What is Tradition? A passing-on, a handing-down, a gift from our mothers and fathers, our patrimony, the way in which all of our ancestors are embodied by us, our inheritance, that thing that makes “a people” more than just merely “a population”.
Many of the best culinary traditions are born of something called “thrift”, something that is itself quite literally born in that it originates within the kitchen economy of the family. The greater the family, the more necessary the employment of “thrift”, thrift in the form of bacon, prosciutto, guanciale, salumi, bresaola, ham, capocollo, saucisson, fenalår, various cheeses, rillettes, confit, and - yes - even foie gras.
And yet, in our age of impoverishment of the imagination due to the convenience and commodification of all things, it is precisely these traditional foods that are considered to be the finest and most desirable things - foods that were, when properly contextualized, the work of thrift, the work of the peasant farming economy, the work of precisely those people whom Hollywood has painted as clueless bumpkins in frumpy brown clothing with dirt smudged on their faces.
The foods we idealize, that we place on a pedestal or consider with awe and wonder come from many generations of great vintners and cheesemakers and charcutiers of France, mozzarella masters of Italy, pig-farmers of Spain. “Generations”: family and the great responsibility of forming and caring for and feeding children good things, of handing down the traditions that are the agents of humanization, the very things that allow us to live a cultured life above the level of mere survival, the very things that keep us from being forced to constantly reinvent the wheel.
Ironically, the young couple with no plans for children that galavants around the world sampling the glories of Tradition - views of the Hagia Sophia, sips of the best Burgundy - are consumers of something they’ve rejected.
Ironically, the hobbyist who makes salumi in California with pork from Carolina has abandoned the very nature of the thing he is concocting. Is it “salumi” anyway?
Traditions have become fragmented and compartmentalized, fetishized rather than authentically experienced in their context of seasonality and the liturgical year, experienced in the very liturgy of existence: of marriage, self-sacrifice, births, deaths, sufferings, daily encounters with “the joys and sorrows of this passing life”. What is more liturgical - barring the Mass, of course - than the slaughter of the first lamb born on one’s own farm, the connection to which is one of both affection and necessity?
It is only by dying, by leaving behind the force of our will and pride in the importance of our own lives and wants and aspirations that we can be open to receiving the wisdom of Tradition. Only then can we realize that true achievement is in the passing-on, the handing-down of something done with real love for others, for our families and communities, something done with care and attention to the massive body of knowledge and intuition carried through history by our fathers and our mothers and, if we do our duty, carried by us forward and paid to our children as what is their due.
Ironic again is that truth that we must die to the desire to be sui generis, unique, original - that we must submit to Tradition and receive from it the wisdom of a thousand years - to leave some good mark upon the world for our progeny and not some bitter memory of selfishness and narcissism.
I guarantee that, once the artificial and short-lived, constantly transmogrified industrial “food” system of our nation starts to crumble, only the traditions that have been faithfully fostered from generation to generation will survive, because they are uniquely rooted in place, so deeply rooted in thrift, so deeply rooted in the kitchen economies of the families who live in a locale, and therefore so deeply rooted in marriage and in faith, in joys and in sufferings, and, as we remember most especially this Sunday, in Motherhood.