Let’s think materially, then. Here we are, two weeks out from the ‘high’ of Holy Week and Pascha. In my kitchen I have about eight skinless red onions in the fridge and a bottle of red wine vinegar left over from dyeing Easter eggs; a couple of uneaten heads of Lenten cabbage; Chinese cooking apparatus and condiments of various sorts left over from when my mother-in-law was here; and a good five pounds of spare ribs bought specifically for Pascha and Bright Week. What to do, what to do?
Prime pork spare-rib stir-fry à la Cooper!
Needless to say, this shamelessly culturally-appropriated (and literally-appropriated; this is equipment my mother-in-law gave us, after all!) Asian fusion dish made an instant hit in the Cooper household and there have been requests from certain quarters for encores despite its decided lack of political correctness. And so, I have been honing my technique a bit. This post-Lenten cooking has engendered some interesting meditations on certain material aspects of the art.
When you’re stir-frying, it’s necessary to be a bit sparing with the oil to start with – but you can’t have none. The pork has plenty of fat on it, and it’s usually enough to impart the flavour without making the veggies slippery and greasy while you’re cooking. Oil spits when it gets hot; the more of it in the bottom of the wok, the bigger a mess it tends to make if you’re not careful. And lastly: oil doesn’t evaporate (at least, not in quantities sufficient to matter for cooking purposes). The amount of oil you add to start is pretty much the amount of oil you’ll end up eating.
The same is very much not true of water. Again, the veggies have their own water, which is fine. So do the vinegar and the soy sauce. But the amount of water you add is not the amount of water that you end up with in the dish when it’s ready to serve. Water does, and is meant to, evaporate. It’s still a necessity: if you start by frying the vegetables and add the meat later when it’s still cold, you have to add water to the veggies to keep them from being overdone. It also helps brown the meat a bit better and carries the aroma better. But the main purpose of adding water to a stir-fry is to add time to the process: to give the cook more space to think, plan and experiment, to add other ingredients to taste. In this style of cooking, anyway, water is time.
Not for nothing were the first clocks – in ancient Ægypt – powered by water. The Ægyptians used them for sacral purposes: to accurately measure time during the night so that the appropriate times for sacrifices and offerings to Amun could be observed. These were people, it must be understood, who also fully appreciated that water – that of the great river, certainly – could lengthen or shorten men’s lives in very proximate and immanent ways. ‘Water is time’ had the same material immediacy to them that it would to a certain cook 3,500 years later. Thank the Alexandrians for one thing at least, for all they seem to have led us by the noses (and other organs) since the days of Saint Mark. This definitive attitude toward the elements they managed to impart also to the Orthodox Church in its various forms. The Red Sea water. The water of the Jordan. The water of baptism. The water that flowed from Christ’s side. Christ as the water of life. We are immersed in water when we are born. We die in it and are given new life. I’m not being ‘cute’ with this: of course there is something definitively Ægyptian about this whole relationship of the Orthodox Church to water – where else do you think Christ spent His infancy and youth?
It is therefore in a similar material immediacy that the Orthodox Church uses and demarcates water as (not just a ‘symbol’, not a ‘transfiguration’ of) time, but also æternity – whether in baptism, or at Theophany, or in the blessings of houses. The material, the temporal and spatial ‘stuff’ of the world, is fully present and fully participating in the worship of the Church; all of creation is glorified – it is not the stuff but rather the logic of the world that is broken and overturned when it encounters Christ. Christ, the living water, is not exhausted by use. He doesn’t evaporate as the water does when I’m cooking. There is not less of Christ to go around when His body and blood are ingested, but rather more.
It’s important to be careful here. I still need to cook. I still need to eat. My body is still seventy percent water – and the rest of it is literally made up of the stuff I eat. Christ is Risen indeed, but I’m still going to die. The overturned logic of the world at Pascha doesn’t do away with or destroy the world proper or with its material dimensions; it doesn’t whisk us away into the world of the Platonic Forms; it transforms and subsists in what is already there. It is only by the mystery of baptism and by the Gifts that the living water, that æternity, becomes present in us – physically, materially, spatially and temporally. But this overturned logic of Pascha is something we get, along with Saint Thomas, to not only see, but touch and taste, every week. It looks us in the eye. Not in a symbolic way; not in a metaphysical way; not according to some abstract doctrine – but materially. It requires a true heart of flesh and blood, a heart of love, to be sensible to us, but the stuff, the matter of it, is all still present and in us… Anyway, that’s what a Saturday afternoon stir-fry conjures.
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