Cups of tea in kitchens
with a recipe for buckwheat crepes
Yesterday I went to visit my friend Marie Louise. She lives in an old weatherboard on the A300 just out of Newlyn. Her nature strip is planted with olives and her corrugated iron fence hides a kitchen garden bountiful enough to feed her, and whomever is lucky enough to be the recipient of any excess. Yesterday, that was me.
Sitting on a stool at her kitchen bench, which is where I often sit while we talk, she fed me pancakes at breakfast made from a buckwheat mix stored in a passata jar in the fridge, and later on when I passed back through on my way home from work a large bowl of deeply herbed chicken broth with slippery, hair-like noodles floating within. Whenever I sit there at her bench and receive whatever it is her hands have made — sometimes tea, sometimes food, sometimes just the warmth of words passing between us, sometimes tears shed or laughter bubbling forth — any sickness or discomfort, fatigue or disillusionment, begins to resolve, so that when I walk away and climb into my car and start the engine, when I arrive home to my husband and children, I feel that everything has shifted just slightly on its bearings and I can set off again, on a trajectory, unhindered and unperturbed.
When I was a child we used to visit a woman on Blue Mount road in Trentham. She was a goat lady, a woman from whom we sometimes bought goats. I don’t remember her name. Perhaps it was Josi. I remember her as a European woman, but I’m not exactly sure where she was from. She used to feed us sugar cookies from a tin the colour of the sapphire on my engagement ring — a rich, dark blue — with yellow biscuits twisted into various shapes at intervals around its diameter. And I always came away feeling so much better than when I arrived. Even then, as a child, I felt it: the alchemical transformation that begins in a kitchen sharing conversation over a cup of tea.
Earlier this year I did a course in ancestral European song. We had two sessions with a pair of Sami singers: Jungle Svonni and Elin Kåven. Jungle is a Sami wisdomkeeper and spent time in South America learning and practicing as a ceremonialist. When asked about the use of ayahuaska and other psychoactive ceremonial and healing plants, he spoke about healers in general and about those who are very advanced and respected in his community who do nothing more for their clients than sit them down and feed them cups of tea whilst listening to their problems, which is enough, if the healer is very good, to heal the client or at least start them off on that trajectory. And part of me is curious…. is their knowledge of the deeper layers of our existence so complete that they no longer need all those healing aids — herbs and ointments and healing rituals — and simply being in their presence is healing enough? Or do we overcomplicate things with all of these ceremonies and instruments and healing plants and so forth, and miss the very simple fact that what we need or want is often either within us, or right in front of us, waiting for us to see it and take hold? Or is it somehow both?
On Thursday nights a handful of women I know gather in an Indian restaurant to eat and talk before Thursday night drumming class. They’ve been doing this on and off for years. The restaurant they used to go to changed hands sometime during the pandemic when everything was tenuous and constrained, and the quality of the food turned out to be a bit erratic after that. So they changed venues and now they meet in a different Indian restaurant across town. I have to wonder how much of an effect the location has on what is said, or who comes, or how often they meet. I occasionally join them, when providence and my husband are wiling to give me the night off. And whenever I step up to that table, give my greetings, and settle into that space, I feel all the tentacular attachments of children, or house and home, or work or study, or my busy mind, release, almost at once, like they are not needed or wanted, or even allowed to exist in the company of these women, especially in the new place. Only my best self is welcome there, and only my best self arrives.
I am writing this in the lounge room of our new house. The reason I didn’t go to dinner with the women this last week was because my eldest son has been sick. He has what my daughter had a few weeks ago, what my smallest son is in the process of recovering from — a strange malady of fever and lethargy with few, if any, other symptoms. As I write I can hear him talking in his sleep as he has done every night since he got sick. Other nights it has been fevered mutterings. Tonight, I’m not sure. He didn’t have a fever when I put him to bed. As I sit here I feel that quandary that often comes upon me when my kids are sick — how can I help them? I am at a loss as to know what to do. They have a fever — let the fever do its job. They are snotty and have a cold — let the cold run its course. I’m supposed to have all these tricks up my sleeve, all these plants that I’m in relationship with that I know effect the body in different ways — elder, hawthorn, yarrow, comfrey, plantain, oak, marshmallow, slippery elm, willow. I’ve worked with each of these and know their actions on the body to some degree and yet to me everything comes back to relationship. What is my relationship with this plant? What is my son’s relationship with this plant? What is my relationship with the microorganism that is causing his fever? What is his relationship with that same microorganism? And I get myself caught up in the business of relationship and don’t know how to help. And maybe, he doesn’t need help. Its always easier to see when its not my son.
