I started my weekly quests to try a recipe from VCTOTW some months ago, when this little blog site was but a twinkle in its mum’s eye. Hence my actual baking projects are several recipes beyond what’s been written up here (6 recipes at last count). So to catch up and make weekly posts here correspond to what’s most recent in Charlotte’s real life adventures, I’m gonna attempt to post a cupcake recipe update every day this week, beginning with Monday. It’s Memorial Day — what better time to pay tribute to the recollection of cupcakes past?
Why else is this week apropos to lots and lots of cupcake contemplation? Today (Sunday) is the Feast of Corpus Christi — that’s “the body of Christ” for you Anglo-speaking Hellenists — which is an extra special day for celebrating, honoring, and thinking about the Eucharist. That’s a little ritual Catholics partake of at every mass, wherein we eat Jesus. No, not Jesus the body who walked around about 2000 years ago, Jesus the baked good! See, right before he died, Jesus ate one last meal with his friends, where he picked up a piece of bread, and passed it around the table for everyone to get a bite. He told his boys that this bread was his body, which was given up for them, so they’d darn well better remember it. Which they did, by making sure Christians ever after repeat the act of sharing out some bread when they get together. Mmm. Salvation and complex carbs, all in one bite.
So Catholics share a highly symbolic meal to connect with other Catholics and with Jesus. Vegans share unbelievably moist and fluffy cupcakes to connect with other vegans and with omnivores who might otherwise find them (the vegans) pretentious and aloof. Just about everybody eats to form connections and forge community, not just to fill up their rumbly tummies. Can you think of the last social event you were part of that didn’t involve food? There’s good reason. Get people around a table together, they start to feel like family, and it’s infinitely harder to kill or seriously maim someone you’ve broken bread or shared a pizza with. Once you’ve eaten with somebody, you start to see them as a person like you, and you start to empathize.
But it can get complicated for vegans to do this in a largely non-vegan world, since there’s no telling when some cruelty-laced product like butter or bacon is going to show up on the menu. That’s why vegan cookbooks like VCTOTW are so great — they give vegans something to offer non-vegans that non-vegans look forward to eating (unless you are my friend Format Fan; then you are impossible to please and we must bond over something else entirely). That’s also why church is so great. Vegans can go, shake hands with all manner of humans at the Sign of Peace, and even get their share of some corpus Christi without compromising their regard for non-humans. Jesus didn’t pass the rack of lamb at the Last Supper, he passed the bread. See? That Jesus is one smart matze.
To read further (and slightly more coherently, but only slightly) on the subject of being vegan and Catholic at the same time, you can check out the Non-fiction section of the Prose page. This is likely to be an ongoing project. If I’m not excommunicated first. :) Happy Corpus Christi!
