Peasant memories

I'm just taking a moment here to say goodbye to James Barber, aka "The Urban Peasant," the title of his cooking show that ran on CBC-TV oh so many years. The thing I loved about him - probably everyone loved this - was how he did the show as a lonely person who made friends with the human condition. He always talked to himself while he was cooking, as if to talk himself out of loneliness and into a state of comfort.
And not just the five-minute comfort of, say, a dish of macaroni and cheese. He incorporated all the comfort of living alone in the city, but not alone. There was the cat, the fire escape, the rain, and the market. You could go to that market and pick live crayfish up in your hands, and choose the fattest, freshest one, and in so doing, commune with every peasant woman or man who has visited such a market since the dawn of time.

His shirt sleeves
His shirt sleeves always came unrolled halfway through the show, and hung in the soup pot. He never minded this. He never rolled them up again. Shirt sleeves hanging in the pot are what happens when you are alive, and cooking, and talking to yourself, in this imperfect but lovely world. There they go, your shirt sleeve ends trailing over the pile of chopped celery, the slivered onions - on their way to the pot they might send a pyramid of sugar snap peas to the floor, but you pick the peas up again and you stick them under the tap and you keep going. You didn't worry about anything.
Not even your asthma, or emphysema, or whatever it was that made The Urban Peasant breathe so loudly into his microphone. Or your limp. He breathed as if he was snoring, and he limped around his kitchen in such an endearing manner, you just wanted to be with him all the time, in a world where cheap and cheerful groceries came second to just being together.
Which is what we're all striving for at this time of year, right? Bumper to bumper in the box store parking lots, blood pressure aimed at the star on the tree. Be together - that's what James Barber was all about, chopping up cabbages. Be together - but he was always all alone. And why? Because he knew the secret of dissolving loneliness is knowing how to be by yourself.

Heart of the kitchen
The history of anyone is full of song, memory, beauty and companionship, if you know, like Barber seemed to know, how to remember it, how to talk yourself into the soul equivalent of a little kitchen with a big warm stove for a heart and pots full of everyday cabbages, onions, garlic, fava beans, oil and herbs, chopped chicken or a sweet, fresh piece of fish.
He wasn't just about the food - he was about the story of the self: will the soul cheer up and live? "Yes," he said, "it will." He said this by his tone, which was the tone you would use if you found an orphan under the bridge and were guiding it to your own warm fire.
James Barber died at his kitchen table while making a pot of soup. His wife apparently told people he would have felt OK about the soup being his last act, but would not have been impressed with the timing. I guess she meant it was too close to Christmas.
Well, James, you said to cook cabbages in winter because they're cheap, so I'm cooking up a big pot, with chicken and noodles and sesame oil and hot chilli pepper sauce with garlic. More than that, I'm going to try to cook it with comfort and joy, and I'll think of you this Christmas, and thinking of you will remind me that presents are not important, that you should cook for the people you love, and that while one is at it, one might as well give a bowl of soup to her own inner orphan, shivering under the bridge.

Kathleen Winter is a freelance writer who lives on Butterpot Mountain. Her book of
fiction, "boYs," was published by Biblioasis.