Believing in Magic: An Idiot's Theology of Food
How two chefs and a brewer transformed the stuff of earth.
A man who play-pretends at Anglican priesting once told me there was no such thing as magic. By that, he meant to explain away the transformation of bread to body and wine to blood because he was Anglican, after all, and some Anglicans are scared shitless by metaphysics. (Stiff upper lip and all that.) By "there's no such thing as magic," he also meant to explain what he called “The Godfather Problem” which is this: If the Eucharist is magic, then how could Michael Corleone take the host on Sunday and murder a rival on Monday?
The man—I will not call him Father—could not see beyond metaphor, and he’d adopted a cynical anti-transformational view that relied too much on the "accidents" of the Eucharist, which is to say its outward appearance. This was not limited to bread and wine, of course. He listened to jazz for its virtuosity instead of the way it makes you Feel baby feel. He appreciated art as a dog appreciates chow. He never understood my love for Anthony Bourdain or Cummings or Bukowski or even Sandburg. The form of a thing—and its reduction—were more important than the mystical beauty inside the thing, which is to say The Magic.
There's no love lost between the play-pretend priest and me, but still, I pity him.
In the summer, stardust falls over the Ozarks, coating every blade of grass, every wildflower, every tiny golden finch coming home for the heat. In the fields, tiny white petals peel from wild vines, harden over, turn to pink balls then plump up, darken, and hang as little treasures. There is a harvest on those vines, and how can that harvest be explained but by some magic? More, how can the human propensity to take the thing—the blackberry, not the golden finch—macerate it, reduce it, and compose something of the flavors be explained by anything other than magic? How does anyone take the created things of earth and transform those things but by magic?
In the seventeenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins was so convinced of the deep magic of the natural world, that he took his brothers into the forest and force-fed them wildflowers. He wanted them to taste the earth, allow its magic to work through their blood and bones. As I wrote in The Deep Down Things, “When I first read this, I wondered whether he might be insane, but now I understand: the sacramental energy of God filled everything in the world around him. Creation was neither abstract nor outside of humanity. It was a thing meant to be taken in, ingested, fully experienced. This was what it meant to commune with God.”
And even this—Hopkins and the flower—might be explained away as a fitful childhood prank if I had not been force-fed flowers by a band of local poets. Those poets: Tyler Rogers, Eric Robinson, and Jesse Gagnon.
This was the experiment: Orthodox Brewery shut its doors for a private event, moved three large picnic tables into its taproom, and invited a local chef to create something special.
Tyler—the chief protagonist of food—is a local craftsman, and his craft is flavor. He has bona fides: a stint at The French Laundry; the chef at a local restaurant; a roll-out bag of handmade knives; the give-a-damn tattoos that mark him as a maker instead of a nine-to-five corporate type. His Apple Watch is his lone badge of commercial conformity. He is, by all accounts, a rogue magician.
Tyler’s partner in crime—Eric Robinson—is no less magical. A jazz musician turned chef, Eric knows that food is more than the sum of its parts. Yes, it’s about the notes on the palate—the acid, salt, fat, heat—but it’s about the notes not played, too. Great food, he might say, is about as much about the implied as the applied.
In the taproom, the chefs rolled out the courses—a tiny compressed melon with a reduction made from the blackberries at Tank’s farm; a riff on Tom Kha; barley soup so thick with Ozark accents you could hear its drawl; tomatoes and soft cheese.
They rolled through the dishes with intention, paired them with different beers from Orthodox’s brewer, Jesse Gagnon—a craftsman among craftsmen. For the final course, Tyler brought out the beef, and this was the moment he conjured Hopkins.
A fatty Arkansas brisket; a corn emulsion of some sort; a side of fresh sauerkraut. Dotting the top of that dish, the flowers. Eat the flowers; taste the land; remember that the thing is rarely the thing; underneath the thing there is something bigger; magic.
There are things that cannot be described, only experienced: the scent of morning dew; an early morning fog settling over the ancient oak; the taste of honeysuckle from the vine; the joy of being barefoot in grass; the notes the stars sing at night. There are keys humming just beyond reach. There are colors deep enough to taste. There are joys in every tiny thing. The magicians see this, know this, and they transform all of it into human experience. What is this if not magic? This last dish was that.
If humans—with all their limitedness—can conjure the magic in a meal, what can be said of God? Could he take the bread of earth and transform it into his very self? Could he take grapes from a vine and make them his life?
Only a raunchy naturalist would dismiss the possibility.
Pause. Steel yourself. I’m about to move into the realm of citational Christian cliche because practicing Christian nerds love to cite the holy trinity of English faith-writers: Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton. But Chesterton—the great philosopher and novelist—wrote of his own experience with the magic of life:
In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.
Chesterton was convinced in magic, and not the magic of fairies and wizards and dragons, but the magic that’s filled the world from its first days. That magic—we’ll call it sacramental magic—convinced him that this life is no accident. It is something more. For all its accidents, there is mystical hiding beneath. That something is the essence of the magic.
At one of those long tables in the Orthodox taproom, I participated in magic. Three men—Tyler, Eric, and Jesse—took the good stuff of Ozark earth and they transubstantiated it. Each dish, each flavor, the scents, and the sense of all of it took me home. I became the boy picking blackberries on my granny’s land. I stood among the bags of feed in my grandpa’s barn. I found myself in the stone basement, hunting for a jar of canned tomatoes. I sat across from Amber as we ate soup at Taste of Thai. I examined the wildflowers on the banks of the Buffalo.
It was a Proustian meal, a meal that conjured involuntary memories of what it means to not only be alive but to live. And not only to live but to experience. And not one to experience, but to believe.
What is that if not magic?
You Will Look Back on Today and Say
I was part of some magic:
A universe of memories
collected in the eyes
of those I love without knowing
and without knowing love.
All of us at that long table and
Three knife points of light
split some shroud,
peeled it back as onion skin
then spoke: take, eat, drink.
Taste and see:
the grass in Granny’s field,
clover pushing through toes,
wildflowers along the Buffalo,
the wild ache for next season’s
blackberries.
Taste and see:
earth, water, sun,
and the smiling
shining spirits dancing.
Taste and see: magic.
You will look back on
today as a child
and see all of this
again and again.
The earth stills
in silent knowing,
and goes on
and on.
The Observationalist
In the spring of 2023, I began exploring the concept of visual language by creating a book of photos, poems, and short essays entitled The Observationalist. All proceeds are reinvested in the equipment I need to pursue more ideas like this. You can preview The Observationalist by following this link or clicking on the image below.
Thanks for reading!
Beautiful. I could see myself at the table, brining fork to mouth, spoon to chin.