I made a symbolic eleven-recipe cookbook for my final project. Each recipe references a text through its ingredients, color scheme, or cooking techniques. Some of the dishes were family recipes, and others were adapted from cooking websites to improve the taste and symbolism. The more complicated desserts are highly symbolic, but others are more lighthearted. The book’s title, “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry,” references the oft-repeated phrase “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” This is a combination of several Bible verses, including Ecclesiastes 8:15, which says, “A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry,” and Isaiah 22:13, which says, “Let us eat and drink, for to morrow we shall die.” Many
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In a society that viewed women as seductive, dangerous temptresses, remaining a virgin was a powerful choice for women and a public expression of their personal commitment to God. I tied two dishes, the Virgin Mary drink and mini pavlovas, to feminine virtue. The former represents Mary, the ideal virtuous woman, and the latter represents the characteristics of all virgins. People have revered Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, throughout all of Catholic history. Dante’s 1320 Divine Comedy shows this view when Dante hears Bernard of Clairvaux, a French spiritual leader, pray to Mary while they’re in the highest form of heaven, the Empyrean. He says, “Oh Virgin Mother, daughter of your son, most humble, most exalted of all creatures, chosen of God in His eternal plan, you are the one who ennobled nature” (Dante 531). From this praise, it’s clear that Mary plays a significant role in Catholic theology. While Mary was free from sexual sin, people also believed she experienced no labor pains and was thus free from original sin. I took inspiration from Mary’s purity by making a drink that was correspondingly free from alcohol. Alcohol-free cocktails are “virgin” drinks, which further ties the drink to Mary’s virtue. While I considered making a virgin strawberry daiquiri, I ultimately settled on a virgin Bloody Mary cocktail, because its name, Virgin Mary, …show more content…
Jerome describes the value he places on Jesus in Letter to Eustochium while explaining his religious experiences in the desert. Referring to one of his particularly lustful moments, he says, “Helpless, I cast myself at the feet of Jesus” (Eustochium 1). I represented the importance of Jesus’s role with resurrection cinnamon rolls, inside-out cinnamon rolls I’ve made since my childhood. I picked them because they end up hollow inside, matching the imagery of Christ’s empty tomb after his resurrection. The marshmallows inside each roll melt in the oven to create this effect. While Jerome and others of his time clearly looked to Jesus for forgiveness and increased faith, this idea changed as the Catholic church became even more corporately driven. For example, by the mid-1300’s, Chaucer mocks money-driven clergy in the Pardoner’s Prologue in The Canterbury Tales. Here, the Pardoner says, “Thus the very same vice that I practice, I preach against, and that is avarice…Yet still I can make other folks begin to leave avarice and sorely repent” (Chaucer 713). Rather than believing salvation came through Christ alone, church leaders later began to intercede, forgiving people’s sins themselves through indulgences. In this, not only did they limit Jesus’s role, but they also participated in the greed
In a society that viewed women as seductive, dangerous temptresses, remaining a virgin was a powerful choice for women and a public expression of their personal commitment to God. I tied two dishes, the Virgin Mary drink and mini pavlovas, to feminine virtue. The former represents Mary, the ideal virtuous woman, and the latter represents the characteristics of all virgins. People have revered Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, throughout all of Catholic history. Dante’s 1320 Divine Comedy shows this view when Dante hears Bernard of Clairvaux, a French spiritual leader, pray to Mary while they’re in the highest form of heaven, the Empyrean. He says, “Oh Virgin Mother, daughter of your son, most humble, most exalted of all creatures, chosen of God in His eternal plan, you are the one who ennobled nature” (Dante 531). From this praise, it’s clear that Mary plays a significant role in Catholic theology. While Mary was free from sexual sin, people also believed she experienced no labor pains and was thus free from original sin. I took inspiration from Mary’s purity by making a drink that was correspondingly free from alcohol. Alcohol-free cocktails are “virgin” drinks, which further ties the drink to Mary’s virtue. While I considered making a virgin strawberry daiquiri, I ultimately settled on a virgin Bloody Mary cocktail, because its name, Virgin Mary, …show more content…
Jerome describes the value he places on Jesus in Letter to Eustochium while explaining his religious experiences in the desert. Referring to one of his particularly lustful moments, he says, “Helpless, I cast myself at the feet of Jesus” (Eustochium 1). I represented the importance of Jesus’s role with resurrection cinnamon rolls, inside-out cinnamon rolls I’ve made since my childhood. I picked them because they end up hollow inside, matching the imagery of Christ’s empty tomb after his resurrection. The marshmallows inside each roll melt in the oven to create this effect. While Jerome and others of his time clearly looked to Jesus for forgiveness and increased faith, this idea changed as the Catholic church became even more corporately driven. For example, by the mid-1300’s, Chaucer mocks money-driven clergy in the Pardoner’s Prologue in The Canterbury Tales. Here, the Pardoner says, “Thus the very same vice that I practice, I preach against, and that is avarice…Yet still I can make other folks begin to leave avarice and sorely repent” (Chaucer 713). Rather than believing salvation came through Christ alone, church leaders later began to intercede, forgiving people’s sins themselves through indulgences. In this, not only did they limit Jesus’s role, but they also participated in the greed