On the Sacredness of preparing food

This time of year is harvest time.  In the old Celtic calendar it was Lamas or Lunasagh.  I spent today processing beautiful organic peaches, a ritual I have undertaken for more than 40 years.  Beautiful fragrant peaches, rosy in colour and floral in scent.

The day was warm, but anticipating the heat and moisture of canning, I cut up and fried an organic chicken yesterday-- soul food for my Missouri ancestors. NOT batter fried. Lightly dredged in seasoned flour (gluten free for me).  When I visited my Great Aunt with my then new husband in 1973, fried chicken was what Aunt Estelle fed us when she welcomed us into her house.
Cold fried chicken is a perfect meal on a hot day. Slipping the skins on the peaches, gently stripping away the outside, leaving a heavy slick globe cradled in my hands- reminded me surprisingly of delivering a baby. [Don't drop it as it squirts into your waiting hands!] Red havens- my favourite peach variety. The first time I canned red havens they were from Creston BC, and I was pregnant with my daughter.  We canned peaches before moving from Sproule Creek to northwest BC, and brought our canning with us.  Now I buy them by the case from the growers at the Old Strathcona Farmers Market in Edmonton. I give away a lot of what I can.  A gift of peaches is like a gift of sunshine that you can eat.  It is a gift that makes sense to my Elders and First Nation friends in Northwest BC.  A gift of the work of hands.
Today I also thought of putting up fish in the smoke house, another intensive focus of seasonal food preparation.  On the Skeena and Bulkeley Rivers (aka Xsan and Widzinkwe) it is sockeye or spring salmon in the fish camps and smokehouses- deep orange flesh falling away from sharp blades wielded by skilled hands. ts'el.  If half smoked, not enough to keep without canning or freezing, the resulting fish is called ts'el.  To make fully smoked you have to leave it in the smokehouse, in cool smoke, to finish drying. (The extra thickness is removed through a thinning process to make the highly valued and delicious strips huuks, which are threaded on clean sticks to be smoked into salmon jerky). When you do the same process with a spring salmon (aka chinook), the result is like a small pink blanket thrown over the pole in the smokehouse.  They are BIG. I watched a Tahltan lady in Glenora on the Stikine River doing this once.  It was impressive.

spring salmon hanging to fully dry ASG photo 1984

The process of smoking salmon here involves opening out the fish like a blanket, scoring to- but not through- the skin.  There are special boards shaped like a peaked wooden roof on a sawhorse to accomplish this. In Gitxsan the process is
On the Mackenzie and Peel Rivers, the fish we worked with in fish camps were coneys (inconnu or sheefish (Stenodus leucichthys ), broad whitefish and crooked back, a second smaller whitefish species. The approach to cutting and drying was quite different, but the reverence for the gift of food was the same. And the beautiful skill of hands and knives creating valued food was also the same. Fish are air dried first, with care taken to discourage hungry gulls from snacking, and then smoke dried in a smokehouse. 

fish air drying at Tree River Fish camp, August 2000

The resulting dryfish is golden toned and utterly delicious.
On the Skeena, the unused parts of the fish must be returned to the water, or burned in the fire.  On the Mackenzie and Peel Rivers, the guts and trimmings are spread out on the sandbar for the gulls to eat.  The gulls are thanked for cleaning the land, and are welcomed. Tidigeh. For my peaches, and the local apricots I spent the past week turning into preserves, unusable parts are returned to the earth via my compost.
In all of these cases, the process, the goal, is the same: taking the gifts of the season, of the Earth, and putting them up to sustain family and friends, to feed the people. A ritual of enacting thanks, and perpetuating relationship. Prayer in motion.