What fasting kitchens know about cooking from the cupboard
For most of history, a great many people have spent a large part of every year not eating meat. Not because there was none, but because their faith told them not to. The rules differ completely from one tradition to the next. What they produced is surprisingly similar: kitchens that became very good at beans, lentils, grains, oil, spice and things that keep.
That is the subject of this site, arrived at from a different direction. This page is about what those kitchens made, and what a cook working from a long-life cupboard can learn from them. It is not guidance on how to fast. Each tradition has its own rules, its own exemptions for the old, the young, the pregnant and the ill, and its own people to ask.
The Orthodox fast: what is left when even the oil goes
The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America lists the foods given up on fast days, “in order of frequency of prohibition, meat (including poultry), dairy products, fish, olive oil and wine”. Most Wednesdays and Fridays are fast days, and so is Great Lent. “Fruits, vegetables, grains and shellfish are permitted throughout the year.”
So on the strictest days even the olive oil goes. On Clean Monday, the first day of Lent, food is kept to “uncooked vegetables, fruit, dry nuts, bread, water and fruit juices”. On the gentler fast days, food may be cooked “with olive or vegetable oil”, and this is where Greek bean cooking lives: fasolada, white beans in tomato with a great deal of olive oil, and gigantes plaki.
Why oil and wine, and not olives and grapes? One Orthodox priest explains it as a matter of blood: the fast avoids foods that contain it, and oil and wine, “up until the last couple of centuries, were stored in skins of animals”. It is one priest’s account, and he says himself that the rule could be re-examined. But it is a good reminder that fasting rules carry history with them.
Ethiopia keeps the strictest fast of all. The Ethiopian Orthodox church puts fasting days at “about 250 a year, of which about 180 are obligatory for all”, with no meat, eggs or dairy. In practice, one study estimated, adults keep around 140, which is still more than a third of the year eating, in that paper’s words, a “vegan dietary pattern”. The cooking that grew out of it leans on pulses: in one study of breastfeeding mothers, “almost all mothers ate pulses in fasting” periods, stewed in sauces spiced with berbere. Our misir wat is one of those stews.
Ramadan: dates, water, then soup
Ramadan is a fast of a different shape: nothing at all from dawn until sunset, every day for a month, then a meal. How that meal begins is set by tradition. The Muslim Council of Britain’s guide says that “as per tradition, Muslims break their fast with dates and water, followed by a cooked meal”, and quotes the hadith behind it. NHS Greater Manchester’s advice follows the same order: “break your fast with dates and water, followed by a light soup or salad before moving on to a balanced main meal”.
In Morocco, the soup is harira, served, as National Geographic puts it, “literally every evening as part of the fast-breaking meal”. It is lentils and chickpeas, tomato, spice, a little pasta, thickened with flour and finished with lemon, which is to say it is almost entirely store cupboard. Dates keep for months. A kitchen that has to produce a restoring meal at the same hour every evening for a month has every reason to build it from things that are always there.
Hindu fast days: a short list, cooked well
Hindu fasting often works by exclusion rather than by hours. On Navratri, a temple guide lists what to give up as “grains, lentils, onion, garlic, and regular salt”, with rock salt in its place. What remains includes sago, potatoes, buckwheat and amaranth flour, milk and nuts. The rules vary a great deal between regions and families.
A short list concentrates the mind. Sabudana khichdi, sago pearls soaked and tossed with potato and peanuts, is what generations of cooks made from it, and sago is one of the most cupboard-friendly things there is: a bag keeps a year and needs only soaking.
Shojin ryori: wasting nothing
Japanese Buddhist temple cooking, shojin ryori, is “free of meat, poultry, fish, and eggs”, according to Japan’s tourism agency, and traditionally avoids pungent onion and garlic too. It “grew in popularity through the influence of the Zen master Dogen in the thirteenth century”, and Dogen’s instructions for the monastery cook are one of the great texts about kitchens.
What runs through them is respect for ingredients and an absolute refusal to waste. Dogen tells the cook to “keep the white water with which you have washed the rice; do not wastefully discard it”, and to look after the stores “as if they were your own eyes”. The tourism agency notes the same habit in practice: vegetable peels and leafy tops go into simple broths.
England: fish days and the navy
England fasted too. In the Middle Ages, meat was given up on set days, “typically Friday, but in England also on Wednesdays and Saturdays”, and through Lent, Advent and Pentecost. Fish replaced it for those who could afford fish, and most of it was preserved: “drying (stockfish) and salting were the two principal methods of preservation, with herring and cod the dominant species”.
After the Reformation the fish days survived for a new reason. Under Elizabeth I, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Lent were fish days, “almost a third of the year”, and an Act of 1563 said this was “for the better maintenance and increase of the Navy…and not for any superstition”. It did not entirely work. As the History of Parliament puts it, “there simply was not enough fish”, and salted red herring was remembered as “tasting like chewing old leather”.
One custom from all this survives everywhere. Before Lent began, English Heritage explains, “eggs, butter and fat were used up”, and the easiest way to use them was pancakes.
What a cupboard can take from all this
Pulses and grains can carry a whole cuisine. Every one of these traditions, faced with weeks or months without meat, built its food on lentils, beans, chickpeas, sago or rice, and none of them treated that as a hardship menu. Fasolada, misir wat, harira and sabudana khichdi are dishes people look forward to. A cupboard built on the same things is not a ration.
Fat and spice are what make it good. Notice what is taken away last. The Orthodox fast gives up olive oil only on its strictest days. The flavour in these dishes comes from oil, garlic, ginger, chilli, cinnamon, cumin, lemon: all things that keep. See the spice kit.
Plan the meal before you need it. A fast day is a day whose food was decided in advance, and the dishes that grew around fasting are the ones that can always be made from what is in the house. That is the definition of a good store-cupboard recipe.
Waste nothing. Dogen’s instruction to keep the rice water is the same instinct as keeping the liquid from a tin of chickpeas or carrots for the soup. In a cupboard, everything you open has already been paid for in weight, space and money.
The recipes this page grew out of:
- Harira: Moroccan lentil and chickpea soup, with dates
- Fasolada: Greek white bean soup
- Gigantes plaki: Greek butter beans in tomato
- Misir wat: Ethiopian spiced red lentils
- Sabudana khichdi: sago pearls with potato and peanuts
The same series looks at how cooks without kitchens managed: cooking on an open fire.