40 Days of Dish(es): Of Bone and Blood

While attending a Jungian lecture on divine feminine and masculine archetypes where the audience was asked to participate by providing examples of commonly accepted traits and themes of each, I was picked to give an answer. Bored by the surprisingly pedantic answers from the group about men being active and women passive, I scratched this out on a scrap of paper on my knee:

A woman is like a mushroom. Most of her lies underground just as the mushroom's myceliae do, deep down with the roots of trees and plants, in silent facilitation of their processes up-taking nutrient and water from the soil. It is a symbiotic relationship she participates in with the plant, and one could not live without the other. She forms a vast underground web-like network unseen by man, save for when he stumbles by, kicking over a rotted log, exposing her ubiquitousness. She presents herself to the above-ground world as a mushroom, the fruiting body of her sex, only when the timing is right to release her spores, when conditions are amenable to her survival; indeed, to her thriving.

Tagliatelle al Barbaresco

My classmate and I looked across the table, staying put after the above dish was eaten. "I feel like I'm underground" she said. "No way I'm getting up after that" I agreed. It was the sauce that held us, sinking down in our seats. It was comprised of Dolcetto d'Alba wine, butter, shallots, agaricus and porcini mushrooms and parsley with an extra quarter cup of wine added in the last minutes. And with the final seasoning, I tasted blood in the sauce.

At the table, we discussed the wine from Barbaresco, with a taste like a ruddy complexion, hardy enough to carry the other ingredients on its back from the saucepan to the table, and the splash of fruit added at the end. The mushrooms were like meat, soaked with the deep burgundy sauce. Robert commented how you could taste the unfolding of earth to herb to fruit. We wanted to know where exactly this deep red came from and consulted his copy of the World Atlas of Wine. Turns out the grape grows on chalky, iron-rich soil, which speaks of bone and blood.