A Series on Eating and Drinking Liturgically: An introduction

Feb 20

By Sarah White

My experience with food for most of my life has been pretty… middle-of-the-road. I’m all for late night sweets that hit the spot like nothing else could, or a killer glass of Merlot, but preparing and consuming food was never at the forefront of my family’s mind growing up. My parents cooked—and they were good at it—but we never spent hours putting together elaborate meals. We stuck close to our reliable friend, the beloved recipe. And although company was often around to eat the food with, the only time I can recall us all gathered around cooking together was our annual New Year’s Eve paella. It took up the entire stovetop. It’s not that my family didn’t like food; we did, we just didn’t celebrate it.

It wasn’t until I met my husband that I realized how much time people can enjoyably spend in the kitchen. I was awestruck by his dedication to preparation and his courage in cooking without a recipe. He sparked a new love of food for me, even before we both converted to Catholicism (another story for another time!). Our conversion, though, once again renewed my love for food: for the gift that it was, for the communion it brought, for the resemblance it had to the Eucharist, and for how it changed the way I looked at my body and its relation to food.

Today’s culture is obsessed with food in the oddest of ways. We have 10, 30, 60, and 90 day diets that are misleading and only sometimes work, as well as societal expectations of physiques that are unattainable. All around us, our view of food has become distorted into something it was never meant to be. For years, I treated food only as a means to keep going, often taking it for granted, sometimes abusing it, all the while giving it a moral value: “It’s so bad to eat this,” or “It’s so good start my morning with this.” Food has no moral value. You are not good just because you had a salad for dinner, nor are you bad for taking mashed potatoes and stuffing. Food is a gift. All of it.

The Lord did not have to make food taste good, and yet He did. He didn’t have to gift us salt, or spices, or balsamic vinegar. He didn’t owe us chocolate or pasta or hummus. He could have made everything taste bland, or created us to get all we needed to survive from water and sunshine; but He didn’t, he gave us food––really, really good food.

He comes to us as of food every time Mass is celebrated, in the form of bread and wine. There is something really special there. While there are many lovely and memorable books written on this, the bottom line is: God making Himself present within the Eucharist connects His Banquet, His Feast, to every single time we consume food. Because of this, no meal is arbitrary. In her book The Catholic Table, Emily Stimpson Chapman writes, “The Church’s call to feast and the Church’s command to fast are, at least in my world, two of her greatest gifts.” Every time we eat, we have the opportunity to pray in praise and thanksgiving for the gift of food, a gift that so many of us don’t even fully comprehend!

So comes this series on eating and drinking liturgically. Here, I’ll offer an introduction to how we can incorporate saintly celebration into our everyday lives, all while diving deeper into the gift of food through a Eucharistic lens. I’ve read so many books on this topic and they are all so close to my heart. I hope that you take this series as something to be brought close to your heart and your kitchen too.

I plan on pulling together meal and drink recipes––both from books and from what my little family has come up with––that will call upon great saints and feast days. Ultimately, these lists are far from exhaustive. There are saints the Church celebrates every day and there are drinks and meals you could make to celebrate every one of them!

This month, a new season within the liturgical year begins: Lent. Come February 17th, we will embark on 40 days focusing on prayer, fasting, and almsgiving per the Church’s lead. Food plays a huge role in all those avenues: we ought to pray before every meal, in private and in public, and, in terms of almsgiving, a bottle of water or a warm meal or even a simple bag of chips could make a person’s entire day. There is a special gift that lies within the Church’s teaching of fasting as well. The goal is to reset our relationship with food as a gift and service given to us by God, not to starve ourselves and feel the weight of hunger for hunger’s sake.

We are called not only to love the gift of food for ourselves, but to share that love too. So whether that’s the homeless man down the street, or a new mom in your parish, I pray you listen to where the Holy Spirit will call you. Wherever your Lent takes you and your family, I pray that food becomes more sacred for you through these recipes.

Meal Recipes

For Fridays in Lent

Typically, parishes will hold Fish Fry Fridays for their parishioners during Lent to honor the observance of no meat Fridays. But The Catholic All Year Compendium introduces an alternative: Soup and Stations of the Cross. The whole family (and close friends!) get together to pray the stations of the cross in the backyard, or around a dining table, and then everyone gets to eat delicious soup afterward! Soup and Stations could work for your family best this year, as you can do it in your home and away from a crowd, if need be. Any meatless soup recipe will do, but here is a favorite of mine from Twelve Months of Monastery Soups. For an overview and how-to of the Stations of the Cross, click here.

Old-Fashioned Cream of Leek Provencal Soup

½ cup olive oil

12 leeks, chopped

8 cups of water

3 cups of cubed day-old bread

3 egg yolks

2 cups of milk

Salt and pepper to taste

Croutons for garnish

Saute the chopped leeks in oil, then add water and bring to a boil.
Add day-old bread. Simmer for 30 minutes.
Season the mix with salt and pepper. Blend everything with an immersion blender and return it to the pot.
In seperate bowl, combine egg yolks with milk, salt, and pepper, and blend well. Add it to the soup and mix well.
Serve hot with crouton garnish.

Saint Josephine Bakhita, February 8

Saint Josephine lived a very eventful life, including but not limited to being sold into slavery multiple times, becoming a nanny, and legally winning her own freedom via Italy’s court system, all before the age of twenty. After securing her freedom, she became a Catholic and a Canossian Sister in Italy. Originally born in Sudan, she is the patron saint of Sudan and against human trafficking.

To celebrate her life and her sainthood, offer up your cooking for her intercession for all of those who are somehow involved with human trafficking. You can pick any Sudanese or Italian recipe to make––Kofta, meatballs in tomato sauce is my suggestion for a Sudanese recipe, while Radicchio, Fennel, and Olive Panzanella is one of my favorite Italian recipes.

Drink Recipes

(Taken from Drinking With The Saints, A Sinner’s Guide To A Holy Happy Hour)

Saint Blaise, February 3

St. Blaise was the bishop of Sebaste in Armenia, and a patron saint of diseases of the throat. I would encourage everyone to Google the Blessing of the Throats that you can recite for you and your household. You can celebrate his sainthood by drinking an Armenian wine or an Armenian brandy like Ararat or Dvin. You can also choose to make a cocktail appropriately titled:

Down The Hatch

1 ½ oz. bourbon

¾ oz. blackberry brandy

2 dashes orange bitters

Pour all ingredients into a shaker filled with ice and shake 40 times.
Strain into a cocktail glass and serve.

Our Lady of Lourdes, February 11

From February 11 to July 16, 1858, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times to Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France. The Virgin was dressed in white with a blue sash and gold roses at her feet, and announced that she was the Immaculate Conception. When Mary told Bernadette to dig in the grotto where she appeared, a spring of water gushed forth and is the location of cures for countless people. You can celebrate this day by drinking a wine from France, or by making this non-alcoholic cocktail; I cannot express how many secular friends of mine know about saints, all because of a good cocktail.