Cooking Up Religious Beliefs

Here’s a surprise: some of the everyday favorite foods we swallow and savor were originally created as sacred food for thought, dishes that deliberately expressed, encouraged and even enforced a specific religious belief. The Hebrew Challah, for instance, is two breads braided into one, first as a reminder of the double portion of manna that fell on the Sabbath while the Jews wandered 40 years in desert, and thus also as an enduring representation of God’s mercy and generosity. Here are a few other seemingly ordinary foods whose spiritual message is supposed to be the key ingredient.

Sandra Garson, a well-known cook for Dharma centers from Maine to Mongolia, is the author of Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking and How to Fix a Leek and Other Food From Your Farmers’ Market.

Baklava

Time consuming and costly, this famously flaky and calorie rich dessert used to be prepared only for special religious occasions. Particularly at Christmas, it was compiled from 33 thin sheets of pastry, one for each year of Jesus’ life. For Easter, it was made from 40 sheets, one for every day of Lent. Since its layers represented years of life, one was often blessed in Church and offered at weddings as a long life prayer. For Rosh Hashonah, Sephardic Jews made baklava with blanched almonds instead of the usual brown walnuts to achieve a lighter color, expressing their hope the coming year would be bright. On the 15th of Ramadan when the Ottoman sultan paid respects to the cloak of Mohammed in Topkapi Palace, he let everyone know by sending trays of baklava to his legions in a long extravagant parade through Istanbul.

Hot Cross Buns

The English custom of eating on Good Friday buttery, spiced buns decorated with a sugary cross seems to have been institutionalized in Tudor times by a London bylaw that forbid selling cross-marked buns any day but Good Friday or Christmas. They are now only served on Good Friday for breakfast as a reminder this day marks the one Jesus died on the cross. This idea of using spiced, sugary, raisin-studded bread for a specific religious purpose stretches back to ancient times in Greece and Rome. As it happens, on the spring solstice (March 21), the contemporaneous Saxons—ancestors of today’s Brits, also baked buns marked with a cross that represented the four seasons or solstices to honor their goddess of light, Eostre, whose name gave us the word Easter.