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SUNDAY AUGUST 30 / A cooking class on Arancine

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 20 / LIPARI ISLAND Book Club

EARLY OCTOBER DATE TBD / STOOP SALE with a few other Archie cuties!

WAYS

OF

SEEING

HEALING

As I said above, I’ve been sick the last few days, and it got me talking to Papa about how Nonna used to do alternative healing practices with him as a child.

If he sprained his ankle, for instance, she would warm a bit of red wine and rub it into his ankle. Then she would take butter and salt and rub that in after the wine, then bandage him up. Nonna loved wine, in general:

If he had a cough or some other flu-like symptoms, she would perform ‘cupping’ on his back with a juice glass and a tea light. If you aren’t familiar with ‘cupping,’ it involves placing a candle on the back of the patient, putting a glass over the candle to stop the oxygen, which raises the skin, then removing the glass. This usually leaves a red circle on the skin for a week. From Papa: Nonna said it was meant to ‘stop pneumonia’ and ‘pull all the gook from my lungs,’ and she would do this ‘first thing rather than the drug store’.

Years ago, the same week I clarified Papa’s ‘cupping’ memories, I read in Karyn Crisis’s book about Italian women in the mountains around Emilia Romagna performing ‘cupping’ or coppettazione on ill patients “used to resolve the inflammatory state“. It kind of blew my mind. I just did not realize how deep this magic was.

Apparently, a lot of people in our family performed cupping, and ALSO: drank chicken blood. Nonna never prescribed this, but Papa said he’d heard murmurs about it in our family and that I should “look into this.” Maybe next time.

Nonna also told a young Papa to ‘smell the semolina bread’ if he was coughing. To grab a hunk and take a big sniff.

I plan on writing about this more extensively next month, but this got me thinking about Hildegard and her upcoming feast day on September 17th. My modality of healing has always been music, specifically singing or making sound.

Hildegard’s ideas around music, food, art and healing resonate with me more than any other figure in history. She believed that the verdant green in nature had healing powers, and you could take in this ‘greening power’ through the means of music, food, art, landscape and more. She called it viriditas, and felt the color green represented the divine. (If anyone has seen the fertile landscape of Ireland and its one hundred shades of green, they know this power).

She also felt fennel carried viriditas and would often prescribe it.

With my low energy this week, I think Hildegard would appreciate this healing, quick-pickled fennel recipe. I developed it a long time ago, and we served it in the cafe at Archestratus. Maybe some of you who ate there even remember it. Si, there is a secret ingredient.

ok, love love

ppppppppppppppppp

aige

a presentation on hildegard

A few years ago I did a presentation on Hildegard for some of my friends (like an esoterica club/group thingamajiggy). If you are interested in learning about Hildegard, I think this is a pretty good primer for the information surrounding her early life, though there is so much more to explore about the ideas she brought into the world. So much music to listen to. Enjoy!

What is refrigerator pickling? It is a very simple way to preserve your food at its peak with MINIMAL effort. I need minimal practices, or I won’t do them. Refrigerator pickling usually means using vinegar, salt, and sugar, often together. This combination preserves foods immediately. It also means that because we use vinegar, we stop the fermentation process. BUT! Even though there isn’t much of any fermentation happening, there are still so many health benefits to refrigerator pickling. It can lower blood sugar; the salty brine can add electrolytes to your meal, and because most of it stays raw, the nutrients are maximized. Anyways, I love that it’s become second nature and feel like my meals at home are so much more dynamic because of this little homemade refrigerator pantry. No be afraid.

F E N N E L +

O N I O N

(an anise pickle for Hildegard)

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The WORKSHOP

for POTENTIAL

RECIPES

(a free printable PDF)

I have too much to say about Oulipo, but in short, they were these French writers (mostly guys) who took play very seriously. They were sort of over this idea of being romantically struck with inspiration and only then having an outpouring of work. They loved systems, but systems that left the outcome to chance. They were vocally not into mysticism or esoteric practices, but I would liken this to divination.

In 1961, Queneau wrote a book of poems called One Hundred Hundred Million Poems. It’s a set of ten sonnets, each 14 lines each, with similar rhyme schemes and sounds. Both the sonnets themselves and the book is designed in a way that allows you to combine the sonnets any which way. In fact, you can combine them 100,000,000,000,000 ways.

I have so much to say about how difficult this last year has been, but for now, I am taking play very seriously, too. It’s very easy to lose yourself in all this heaviness. Enter Oulipo: A practice I am returning to. A good warm-up for me to go deeper later.

I wrote 10 recipes, 14 lines each, designed to be combined any way. One hundred million million ways, in fact.

Want to play? Print this out below and start experimenting. Cut horizontally to the black line. Bind it on the left. Snip off the other three sides. If you’ve got card stock it will last longer, but regular printer paper will work fine.

The cooking method and amount of each ingredient are up to you, but that doesn’t mean the recipes are without some instruction. To choose each line, you can roll a 14-sided die, or smoosh them around whilst closing your eyes, or look up another Oulipo mathematical constraint to get there. The idea is to make space for this kind of work. The work of play.

I hope you enjoy and PLAY WITH my version of One Hundred Hundred Million Recipes and that it triggers IDEAS. I hope it SHAKES THINGS UP. That it pulls you into the realm of spontaneity, which can be transcendent.

Want to make your own? I’ve also included a blank template at the end for you to create and make it happen. And feel free to reply to this email if you have questions!

By the way, mathematically, it would take 2 centuries to read every version, so lord knows how long it would take to cook this whole book.

Have the best time :)

LIPARI ISLAND Book Club

september 20 @1p (EST) on ZOOM

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Originally published in 1979, Italo Calvino's singular experimental novel crafted a postmodern narrative like never seen before—offering not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambiance, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Support our online bookshop ARCHESTRATUS on Bookshop.org. Zoom link available here.

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