The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...
Not Just a Story (2024-06-24)
I don't remember when I first read or heard the welsh story of Cerridwen, her cauldron, or how the bard Taliesin came to have his skills in poetry, prophecy, and healing. (For something of a cole's notes version of the story and its associated meanings, see Judith Shaw at the Feminism and Religion blog, Cerridwen, Dark Goddess of Transformation, Inspiration and Knowledge, 30 october 2014.) Perhaps it was around the same time I was trying to look up more about the strange tangle of stories and imagery presented as "the story of the knights of the round table." It doesn't take much reading to find the "Arthurian legend" label has gradually been extended to cover a great many stories it shouldn't, primarily by more recent scholars and folklorists trying to arrange all the world's stories into one set of ur-stories. Tolkien was none too impressed by them as a whole, since he deemed them primarily french, the persistent celtic heritage of modern france notwithstanding. His suspicion that diverse materials were wound together from different cultures that were not necessarily celtic or "anglo-saxon" has been borne out by historical and ethnographic evidence. C. Scott Little and Linda A. Malcor present an intriguing and plausible case for tracing elements of what became "Arthurian legend" to scythians and peoples of the caucasus region in From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail. While there are certainly parallels in cauldron imagery between the different peoples Littleton and Malcor discuss, including bathing in a cauldron to restore youth or life, that wasn't the element that stuck in my mind. It seemed to me the cauldron image must be more ordinary, so to speak. The caricature witch's cauldron, an obvious derogation of Cerridwen and her sisters in related celtic cultures seems likely to itself have a homely origin in the familiar sight of a woman using one of these all-purpose items over an open fire.
Cauldrons in their many sizes and derivatives, from cupels to crock pots are still at the foundation of daily chemistry at home and in factories. Originally it was the woman's set of such useful containers and her wide knowledge of recipes and formulae both memorized and written where these reactions and mixes were developed and used. Hence there could be a cauldron for cleaning laundry, dyeing fabric and yarn, sometimes not too far away from the cauldron with dinner simmering in it. A smaller set of pots would usually be used for brewing drinks and medicines. So in principle the extension to Cerridwen's all-powerful cauldron with its remarkable broth did not sound strange. What I found myself stubbornly puzzling over was the length of time the special brew meant for her son and accidentally taken by the boy who would become Taliesin remained simmering under constant attendance on the fire. One version of the story I have read said it had to cook for a year and a day, a sort of special number in the way of three, seven, and nine. But this didn't seem quite enough of an explanation. The thing about carefully passed down oral traditional narratives is that they don't pick out totally arbitrary numbers, the size and application of the number goes with whatever action it is applied to. A spiritually potent number will mark the actions of spirit beings, but otherwise the action will have echoes on the human scale in the ordinary world. I had never imagined a real life soup or stew a skilled cook could keep going for a year. Which just goes to show, the real world is amazingly capable of outstripping our imaginations.
The article that solved the puzzle is from Atlas Obscura, where Blair Mastbaum wrote about "perpetual broths" in december 2022. It is an excellent, medium-length article. I can't do it full justice with two quotes, so it is best read it in full to learn about broths that never stopped cooking until a world war literally flattened the cook's village.
Pot-au-feu – also known as perpetual stew, forever soup, hunter's pot, bottomless broth, master stock, or mother broth – is a culinary tradition that is practiced around the world. Food historians zero into two global regions for the origins of soups simmered for years or even decades. The first is China, and more specifically in the cuisines of Canton and Fujian, where there's a rich tradition of making lou mei, or master stock, which is used to braise and poach meats. These master stocks are never discarded. They're handed down from one generation to the next, with some lasting several centuries.
The other likely source for this technique is France, where decades-old soups like Perrotte's have been satiating hungry peasants since time immemorial. "It's classic poor people food," says British food historian Annie Gray. "That may be why there's still a stigma attached to it."
How terrible is it, that the staff of life for peasants is stigmatized when in truth all of us are descended from "poor people"? It's ridiculous, and also a cruel way in which people are cut off from their own deeper heritage. Then again, perhaps another major element of the stigma is that peasants were and still are the most persistent at resisting christianization or else firmly syncretizing elements of christian belief and practice into their own spiritual practices. People who maintain close links to the land are chary of dropping rituals and traditions they understand affect the abundance and quality of the plants, animals, and water they need to live. As many "westerners" are painfully finding out, such people are not superstitious simpletons.
In the meantime, it is worth taking a moment to ponder how profound the stories of Cerridwen and her cauldron must have been to the people who originally tended their own perpetual broths. A human-scale broth can be set on the back in the coals to stay warm enough for food safety, or today cooled and kept in the fridge until the next round of cooking. A broth that demanded an extraordinary range of ingredients, consistent heat, and a continuous watcher to keep it stirred would certainly represent superhuman effort.
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