crisis! and Jesus prefers Chardonnay.

OK.

With my mouth still tasting of sautéed shallots from lunch at Bouchon, I have had a very scary revelation. Perhaps I am still reeling from too much vino – though I don’t think so. So, ok, I was sitting on my futon reading (for the 4th time) Yvain, a French 12th century romance by Chrétien de Troyes. Yvain the knight has gone mad, is running around the forest naked and eating raw game. He runs across a hermit’s house, and the hermit puts out bread and water for Yvain to eat. The text says, approximately: “I don’t think that he had ever tasted bread that was so course or so hard; the flour with which it was made certainly didn’t cost more than 20 sous, because it was more bitter than levain bread” (ll. 2844-48). And I said to Matt, isn’t it funny how different people’s conception of food is now? Whole wheat and other hard grains used to be considered low-class, but now they’re all the rage. White bread with refined flour is out; Acme bakery provides levain bread to all of the fanciest restaurants. And this has just changed in the past 50 years or so. (Not to mention Yvain’s raw meat – carpaccio, sushi, anyone?) And then I got to thinking. And then it hit me.

I want to be a culinary historian. I can study food – the changing attitudes towards food across time; food as a cultural marker. (Has this been done? I don’t know – certainly not more than the Battle of Brunanburgh has been, though, right?) Of course, my first reaction is, “I can’t.” I can’t – I can’t just up and switch disciplines, get new advisors, do “food” seriously, etc. And Matt says I can – I can. (?) I love food. Do I love medieval literature in the same way?

Earlier today during the car ride to Napa, I started wondering what kind of wine Jesus changed the water into at the wedding feast at Cana. I was trying to think what grape varietals are native to the Middle East. It suddenly dawned on me – Jesus probably changed it into white. In all the depictions I think it’s red, but that’s not right. White would resemble the water (especially in the opaque clay jars) and that explains why the wine steward has to taste it to know – he can’t tell by looking (John 2:9). (That, of course, means that the liquid is substantially wine but accidentally resembles water – hellooo Eucharistic connection!)

Was that a premonition? Fuck. Can I change disciplines? [Matt’s a bad person to talk about this; he went from early-modern alchemy in Germany to the Dutch East Indies Company in Indonesia. Not to mention his consulting leanings.]

You know, we’re not going to get jobs anyway, so it doesn’t really matter what I do, does it?