Easter has me thinking of traditions and ceremonies. Of feasting, of feast days. Of the marking of time and the celebrating of time and place. I love traditions — myself almost entirely irreligious I attend midnight mass on Christmas Eve, though the cold church and the walk home are as important as the blood and the flesh. I take up any reason (excuse, we often say) to celebrate — I follow a philosophy of birthday parties, housewarming parties, Sunday lunches.
When I’m in a Catholic country I am endlessly jealous at the celebrations of this or that saint, they provide such grammar to life. An English friend who lives in Rome once remarked that she felt as if she was surprised each week to find the post office or atelier shut. I thrilled at this. When she would ask, her Italian partner would look gobsmacked “but of course, it is Saint X’s day!” Why the city seemed to ask, was she outside and not at a table with a prescribed menu.
Marking time so joyously represents a certain greed. The English, greedy in the worst ways, mark time rarely: Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, birthdays. Our Protestant inclinations, if not beliefs, have continued this. To add twelve or so well-marked feast days is very European indeed, we scoff. But it’s a shame to deny ourselves a monthly peak, some cause to sit and feast. A slowing-down and a thoughtfulness.
Part of me balks at the religiosity of it, which is unnecessarily and tragically narrowing, excluding. Besides, I believe in God listening to the St Mathew Passion in my kitchen; the Georgian liturgy at Gergeti church; or monks intoning at San Salvatore al Monte. But only then, and only briefly. I do not believe at table, at table I believe in people. I rejoice in people.
I thought, briefly, that the civic religion of the Enlightenment might offer an alternative, that the Americans and their festivals of nationhood could provide some guidance. Fireworks and hot dogs to mark a man-made structure. No. As with religious feasting, national feasting cannot but be narrow. After all, who would wish to celebrate the actions of a whole country, its triumphs and sins?
What then can form the hook of celebration, can entice the marking of time? What model can we look to, hewn of baggage, still with a purpose, a scaffold for greed?
In Catalonia there is a late-winter/early spring ‘festival’ called the Calçotada. Inverted commas because festival suggests a specific time, but a Calçotada has none. It is only loosely temporally situated, it floats a little: it can occur on any day, anywhere, usually on a weekend and usually in the country.
A Calçotada is a celebration where the gathered eats calçots — a sort of spring onion/leek — with a tomato and almond sauce called romesco. There are often sausages too, wine, vermut and so on. But the center is the calçot, which is cooked in a bundle on the barbecue, pressed against its neighbour in a grate. Its outer skin is burnt and the insides are soft and buttery — off with the outer layer, into the sauce. Often the table will be layered with newspaper — this is messy eating — and one's hands will be smeared with ink and charcoal and sauce. It is important to eat outside.
So, what is the purpose, I ask my Catalan friends? “To eat calçots.” They look shifty, furrow their brow. To what end? “Well, to be with people. To eat calçots.” And one begins to realise that there is no purpose save the most important. Calçotadas begin when the weather has finally become warm enough to sit outside — I know few people who love to sit outside as Catalans, huddled in February in their big coats — sp perhaps it’s a celebration of the resumption of celebrations. Perhaps casting around for a reason some Catalan matriarch noted the proliferation of calçots and decided they would do.
On the surface the calçotada is not so different from a barbecue — the food, the gathering, the messiness. What marks it apart is the guiding purpose: not simply to eat with people, but to eat calçots with people. And thus it gains a certain firmness of purpose, even if that purpose is the consumption of a sort-of-leek, there is a scaffold understood by everyone: the manner of cooking, the manner of eating, what to eat it with.
Such rules become rituals and rituals create a certain magic, a magic that binds a conspiracy of eating. Here then is a good balance: gone are religion and nation. All that is needed is a specific food. This allows a sacredness that is particularly malleable. Within the confines of its rituals exist a great deal of space and freedom — a gentle, well-tempered void to be filled with that honourable exploit, greed.
