An Exaltation of Soups (33 page)

1. The night before, prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list, then mix the chicken pieces, onion slices, and chile peppers in a flat-bottomed dish and pour the lemon juice, then the peanut oil over the chicken. Mix well. Seal the dish with plastic or aluminum foil, refrigerate, and let marinate overnight.

2. Fire up the grill (to be most authentic) or turn on the broiler.

1. Brown the chicken pieces as quickly as possible with a very hot flame, either on the grill or under the broiler.

2. Put the browned chicken pieces in a Dutch oven and add the marinade and onion mixture. Pour in the hot water, season with salt and pepper, seal with aluminum foil, top with the cover, and cook at 275 to 300°F. for 2 to 2½ hours.

3. Thirty minutes before serving, bring 8 cups of water to a boil. Add the rice, reduce the heat to low, and cover. Simmer for 20 minutes, then remove from the heat.

Mound the rice in a large serving dish. Unseal the chicken—it should be tender and the onions should be lightly browned and very sweet—and pour it over the rice. Invite your guests to sit down and dig into the pot, with their choice of fingers, spoons, or forks.

O
NCE UPON A TIME
, New Year celebrations had nothing to do with January 1. For that matter, they still don’t in many parts of the world.

Why? It’s a calendar thing.

In the Beginning, there was no concept of measuring and recording the passage of time. It got cold; it got hot; people adapted. Not until Neolithic man—or, more likely, woman—started growing things did it become important to keep track of time. People kept their eyes on the growing season and marked the end of one natural cycle (winter) and the beginning of the next (spring) according to when the first new moon appeared in the sky after the vernal equinox. New
year
celebrations and rituals logically began with new
life
, the renewal of the earth, sprouting plants and animals popping babies, all based on the lunar calendar—you know, sometime around May, give or take a month, depending on where you lived.

There was, however, one problem: “lunar” accounting doesn’t add up right in the larger planetary rhythms of timekeeping. The moon waxes and wanes and waxes and wanes and still adds up to only 354 days in its annual cycles, so its calendar didn’t and doesn’t add up to a true 365-day year of earth orbiting the sun. And so began the battle of cultural calendars—lunar versus Zodiac versus solar.

• Babylonians, who were the first, apparently, to come up with a lunar calendar around 2000
B.C.E.
, and they intercalated an extra month from time to time to true the seasons.

• Chinese, who—since 2637
B.C.E.
and the legendary Emperor Huangdi—observe twelve 29- or 30-day months that repeat seven times in the course of a nineteen-year period and generally stay in line with the seasons. New Year? It starts at the second new moon after the beginning of winter, falling somewhere between January 20 and February 20.

• Koreans, Vietnamese, and Tibetans, who celebrate Sol-nal, Tet, and Losar based on the same Chinese calculations.

• Hebrews, who add an extra 29-day month
Veadar
every nineteen years and celebrate the New Year in the fall as Rosh Hashanah.

• Muslims, who begin their calendar from Mohammed’s flight from Mecca to Medina, count 354 days for nineteen years and 355 days for eleven, so their New Year’s Day moves backward through all four seasons.

• Persians (Iranians), who celebrate the New Year on March 21. Their pre-Zoroastrian calendar, which was formalized by Zoroaster and perfected by the astronomer/poet Omar Khayyam, featured twelve months—named after the guardian angels of the holy book of Zoroastrianism—of 30 days each, thereby giving 5 extra days for ancestors to visit their children on earth. New Year, or
No Ruz
, was the most important festival of all for this sacred time.

• Ancient Egyptians, who fixed a 365-day calendar based on the confluence of the Dog Star Sirius reappearing in the eastern sky about the time of the Nile’s annual flood.

• Romans, who progressed from a 304-day calendar that just flat ignored the 60 days of wintertime, to Numa Pompilius’ faulty solar calendar that first made Januarius 1 the official start of the New
Year, to Julius Caesar (in consultation with the astronomer Sosigenes) banning the use of lunar calculations and declaring a year of 445 days in 46
B.C.E.
to correct Rome’s calendar, a time known as “the year of confusion.”

• Roman Catholic Europeans, who corrected the Julian calendar in 1582 under Pope Gregory XIII, then exported this new Gregorian calendar all over the world with their explorers, conquerors, missionaries, and colonialists. Germans stuck with the Julian calendar until 1700; England and the American colonies until 1752; Russia, 1918; and Turkey, 1927.

Okay, you’re likely saying, but now it’s the twenty-first century and most everyone marches to a 365-day solar calendar. So why does the Christian Church still have moveable feasts for Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, and Easter? Good question. Because, as a historical footnote, the church calendar is partly regulated by throwback lunar cycles. Why? Because, despite its best efforts, the church was not able to completely ban pagan fertility rites at the vernal equinox’s new moon, so it turned them into church holidays that fluxed along with the lunar cycles.

Now we’re through the hard part and can get on with the whys and wherefores of New Year celebrations, not to mention which soups traditionally fuel them in kitchens across the world.

It’s a pretty simple and totally universal proposition, when you think about it. People want and need fresh starts, so they create appropriate times for them, bundle them up with a lot of traditions and rituals, and declare themselves reborn at the end.

In the old days of agricultural societies, what better time to ritually honor that rebirth than when the earth was renewing itself? For peoples bound to church calendars, like Muslims and Christians, the ritual date is important, not the season in which it falls. For the modern world, driven as it is by the need for global coordination of commerce and contracts, January 1 is a convenient consensus. And if January 1 isn’t your new year of choice, it’s still perfectly fine to celebrate—just don’t ignore the “other” New Year’s Day that’s traditional for you, too.

H
AITI
PUMPKIN SOUP
S
OUPE JOUMOU

Serves 6 to 8

T
HIS
is
A
fabulous stuffed soup—bright yellow-orange and sensuously African with an opulence of meat, vegetables, and the Caribbean bite of lime and chiles. In Kreyol, you’d say it was stuffed with
dub, joumou, kawot, seleri, zanyon, nave, pomdete, malanga
, and
shou—
and spiced with
piman bouk, ten, lay
, and
sit-won.

1. Rub the meat with the spice paste and let marinate at room temperature for 1 hour.