Giving It Up for Lent: The Cuisine of Denial

One night in winter, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president and Pius XII was pope, my mother sidestepped our usual dinner of hamburgers or hot dogs and passed hot cross buns around the kitchen table. It was the first night of Lent, just like tonight. We had entered the Christian season of fasting and prayer that wends its way for close to seven weeks toward Easter.

That evening my mother had all six of us children to herself and she was happy. A schoolteacher, she liked fitting a lesson into everyday events. There were enough of us to make a small class. The shiny buns she took from the bakery box had a story to go with them. They were only made during Lent and the grid of white frosting on top formed a cross. An English monk invented them in the Middle Ages.

All of that explained why I had never seen them before. But it was the first bite that convinced me they were the right food for the occasion. They were filled with dried fruit, one of my least favorite foods. Lent must be an acquired taste, I decided.

Our mysterious meal is my first clear memory of the most solemn phase in the church calendar year. I was in fifth grade at the Cathedral school in Syracuse, N.Y., and the nuns had drummed into our heads the meaning of the season. But it took my mother’s lesson at the kitchen table, served with hot cross buns, to make an impression. Even now, the “surrender” of Lent that the saints write about makes me think of food.

I find I am not alone. Most of the 2 billion Christians in the world live in countries where Lent and special foods go together. Even people who don’t observe the season as they once did remember what they used to eat at this time of year. Salt cod for Greeks, lentil patties for Armenians, bean soup for Italians, bread pudding with cheese for Mexicans. They are simple, inexpensive dishes made from local ingredients. However different they are from each other, there is something they share. They all comply with the rules of Lent.

For Roman Catholics, and I am one, the strictest fasts are on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, the first and one of the last days of the season. Adults in good health do not eat meat, and the day’s total intake is one full meal with two others that should be very small.

“The basic idea is to be more spartan. No frills,” says Father Philip, guest master at St. Andrew’s Priory, a Benedictine monastery in Valyermo. “On Fridays in Lent we have vegetable soup and bread for dinner. And that’s all.”

Most Protestants follow a more general guideline. “Christians keep three Lenten disciplines,” says Pastor Mark Price of St. Timothy’s Lutheran Church in Lakewood. “There is fasting, prayer and alms giving.” He leaves the details to individuals.

Giving up bad habits counts as a fast, he says. So does taking on something new as a form of self-discipline. Some people he knows place Herculean limits on themselves, fasting for three days, Maundy Thursday until Easter Sunday.

“I don’t spell out what people should do,” says Price. “On Ash Wednesday I just tell the congregation, ‘Your Lenten discipline begins now.’”

Orthodox Christians, most with roots in Eastern Europe, Russia and Greece, follow austere rules, by comparison. Clean Monday, the first day of their Great Lent, as well as Holy Friday and Saturday, the last two days, are “dry fast” days. Observers of the fast get by on fruits, nuts and foods that require no cooking.

Other days, the ideal is to give up meat, dairy products, fish, except shellfish, olive oil and wine. That leaves vegetables, fruits and grains. “Keep a simple diet to gain control of our physical desires,” says Father John Bakas, dean of St. Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Los Angeles. “It is a spiritual exercise.”

From these recipes for self-denial come dishes that some people actually look forward to, each year. “It’s comfort food,” Eloise Gomez says of capirotada, the Mexican bread pudding she grew up on. “Ash Wednesdays we always knew my mom would make it with raisins and cheese.” Gomez will add the dish to the Lenten menu at the Mater Dolorosa Retreat Center in Sierra Madre, where she is kitchen supervisor.

In her cookbook, “The Foods and Life of Oaxaca” (Hungry Minds, $32.50), Zarela Martinez gives the recipe for a dish made of chilies dipped in a batter of egg and dried shrimp that she associates with Lenten cooking in her mother’s kitchen. That and a stew of dried corn, green onion and tomatoes were basic foods when she was growing up.