That this festival takes place in Catalonia, a Catholic country with the normal proliferation of Saint’s Days — my favourite is the carnival before lent, when schoolchildren dress as they might for Halloween and the King of the Carnival is condemned to death for misrule on Shrove Tuesday — shows them to be a very greedy people indeed.
Most of the time when those of us who are not particularly religious or nationalist take part in festivals our concern is, as the calçot eater’s is, with food and people. But it is the calçotada’s doing-away with any ornament entirely that so appeals. Here we find a Festival of Greed alone!
I appeal for more Festivals of Greed. For days with rituals, rituals to conjure that certain magic, the magic that supports un-constrained joy. These rituals could be toasting, singing, the preparation of certain foods, the drinking of special liquids, dancing, digging. Such festivals would care little for the preservation of some past idea, would sit not in a stultifying conservatism but would conjure traditions that rely on creation. Would provide, year after year, traditions of renewal and malleability.
I am very grateful to my friends Tiberi Club for letting me use pictures of their calçotada. Follow their Instagram, they’re really the best eaters in Barcelona and are terribly greedy, the sort of people who eat tripe for breakfast.
Duck Presented in a Classical Manner
Adapted from a recipe in Bocca by Jacob Kennedy
Stuff the duck, as large a fowl as you can get, with the green tops of fennel, a sprig of rosemary and a handful of sage leaves, five or six rashes of bacon and the duck innards, roughly chopped. If you are worried about escaping stuffing, you can close the cavity with toothpicks. Rub the skin with salt and place it on a rack with a dish beneath it in an oven heated to 200c, for forty minutes until it is browned. Remove from the oven and pour the duck’s juices into a bowl and mix with a glass of red wine, baste the duck and return to the oven at 150c. Cook for another 2 to 21/2 hours, basting every twenty or so minutes, until the skin is very crispy. The duck will now be tender. Rest for ten minutes. Now take the flowers of forty or so primroses and press them onto the duck’s skin, and repeat, pressing new flowers over the old, which will have become translucent. These will retain their colour.
Roast potatoes with more rosemary than you’d imagine you’ll need
Peel the potatoes and cut up quite small, as they do in Italy. In a bowl toss them with plenty of oil, a great deal of fresh rosemary and salt. Pour a little more oil into a large roasting tray and heat it, either by putting it in the oven or lighting the stove beneath it, it needn’t be very hot, simply warming the oil. Pour the potatoes onto the sheet, making sure they aren’t piled on top of one another — if necessary, use two sheets — and pop in an oven at about 150c, removing to mix around after about ten minutes, and twenty minutes after that, to prevent sticking. Ought to take about an hour and a half.
Serve with broccolini blanched in salted water and a fresh mayonnaise, thinned a little with egg white, into which you’ve added chopped capers and parsley.
Extracts from my diary, Lent and Easter 2020 e.g. the time of the First Lockdown, when Duck Presented in a Classical Manner was first cooked.
“Days do not wish to roll over, do not wish to end, they are without any punctuation save eating.”
“Have been thinking that this is an especially ancient sort of rural living — never leaving the village, seeing the faces of people who live on the smallholding upon which I live, on top of that those of the few walking along the paths and lanes. There is a pleasure in seeing no one. Nothing is going on here and this nothing is beautiful, but god I would kill someone if it went on forever.”
“The cherry blossom has started to emerge. This is of note and has been to me for a few years, but is especially of note now. My time is indicated by the growth in my potting shed, the buds emerging so splendid from the trees. Amazing how all those boring identical shoots — rounded and fragile, a pale sort of green, divulge so splendidly and suddenly, some with spikes, some suddenly purple.”
“It is Easter Easter and it is good to mark the festivals, even while their meanings are lost to us, peculiar and deeply silly.”
“Quiet days in the country, my body is tired, my mind is a soap in hot water, I am eating too well and drinking too much but there is nothing.”