When the first year’s frost freezes cabbage, that’s Halloween time. I don’t know how people adjust their Halloween clock if they don’t live where cabbage don’t freeze.
You have certainly heard of Zen: Zen and the art of meditation, Zen and the art of making tea, Zen and the art of maintaing a motorbike, and so on. N ow, news have spread that Zen can even be applied to the arts of management.
It’s surely good to know, in an era when management styles are – justly – under attack from any imaginable side.
What follows is an example – quite trivial, if you want – of how Zen doctrine is applied to cooking and to commonality feeding. There’s a master, most often a lady, with her own ceremony, and the guests, and the ceremony of having a meal together – usually November First.
The recipe is simple enough: fire, a large pot, olive oil, much garlic, meat – any kind of meat – cabbage, fresh but after having got the early morning frost, that’s the secret, tomato sauce, pepper.
The cook sets herself to quietly boil the garlic in oil, until the garlic gets a blond-like shade and the smell makes the stomach of anyone around to twist for appetite. Than she adds the cleaned cabbage, leaf by leaf, after having taken the hard, trunky parts away. Cooking the cabbage is the most critical part of the process. It has to be done in such a way not burn cabbage but to retain some internal moisture, too, so that, when the meat will be added, the meat will neither broil nor boil, but cook gently, to maintain its flavor and be tender at taste.
For those who cook by variable metrics, buy a box at the supermarket and microwave it.
The cook has to be alone in the kitchen: she may softly speak with the pot, or curse it; whatever it’ll be the dialogue, it’ll be between a woman, her tools and her environment. And that will last for hours, in a very warm and humid kitchen. An exhausting experience, taking into account that the lady will have to continuously mix by hand some pounds weight, depending on the number of guests, usually from ten to twenty.
To this gym, it has often to be added the preparation of polenta – boiled maize flour – that has also to be continuously mixed to be kept homogenous.
Both the cabbage & meat mix and polenta have very high viscosities, therefore require real muscles to be continuously mixed. And will.
When the guests are served – one to n-times – the cook has still to be ready to slice and grill the cold polenta to serve it with gorgonzola cheese on the top of the hot slices.
Meal duration: one hour.
Preparation: four to six hours; at the end, the cook – poor lady – will content herself with a glass of good red wine before washing and falling asleep, may be on a sofa, together with her dogs.
And she’ll sleep and dream sweetly and nicely, because she will have done a good job.
That’s Zen.
There’s no need to sit alone on the top of a mountain, cold, eating worms, beaten by winds, no one to talk to, to listen to. Zen is everyday life, on November First, on December Twenty-fifth or on September Twenty-seventh, whatever the date, whatever the name of the day.
Zen is first of all dedication, to oneself and to others; a dedication that goes beyond ready-at-hand satisfaction, a dedication that, like the lady’s glass of wine, will put you to sweetly sleep when you’re justly tired.