“The stomach bears the feet.” Or so says the Bereshit Rabbah, a Jewish midrash, or commentary, on the book of Genesis from 400 C.E. For some, this phrase suggests that hope fuels our actions, but as a food writer, I think it means that being well-fed compels us to action, binding us to our faith and to our communities. This idea is borne out in Elysian Kitchens, a cookbook about food and faith that chronicles how individuals residing in 11 spiritual spaces across the globe feed and sustain one another. Journalist Jody Eddy chronicles the culinary traditions and food-focused labors of Buddhist monks, Maronite priests, Catholic nuns, and the many religious devotees who feed the spiritual collectives to which they belong. In its exceptional recipes and expansive essays, accompanied by stunning photographs from Kristin Teig, Elysian Kitchens affirms a central belief for all food lovers: In every corner of the world, cooking is an anchor for our communities, cultures, and beliefs.

While producing Elysian Kitchens involved more than two years of on-the-ground research, the project originated with an earlier visit of Eddy’s to the Poblet Monastery in Tarragona, Spain. “The monk who gave me the tour told me that they received calls from chefs frequently who wanted to stage at the monastery,” Eddy remarked. “Having worked with chefs in my career, I thought, ‘There’s something really interesting here.’” On a subsequent trip to the Thiksey Monastery in Ladakh, India, where Eddy spent some time following the death of her mother, she witnessed the pride that the monks took in their food, and how they used it as a ritualistic scaffolding for their lives.

Alongside Teig, their travels brought them to the Sikh Gurudwara of Shri Bangla Sahib in New Delhi, India, whose langar, or kitchen, is as large as a football field. And to Eddy’s hometown monastery of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. Through Michelin-starred chefs in Japan, she connected with the Zen Buddhist temple of Eiheiji in Fukui Prefecture. She drew inspiration from the Masbia soup kitchens run by Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, and in the Sufi temple of Zawiya in Fez, Morocco, where cooking with others is a crucial part of spreading the faith. Even more cloistered sites, like the Abbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac in Quebec, eventually welcomed Eddy and Teig into their kitchens: “Once they understood that we were committed to this,” Eddy says, “that we really found their work meaningful and full of integrity, we were able to develop a kind of trust with them.”

The dishes Eddy and Teig sampled at these sites both affirmed and confounded their expectations about what foods fuel religious devotion. Some dishes, as might be expected of the foods of monks, were simply prepared and sparingly seasoned, such as the slow-cooked rice porridge called okayu at Eiheiji Temple. But many were full-on decadent, as in the creamy, bacon-laced Chicken Normandy from the Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille in southern France. The appetites of the priests, nuns, monks, and gurus ranged widely based on their daily labors and the communities with which they engaged. While the Poblet monks in Spain leaned toward national dishes like paella, the nuns at Kylemore Abbey in Connemara, Ireland, expressed their fondness for the occasional lamb burger—and pint of Guinness. Though time at the table was sacred, it was not without joy: The monks of Saint-Benoît-du-Lac may be required to eat in silence, but one told Eddy that they often had someone read to them during meals. (When she asked if they read from the Bible, he replied, “No, we’re reading Lord of the Rings right now.”) For all the seemingly untouchable holiness of these spaces, these devotees are also human beings, and possess very human appetites for the pleasures of good food and connection at the table.

Food, it turns out, also provides crucial economic support for the survival of these institutions. Many prepare products for retail, such as beer and cider from Saint-Wandrille in Normandy, and wine and arak at Saint Anthony of Qozhaya in the Qadisha Valley of Lebanon. The Kylemore nuns have received widespread acclaim for their jams and chocolate, and their scones have been repeatedly voted among the best in Ireland.

Yet industry need not be entirely at odds with tradition: The Saint-Benoît-du-Lac monks wear contemporary hairnets to comply with food safety regulations, but their commitment to the old ways of doing things is essential. According to Eddy, “They say, ‘How do we survive in this market economy? What do we depend on? Well, let’s scale up and be of the world, but let’s also continue these traditions that we’ve had for decades, and in some places, for centuries.’” Like any food business, these sacred spaces are constantly calibrating the needs of their community against the appetites of the general public. “So many of the things that I witnessed in these sacred spaces,” Eddy observes, “are in the culinary zeitgeist now—ideas of eliminating food waste, of growing your own food, of giving back to the community.” It’s merely the latest stage of religious figures using food to reach beyond the bounds of their order, to participate in a larger culinary discourse that has been taking place for thousands of years.

Though each of these institutions has its own specific history—several have been destroyed and rebuilt countless times, enduring civil war, famine, and religious and political conflict—they all share a common investment in commensality, in the act and practice of cooking and dining together. This sometimes manifests as intergenerational exchange of craft; as Eddy notes, younger Thiksey monks work alongside the older ones when preparing the dumplings for a fortifying skyu stew in the colder months, creating a living archive of recipes and techniques. “It was inspiring to see not only that the older generation wanted to mentor and share,” Eddy explains, “but that the younger generation had a real appreciation and gratitude for that knowledge, and a real eagerness to learn. They see themselves as the throughline going back centuries, and so they bear the weight of the responsibility that comes with that.” 

The survival of these spaces is hard-won, bound not just by a sense of religious order, but by a larger appreciation of what it means to have sacred spaces in which to find community and peace. “All day long there’s so much industry and laughter and levity,” Eddy says. “Yet when they come together for their meals, you notice the stillness and silence, that everyone is eating at the same time, the same things, being served at the same time. When the meal is closed with another prayer, it’s marked as an expression of gratitude—for one another, for the earth, for the food you’re able to consume. That gratitude permeates the whole meal.”

Regardless of your faith or level of observance, it’s hard to deny the power of what Eddy documents in Elysian Kitchens, 11 communities who experience food not through mandated austerity, but through intentionality. “I was expecting one thing when I started to meet these people,” Eddy remarks, “but what I found on the other side of that door was joy and a lot of pride, never a sense of sacrifice.” During her research at Saint Anthony in Lebanon, Eddy met a monk named Father Youhanna, who recently returned to the monastery after a hermitage of more than two decades, during which the other monks would leave food for him on his doorstep. “He really valued knowing that there was a human outside of his dwelling,” Eddy remembered. “But he told me that he also felt sadness, because that person who brought it had walked away.”

As Youhanna recounted that conversation to Eddy, the monk acting as translator chimed in, saying, “But we really wanted to bring you the food, and we prepared it with a sense of love.’” When Eddy asked him why he decided to return to the monastery, he stated, simply, that he “missed sharing a meal.” Is there anything more human, or more divine, than that?

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