“They have an emotional connection,” she says. Reviving them is not a religious calling for her, but a cultural one. “A lot of Mexican Americans want to reclaim their traditions,” Martinez says. “I rescue these dishes because they are part of Mexican heritage.”

Other big-name cooks have been bringing back their own Lenten nostalgia foods. Last year during Lent, Mario Batali of “Molto Mario,” one of the most popular shows on the Food Network, spooned out his bread soup for Lent, made of bread crumbs, Parmigiano-Reggiano and sweet peas in a chicken stock. That course led on to a dish of pasta and beans.

It is daunting to think about the quantities of macaroni and cheese, tuna casserole and fish sticks that have been consumed by American Christians during Lent since the rise of frozen foods. Even foodies still think of them as the standard-bearers. This year again, grocery stores including Bristol Farms are baking hot cross buns, back by popular demand as of today.

But ask Greek Orthodox Christians what they eat during Lent and it’s a whole other story. “Lentil soup,” says Anastasia Kalivas who manages the Orthodox Christian bookstore, The Life Giving Spring, in Glendale. “And on Holy Friday, the day Christ was crucified, we add vinegar to symbolize the vinegar the soldiers gave him when he dying on the cross.”

Plain rice, plain spaghetti and taramosalata, carp roe, spread on bread are other familiar Greek dishes for Lent. “If you keep the fast, Lent makes for a different lifestyle,” Kalivas says. “You might live on vegetables the whole time, if you are Greek.”

An afterthought spins conversation in the opposite direction. “You look forward to Great Lent, but you dread it too,” Kalivas says. Fasting is about food, what you used to eat and now live in hope that you will one day eat again. Eastern and Western Christians are reminded of the extravagant freedom to eat whatever you want for one day during Lent.

Orthodox Christians remember on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation. A major holy day in their calendar year, it commemorates Mary, the mother of Jesus, conceiving her son. And it has its own special dish, bacalao, made of reconstituted salt cod dredged in flour, fried and served with a garlic sauce. “When you’ve been fasting for weeks, salt cod is a feast,” says Kalivas.

Italians escape the penitential tone on the feast of St. Joseph, March 19, with pizzelle, flat, snowflake-shaped cookies rolled in powdered sugar. The Irish break free on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. Corned beef and cabbage never looked so good.

It seems cruel to glance back toward yesterday. Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, as it is fondly known by happy pagans, Shrove Tuesday for the devout who only intended to indulge one more time before “shriving” themselves of their sins. Cruel perhaps, but revealing.

The revelers in New Orleans may still be out to breakfast, having been to Tuesday night’s Mardi Gras ball and then to a breakfast of grillades and grits. There might still be a slice of King cake, with a trinket buried inside, in the kitchen. Fat Tuesday is the last day of the festival that the cake is served.

In Pennsylvania Dutch country, faschingkrapfen, the doughnut-like pastries that Germans and Austrians serve during their Carnival before Lent, had a moment as well, on Tuesday. “A long time ago as a little boy in Germany,” says Joachim Splichal, the chef and owner of Patina restaurant in Los Angeles, “we made faschingkrapfen of brioche dough, cut into triangles and fried, then covered with sugar and cinnamon. As a young kid, I looked forward to that. Now, it reminds me of a season of the year, like raspberry or asparagus season.”

And in North Hollywood, members of St. Emmanuel Lutheran Church might still be feeling the effects of Tuesday night’s pancake supper. Sausages, buttermilk cakes the size of serving plates and a pancake race that had players rushing through the parish hall flipping flapjacks from a spatula rounded out the evening. Pancake suppers are part of the pre-Lent tradition too, thanks to a legend about an English housewife in the 14th century who ran late to church with her skillet in her hand.

One last greasy foods fest of pancakes, pasties and grits leaves a person with something to hold on to though the weeks of deep Lent ahead. The church approves of it, as a way to clear your kitchen of butter, sweets and meats that would only tempt you, later on. I approve of it, too. Lent never fails to remind me that ordinary life is a luxury.