Large Fierce Mammal

Source: Tasting History with Max Miller

Cultures the world over have funeral customs involving food. Food for the dearly departed to take on his or her journey into “the afterlife’, and of course food for those left behind.

Relevant recipes abound and some funeral services will even provide suggestions for the menu.

In these parts, and setting aside the still uncommon but growing interest in wakes, a traditional funeral involves a viewing of the remains combined with personal extension of condolences to the bereaved, attendance at graveside for the interment which may or may not be restricted to immediate family and persons of special significance, and at the end of it all, a reception. More recently, this has undergone a slight change with the funeral attended only by family and invited guests, followed sometimes weeks later by a “celebration of life” where people talk to the assembled guests about how the deceased person affected their lives (always for the better in such a public venue) and otherwise tell entertaining tales about them. Both the traditional reception and the celebration of life share one commonality — That’s where the food comes in.

The kind of people whose funerals I would attend don’t have these sorts of things professionally catered, and again speaking for my own part of the world, the event is indistinguishable from any other pot luck affair except that the its motivation is death. Dishes are contributed either by the ladies’ auxiliary of the fire department, church, or other organization the deceased was a member of, or more commonly by the guests themselves where focus is on items that will travel well, survive being refrigerated and reconstituted with panache, and depending on several factors, may even expose an element of competition. Permit me to elaborate.

In the days of my callow youth, I came to be blessed with the acquaintance, and ultimately friendship, of a rural family upon whose extensive holdings of forest and field I was granted unlimited hunting and fishing privileges, and at whose table I was often hosted at meals that were revelations of incredible cookery. This was an old school multi-generation household consisting of a surviving grandparent — the maternal Grandmother –, the Mother of the house whom I will call Jane for security reasons, her husband and Father of the house, who I will likewise call John, and their three progeny — the oldest being a son my age, let’s call him Jerry, who I had befriended at school and was my inroad into getting semi-adopted, and two younger sisters of decreasing gradation in age the names of whom, with all respect to them both, don’t matter to this narrative.

Over time, death came first for the Grandmother, and then for Jane, leaving John like a fish out of water. That’s where the food comes in.

I attended the funeral and it was one of the traditional ones that returned after the burial to the family homestead for a reception that had the old floors creaking under the weight of food, let alone people to eat it. No worries though, these were country people who not only knew what to do with hearty fare but how to burn it off to productive ends. And while the board held representation from all of the ladies in the parish around, there was one in particular who saw to John like no other.

This Lady, I’ll call her Joan, a widow of some years herself, was a neighbour, although this being the country don’t get any ideas about proximity of dwelling. She and her late husband had been close friends of Jane and John for decades and this had continued unabated after she received the mantle of widowhood. It was in the spirit of this that she stepped into the void Jane’s rather sudden death had left, to make sure he was fed and looked after while he grieved and got his emotional feet back under him.

John was still working at the time and when ultimately he returned there, Joan saw to it that he was properly fed and watered at every meal. Through this, and while she always returned to her own home in the evenings, a relationship grew so that when a decent interval had passed, she stopped going home. I was aware of the developing relationship and asked how it was going when I ran into Jerry one day on a street in Halifax. I learned that the deal was sealed when he told me Joan had not only moved in, she’d brought her deer rifle with her.

I still get a tear in my eye whenever I think about it.

Please take a moment to dry your own, Good Reader, as we move on with the midnight snack of tonight’s Dark Sentiment.

First a small appetizer that will be familiar to anyone who has enjoyed Alistair Sim in the role of  Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1951 production of A Christmas Carol. This scene plays out before the astonished eyes of Scrooge himself as he is escorted through the inestimable joys of Christmas yet to come —

And now to close with the always entertaining and educational Max Miller of whom I have previously spoken here and here, with this segment from Tasting History. He’s all about feeding the Sin Eaters here, which is something we’ll get into here soon but don’t have locally. Lots of hungry sinners yes, but not the vocation bearing the epithet. Here’s Max Miller to bake us out —