boss about it—not because I am a killjoy, or against dessert, or lazy, but because for people to have dessert every night seemed, in my view, excessive. It was expected for a festive meal, when I had a hundred people for dinner, but did I have to make a dessert every night? I guess my feeling about dessert is a little old-fashioned. I think of it as a special treat. She demurred. The dessert could be simple -- a cookie, for instance -- but it was part of the deal. Occasionally the dessert could be a piece of good fruit, but this was frowned upon. An artist had once complained that a previous cook had tried to pass off fruit as dessert. I got the message.

So how did traditional and indigenous diets use the sweet things they had, whether from sap, fruit, honey or other source? Mainly they combined them with the other elements of the meal. One European who lived and ate with a maple sugar eating indigenous community noted in 1755, "the way we commonly used our sugar while encamped was by putting it in bear's fat until the fat was almost as sweet as the sugar itself, and in this we dipped our roasted venison." Pemmican was a northern woodlands indigenous staple made from dried and pulverized meat combined with melted fat, berries, and often maple sugar.

In Thai cuisine, cooks use palm sugar (made by cooking down the sap of the palm tree) extensively in curries, where they combine it with coconut milk, meat, fish sauce, and herbs and spices. Throughout South and West Asia, people use sweet dried fruits in pilafs and other dishes that are served with meats and pulses. Chutneys and other relishes that are served with the main meal contain fresh and dried sweet fruits. In Morocco, the classic dish tagine is a deliciously sweet and aromatic stew of meat, fruits and spices. (Interestingly, in many sub-Saharan African cultures, sweet foods are seen as feminine, and men eschew them in honor of their masculinity.)

In East Asian cooking, sweet flavors are combined with salty and spicy to make such classic Japanese sauces as teriyaki, yakitori, and ponzu, which are used with vegetables, rice, meat, and fish. The sauces on Chinese dishes almost always contain a sweet element. Even European cuisine, before the influx of white sugar, took this approach. Old-fashioned British cuisine included such now-despised dishes as mincemeat pie, in which beef suet is mixed with dried fruits and spices and baked in a shell; or lombard tart, which combined eggs, cream, dates, and beef marrow. A look at culinary traditions reveals this phenomenon again and again. The sweetness is woven into the larger meal, not a course of its own. This makes sense when you look at it from the point of view of health and wholeness. When sweetness is accompanied by protein, fat, and vitamin-rich vegetables, and balanced by mineral-rich salt, soy sauce, fish sauce, or broth, the body absorbs it slowly and evenly, without the usual spike and crash.

I find that I do not much relish desserts after meals anymore. I like the festivity of it, and the way it prolongs a meal, so when I go out to eat I often find myself hoping that dessert will be ordered. But it is not the food itself that I want -- I am so unaccustomed to sugary sweets now that I often find little to enjoy in the cake, pie, ice cream, or custard that we order. It almost always tastes too sweet. I just like the ritual and relaxation it involves. At home I do often have a little something sweet to end the meal, but it is less sweet and richer in fat or protein than the desserts one usually eats. Sometimes it is just a piece of fruit, or a pot of a relaxing tisane, like rooibos with milk. One of my favorite little sweet somethings takes me back to the sap moon -- a small dish of yogurt drizzled with maple syrup. For me, that's just right.

We all need sweetness -- goodness, comfort, and joy -- in our lives. We need it in our mouths sometimes, and we need it in our hearts and souls even more often. Maybe if we lived in a culture that really fed us, on a deep level, everyday, we wouldn't crave those boxes and cartons and plates of sugared things so much. Maybe if we spent this moon stirring our cauldrons in that snowy woods, intoxicated by the smells of simmering maple syrup, that would feed us even more than the sugar we were making.

So on this Sap Moon, I am wishing you all the sweetness of life -- may you sometimes find it somewhere other than dessert!