Posted by Vale
‘Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin’
Today 21st century body art offers the opportunity to go one step further and actually put the skull there. It’s called a sub dermal implant and it’s what you can do when a tattoo just doesn’t go far enough. Skulls are only the start. Lots of examples here if you’re interested.
The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition
A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, Maggi Hambling, Graham Harvey, Gary Lachman, Nick Reynolds, and Dignity in Dying.
It’s out in May 2012!
Posted by Sweetpea
I love reading Nigella Lawson’s cookery books just as much as I love cooking and eating the food she understands and describes so well. There is a particularly wonderful section called ‘Funeral Feast’ in her 2004 book ‘Feast’, published by Chatto & Windus. Please find a copy and read it in full. Here is a little section to whet your appetite:
It may seem odd to talk about what you eat at a funeral as a way of celebrating life, but at every level, that is exactly what it is. Nor do I mean a celebration in that cheery, if faintly maudlin sense of giving someone a good send-off, though that is a part of it. Any food is a vital reminder that life goes on, that living is important. That isn’t brutal: it’s the greatest respect you can pay to the dead.
I am not someone who believes that life is sacred, but I know that it is very precious. To turn away from that, to act as if living is immaterial, that what you need to sustain life doesn’t count, is to repudiate and diminish the tragedy of the loss of a life…..
…. the abundance of the feast showed the value of the deceased; it was a mark of respect, a way of honouring the life of that person. Particular foods, too, can be a living testament to the person it was who died. Recipes live on, and to eat foods that person either used to prepare or liked to eat can feel monumentally significant. In Thailand, I read in an article by Bee Wilson in the Sunday Telegraph, “mourners are often presented with a little cookbook … compromising the favourite recipes of the dead person. In this way the whole gastronomic person of the deceased is remembered.” And I would say that the gastronomic personality is the persona. How you eat and what you eat it who you are.
It happens in England, too. I know of some sisters who put together a book of their father’s famous (and previously secret) preserving recipes, to be sold in aid of a local hospice, both to remember him but also to give back to an organisation which had cared for him and for them so tenderly.
Nigella lists recipes for ‘Nursery Fish Pie’, ‘Sweet Lamb Tagine’, ‘Lentil Soup’, ‘Meatloaf’, ‘Heavenly Potatoes’, ‘Marble Cake’ and ‘Fruit Tea Loaf’, each with its reasons for inclusion, but it is ‘Hamine Eggs’ which really catches my imagination:
Hamine Eggs (serves 6)
The traditional Jewish food of mourning is a hard-boiled egg, not as a symbol of regeneration, as the egg might suggest for Christians, but more as a symbol of perpetuation. Life ends, and life begins: life goes on, in fact. All foods that are round, too, have that significance – that the cycle of life and time continues – and as Martine Chiche-Yana explains in ‘La Table Juivre’, they are described as being “sans bouche”, without mouths to express sorrow and anguish. I find that appropriate: there is nothing to be said, or nothing that helps.
Hamine eggs are the Sephardic version, traditionally cooked in the dying embers of a fire. Here, they are cooked slowly on the hob, with onion skins to tint the shells a rich woody brown; and although coffee grounds are often added, I emptied out the leaves of a used teabag instead. After all, during World War II, women would use cold tea to dye their legs when stockings were not to be found.
Onion skins from about 4 large onions
Tea leaves from 1 used teabag
6 eggs
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Line a saucepan with onion skins, using about half your supply, and then add the tea leaves. Put in the eggs and cover with the rest of the onion skins (red onion skins will give a deeper, burgundy tinge). You don’t want any onion, just the papery skin. Cover well with water, and pour over the oil to help prevent the water evaporating during the long cooking time.
Bring the pan of water to a boil and immediately transfer to a new, smaller burner with a heat diffuser on it and turn the flame to the lowest flame possible. Leave to cook very slowly for 7 or so hours, then turn off the heat and leave to cool before taking the eggs out of the murky water. I tend to cook the eggs in the daytime and leave them till the next morning before taking them out of the pan.
Hamine eggs are not exclusively eaten at funerals, though they are a feature of them, and these are beautiful on the outside, meltingly tender within and worth cooking not just in times of grief.
Funerals are looking for a new aesthetic.
People are looking for new ways of memorialising their dead. Brooding Victorian monumental gloom is out. So too is the regimented eezi-mow municipal cemetery with its ranks of polished anonymous headstones. In rejection of these, people are presently opting for one of two diametrically different alternatives. Either they go with the eezi-mow cemetery but heap the grave possessively with all manner of garish grieving gew-gaws (to the ire of the mower and some other grievers), or they take flight and seek solace amidst the meadowsweet of a minimalist natural burial ground, where nothing, or almost nothing, marks the spot. The one is highly personalised, the other depersonalised.
People are looking for new ways of saying goodbye to their dead. The one-rite-fits-all approach of organised religions does not suit secular folk, and to them falls the necessity to reinvent the wheel and cook up a unique rite of their own, often in a very short time. Here, almost everybody favours a high degree of personalisation. Common elements include celebration, humour, informality, pop music, participation and a nice coffin. It’s interesting to note that the iconography of religion is now frequently substituted by the insignia of a football team. What existential statement does that make?
Funeral directors, most of them, cling to the Victorian aesthetic. They look increasingly anachronistic. As do their carbon-belching hearses and Russian mafia limousines. Time to move on, chaps?
Where things will go next is anyone’s guess. Observable at this stage is an intriguing yawning of class divides which, in recent years, seemed to have closed. Generally it’s middle class folk who choose to slumber amidst the meadowsweet and larksong, and it’s working class folk who, to the disdain of many of the former, journey through eternity beneath a burden of faded plastic flowers, soggy teddies and the tingle-wingle of a wind chime.
There’s no taming taste. Perhaps what we’re seeing here is not a class divide in the old sense but, rather, the victory of the will of the people over those who reckon they know better, those who would regulate them. The highbrows are at last finding the tide of democracy to be insuperable.
Take Richard Stone, for example. He is editor of the exquisitely posh Burlington Magazine, an arty glossy for those who know best. His beef is with the celebrity statues appearing in our towns and cities. “Every town has now got to have the local celebrity,” he says. “Fine. We used to do it with blue plaques. But now you’ve got to have a bloody great bronze. They’re not artistic – occasionally competent is about all you can say.”
Retorts Eric Woods, head of the fan club responsible for statues of Laurel and Hardy in Ulverston: “If you don’t like it, fine. If you don’t like Laurel and Hardy, fine. If you don’t like statues in public places, fine. Don’t look at it.”
Somewhere in between these two voices is the incomparably exquisite but benignly accommodating Brian Sewell. He says: “They don’t do much harm, except get up our aesthetic noses.”
Surely there are no value judgements to be made here, as in the matter of funerals. Is it not our democratic duty to be indulgent? Diversity is all. Let’s enjoy one another.
