Threshold Meals to Mark the Season
and the neuroanatomy highway
Good Morning,
I hope this finds you in a reflective, restful, and celebratory state, situated as we are within the 12 Days of Christmas, the 8 Nights of Hanukkah, and New Years Eve Eve. May I suggest a meal to aid your jubilation, reflection and celebration as we greet the arrival of another year?
And if instead of reflective, restful, and celebratory, this finds you anxious, exhausted, and gloomy – that’s quite alright and understandable. May I suggest a meal to cure what ails you, comfort your longing and give you hope for a better tomorrow?
Threshold meals
I like to think of the foods we eat around New Year’s as threshold meals - used to mark our crossing from one season to the next. (I’m inspired here by the language of Irish poet and mystic John O Donahue). Specific meals can be important tools of memory, reminding us of year’s past, anticipating the future, and demarcating time. This is true of course in the most real mystical sense and is backed up by research.
As we discussed in the last newsletter, eating is a multisensorial act, and aroma is one of the primary drivers of flavor. And olfaction, the sense of smell, is also one of the strongest keys to both memory formation and recollection. Many studies have shown that memories made with smell (remember that includes flavor too!) are stronger and more emotionally resonant. Much of this is because the area in the brain where olfactory signals are processed is the amygdala and hippocampus, which are involved in emotions, memory, and learning. As this study puts it, “the neuroanatomy of olfaction has a privileged and unique connection to the neural substrates of emotion and associative learning.” Basically, smells, and therefore food and flavor, get to take the express lane to emotion and memory. Please see my handy drawing below.
In short, when food is involved, both recall and formation of memories is viscerally stronger and more emotionally resonant. This makes the meals we eat around holidays used for reflection even more important.
Maybe you don’t have a specific meal you eat to mark the passage of another year yet. If that’s so, I’d like to share one with you – one you can make your own. Food can be a vault for memories, and I’d like to offer this as a vessel to make your own, to stain the pages with your own histories.
To me, New Year’s meals should be easy, heart-warming and belly-filling for cold weather, able to be served at midnight in the midst of a revelry, and reheated for lunch on New Year’s Day. After the abbondanza of Christmas and NYE feasts, we need a simple, comforting meal to welcome another year.
Much like Christmas, the New Year brings with it a cornucopia of food traditions across cultures that meet that mark. In the Southern United States where I grew up, the traditional New Year’s Day meal was black-eyed peas, pork, and collard greens. The collards represented folded green bills and the peas coins; eating the meal is good luck and promises financial abundance in the dawning year. In Mexico, tamales (there’s the pork fat again!) are often relished with glee as part of the New Year’s meal, and in Japan, soba noodles promise long life. Of course, an entire book could be written on the food traditions of Lunar New Year / Chinese New Year - but that’s a discussion for another time and for an expert.
My personal new threshold meal and what I’ve come to share with you, I first encountered on New Year's Eve 2022. AB and I were visiting my uncle Francesco, who lives in Cassano, the town in Puglia, Italy, where my great-grandfather was born. When we arrived in Cassano, Francesco, with a sly grin, announced that he had a surprise for us: invitations to a special New Year’s Eve party. AB and I had no idea what we were in for, but that night we donned our finest apparel and hopped in the car with Francesco, his girlfriend Marilena and her daughter Cami, who drove us to a large masseria up on the Murgia plateau that looms above the town. It was a lovely evening with the best company, with endless toasts, a multi-course meal, dancing, and unexplainably a fire-breathing dancer. However, the star of the show was still being held back. At midnight, after we toasted and drank our Prosecco, the hosts of the party brought out the final course: COTECHINO E LENTICCHIE.
This is the traditional Italian New Year’s dish of sliced pork sausage (cotechino), redolent with garlic and wine, served on a bed of hearty lentils. The sliced sausage represents coins, and the lentils smaller denominations of pennies. The unctuousness of the sausage, combined with the earthiness comfort of the lentils, make this a warm hug of a dish.
Now when I eat this meal, I think of my uncle, his hospitality, the memory we shared that night, and the years that have unfolded since. Eating it is a threshold of sorts, allowing me to mark the passage of another year, and welcome the arrival of a new one. It also has the benefits of being delicious, easy to prepare, and belly-filling.
Cotechino is a type of Italian sausage, typically made with pork, lard, and pork rind, that originated in Emila-Romagna, designed to be cooked low and slow to render the fat and cook down the tougher pieces of meat. It’s typically made with warm spices like cinnamon, clove and cayenne that make it perfect for the cold winter months. Originally, eating Cotechino e Lenticchie for New Year’s was confined to the region in North-central Italy where it originated — the richness of the pork and the coin-like symbolism promises good fortune for the upcoming year. However, similar to how eating panettone for Christmas has spread throughout the peninsula, the cotechino and lentils for New Year’s tradition can now be found all over Italy, including down south in Puglia where we ate it.
Check your local Italian markets to see if they carry cotechino — many Italian specialty stores sell vacuum packaged pre-cooked cotechino imported from Italy, especially around the holidays. Even better, some butchers and Italian delis make their own. In NYC, check out The Meat Hook and Mario’s Meat Market. You can also order online from Olympia Provisions, an American salumeria that makes excellent products. If you can’t find it, feel free to substitute standard Italian sausages found in grocery stores.
RECIPE
Yield: 4 servings
INGREDIENTS:
1 cotechino (or Italian sausage) (varies in size, typically 1- 2lbs)
2 medium carrots, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
1 white onion, diced
2 cups dried lentils
2 cloves garlic, sliced
Olive oil
2 cups chicken stock
1.5 tsp salt
1 bay leaf
INSTRUCTIONS
If using pre-cooked cotechino, cook according to package instructions, typically by heating in water for around 25 minutes. If you were able to get your hands on some fresh cotechino, heat a pot of water on the stove until boiling. Then add the cotechino and cook for ~2 hours.
Heat a saucepan on medium heat. Add 2 tbsp of olive oil to coat the pan, then add the celery, carrot, and onion. Saute for about 5 minutes, or until softened. Keep heat on medium low to avoid adding too much color to the sofritto. Just before the sofritto is ready, add the garlic.
Next, add the lentils, chicken stock, salt, and two cups of water to the pot and bring to a boil. Then, simmer for about 20 minutes, or until the lentils are fully cooked.
Heat a saute pan on medium high heat. While it’s heating, slice the cotechino into rounds (coins!) and fry in the pan until crisped and slightly browned.
Serve the cotechino on top of the lentils, garnishing with herbs or serving alongside braised greens for the ultimate New Year’s meal.
Based on a recommendation from a friend, I recently finished reading The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s tale of a father and son navigating a post-apocalyptic America. I know I’m about 20 years late to the party, but if I had read this when it came out, I would still be hiding under the bed. Anyways, McCarthy’s hauntingly beautiful prose, like a voice from an alien world, cannot be praised enough. Some of his sentences caused me to stop and shake my head at the mind that wrote them. Read it!
That’s all for now…
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
-Sam
Sources
Herz, R. S. (2016). The role of odor-evoked memory in psychological and physiological health. Brain sciences, 6(3), 22.
Arshamian, A., Iannilli, E., Gerber, J. C., Willander, J., Persson, J., Seo, H. S., ... & Larsson, M. (2013). The functional neuroanatomy of odor evoked autobiographical memories cued by odors and words. Neuropsychologia, 51(1), 123-131.
Piras, C., & Stempell, R. (2015). Culinaria Italy: a celebration of food and tradition. Köln, H.f.ullmann.