Tonight for the first time since he’s been sick, I climbed up into his bed to read him his bedtime story. I’ve done other things during the week — making special batches of spiced tea, providing him with warm wheat bags, extra blankets, a diffuser in the room when his nose was so blocked he couldn’t breathe through it, reassurance on the night he climbed into bed with me because he’d had a string of nightmares, one after the other, after the other. But tonight I took the initiative and read to him lying beside him under the covers, and then held him for a bit before climbing down and switching off the light. He was already feeling a lot better today. Somehow, putting him to bed last night, I knew he would. And somehow, I knew that the extra attention at bedtime tonight would help him get over the last little hurdle towards getting well again — shaking off those attachments that get a hold of us when we’re sick and make us feel like we aren’t loved unless someone is waiting on us hand and foot all throughout the day.That’s how it is for me anyway. And I suspect he feels the same. He did say that the worst thing about being sick was that he felt very alone.
I have another friend at whose bench I sometimes sit and drink tea. Rarely, we eat as well. When I sit at her bench its sometimes more chaotic as we both have children and there are also animals involved. This woman has been my teacher in all things plant-related and in all things esoteric. Last time I wanted to see her professionally about something, I sat at her kitchen bench and in our usual way we talked until unseen things showed themselves in more than just words. And then we devised a remedy, or a couple of different options for a way forward at least, a way out of the constriction. Sometimes the way out, when devised like this in language through joint effort, is a puzzle that itself needs solving before you can exit. Its like the solution is a labyrinth, and I am dropped in the very middle, knowing that if I can find my way out, the original problem that got me here will be solved. A riddle to solve a riddle. A problem to solve a problem. A poison to counteract a poison. The homeopathic principle of like-cures-like.
I wonder if the ritual of sitting at a kitchen bench drinking tea is just what the soul needs. A warm space full of the alchemy of food where elemental forces exist to shape raw materials into a cohesive whole — a stew, a stir-fry, a warming broth. And I wonder if there is a kind of medicine that exists in kitchens, especially in kitchens that are used to make tea, to preserve food, to listen intently, and to feel. Kitchens where the table is cleared to make pasta, and the chairs upturned to hang that same pasta to dry. Often, it feels to me like the kitchen itself is a synapse — just like the table at which those women sit on a Thursday night before drumming class — a synapse between the bodies of different things: benches, sinks, stoves, humans, cats, saucepans, dishwashers, floorboards, cupboards, cutlery, plates of food; a synapse between material and immaterial worlds. And just like the synapse between nerve cells is a space where all kinds of things are communicated, the synapse of a kitchen is where the raw materials of my body, my thoughts, my emotions, can exist separately and together at the same time, with the possibility of being disassembled and reassembled into different arrangements, patterns and shapes, so that I can be again all those myriad organisms in one cohesive whole and not scattered and disjointed as I was when I came in.
Sometimes, when I can feel myself getting sick, the thing I most want to do is to visit Marie Louise. Not because I know she will make me well with little more than a conversation over a cup of tea, but because my soul wants to wander into that warm space, into that kitchen with all its jars of herbs, into the space of listening that she holds, into the kettle boiling on the stove, the cat rubbing against cupboards, the silent plants all bobbing in the sun at the window, and be alchemised into wellness again. So that all the disjointed pieces can be cooked back together into one cohesive whole — a bowl of chicken soup with hair-like noodles, a plate of buckwheat pancakes — both somehow resembling the patterns of my soul.
buckwheat crepes
a quantity of freshly milled buckwheat
eggs
milk of any kind
butter for cooking
maple syrup, honey, jam, butter, white cheese, lemon and sugar, cream, labne, or a silverbeet and feta filling, etc for serving
with an approximate ratio of one egg to every 3/4 of a cup of flour, mix together the flour and egg. add milk until the mixture runs easily off the spoon, but is still viscous enough to hold together on the pan. test it by cooking a smallish crepe to start with if you need to.
cut a small sliver of butter and melt it in the pan, smearing it across the width of the frypan. pour a small amount of mixture in the middle of the pan, then lift the pan and swirl until the mixture thins out and spreads as far as it will go. if it goes easily to the edges, use a little less next time, and if it doesn’t get to the edges use a little more. cook until the edges start to loosen from the pan, then flip it and cook again on the other side until it is cooked through. if you like your crepes with a little crispness, cook a little longer on each side. if you like them soft, cook on the second side for only a few seconds before transferring to a plate. top with butter and maple syrup, or the toppings of your choice.
Originally published at https://apeasantskitchen.substack.com on November 11, 2022.
