Moon Cakes For Military Might in China

China's Communist regime celebrated its 60th birthday on October 1 with a massive parade of rolling tanks, missile launchers, lines of soldiers and moon cakes.

That’s right, moon cakes, or round pastries filled with salty or sweet fillings -- red bean paste, or hard-boiled eggs or a mix of fruit and nuts.

Eating the dense seasonal treat, often with Chinese tea to cut the fat, is also timed this year with Harvest Moon Night, an autumn, harvest type celebration that falls on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month when the moon is highest and brightest in the sky.

The occasion allows farmers to give thanks for their harvest and to pray to the moon for protection and prosperity.

Recall the man on the moon and you get a hint of the lunar symbolism.

Moon cakes, being high in cholesterol, also serve to bring families together in that you can hardly eat one on your own. Instead, the cakes are cut into four or eight pieces, and become part of a fall tuan yuan, or family reunion.

So pastry shops, supermarkets and restaurants in China and the Chinese diaspora worldwide will break out the moon cakes for a rare confluence in 2009 of the October 1 National Day holiday and the Mid-Autumn Harvest Festival, which takes place on October 3.

Thwack-thwack-thwack! is to be heard in Chinese bakeries, as bakers prepare a sweet dough for placement in custom molds, next to be filled with choice filings.

In China’s Kuming province, Yunnan TV reported that nearly 97% of local mooncakes are up to standard after inspection by food safety inspectors, compared to 90% last year.

The molds, with indentations, identity in Chinese characters what type of fillings are in the pastry delicacies. After being gingerly lifted from the molds, the moon cakes are packed in square boxes for sale and consumption.

Favorite fillings include coconut, lotus seed paste and black bean paste.

Biting in a moon cake evokes thoughts of home, or autumn harvest if you’re in the Chinese countryside, and military might if your Proustian moment includes exhaust fumes from all those tanks rolling along Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace, in front of president Hu Jintao, to celebrate China’s National Day.

Which is as it should be because moon cakes eaten during the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival has its origins, according to legend, in a 14th century battle to overthrow China’s Mongolian rulers.

At the tail end of the Yuan Dynasty A.D. (1280-1368), Hans rebels had to figure out how to mount an insurrection to overthrow the foreign rulers without detection. They settled on the moon cake, knowing the Harvest Moon festival was nearing and that Mongolians didn’t eat the pastry delicacy.

So they ordered a full batch of moon cakes and inserted into each a message warning of an attack on the night of the Moon Festival. The uprising on August 15, with the moon high and bright in the sky, proved successful and it became a tradition to eat moon cakes during the mid-Autumn festival to recall the victory over the Mongolians.

Hunger For War

Isn't war beautiful? Don’t misunderstand me. Mass murder and devastation is never pretty. Neither is chaos and cruelty. But the way cookbooks and food magazines portray war, it’s glorious and fun on commemorative holidays like the Fourth of July and Hanukah. Seasoned-to-taste patriotic days like Cinco de Mayo, Diwali and Bastille Day? Food media treats those calendar days as cultural wallpaper that brings people together, and get mothers and grand-mothers trying out-do each other with familiar food for friends and family.

No, you won’t find death and destruction in the glossy pages of food magazines. You won’t find images or tales of atrocity to engender compassion or a shudder for humanity. Food media has shed all that is ghastly about war and kept what’s pleasant. The result is grand commemoration and celebration round a carefully laid dining room table, and with food richer and tastier than anything else you or your mother cooks.
Everyone in cook book and food magazine portraits of holiday gatherings is so photogenic as they wear those broad pearly-white smiles and soft, white linens. Everyone beams as they turn million-dollar homes or luxurious holiday destinations into frivolous funhouses. It's all photo op and promotional material. You just know a food stylist went to some effort with the lighting and tight focus to make that perfectly-tanned Turkey and an accompanying bacon, leak and gruyere gratin with a top crust look like a true foodie experience.

It’s the same with TV shows with their hidden-camera esthetic and food porn. Whether it’s Eid-ul-Fitr, Halloween or Thanksgiving, food media turns calendar holidays around food into credit card commercials.

Or does it?

Despite its pursuit of profit, food media plays a key role in military gastronomy -- calendar holidays inspired by military events and celebrated with and around food. Cook books and magazines provide an essential vehicle by which recipes for martial holidays evolve, change and are prepared. But more than that, food media helps us to answer why, knowing what we know about war, we continue to celebrate it. For in the dark coals of group think, we discover once-a-year observances that encapsulate in a day and date key aspirations – freedom for Americans on July 4, liberty for the French on Bastille Day, July 14.

Here are calendar events that manage to separate the glamour of war from its horrors, and evoke respect and tradition. Here we find days of sentimentality that nurture family togetherness, despite the toll war takes on entire nations and continents. Here commemoration of past military struggle offers the promise of certainty in a time of modern-day anxiety and incessant change.

Here are days where food ingredients and festive dishes have broader physiological and spiritual implications for people who celebrate and see themselves through the distorted mirror of history and holidays.

Here we discover how the fragility and angst and neuroses of a nation can sit immeasurably in latkes, or lurk in tamales.

Here we will discover why these and so many other festive dishes arrayed on the dining room table have sugar to dull the pain of past humiliation, indignity and death, and savory to give the mind what it craves the most: vengeance, power and vindication.

For though the victorious in war will in time forgive vanquished nations, and the courts and governments will forget their atrocities, losers in war never forget. William Faulkner reminded us that the past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past. In Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Darfur, Chechnya, the Congo, people may forgive. But they never forget. In South Africa, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Rwanda, they haven’t forgotten.

And this is how they remember.

Etan Vlessing

As Laid Down By Harry Beck

In 1931, Harry Beck. a shop-floor draughtsman for the London Underground, that city’s subway system, had a brainwave that has forever changed how train and subway passengers plan and complete rail journeys. Until then, London’s subway maps in design followed the physical geography of city streets. The problem was harried travelers were hard-pressed to make sense of the twisting and crisscrossing lines on a map when deciding how to travel between two points easily and quickly.

Beck’s light bulb moment came when he decided to ignore London geography overground when designing a new map for underground travel. His focus became the subterranean network of tunnels beneath the city of London in which trains still travel. Hence the designation of the local subway system as the “tube.” Beck’s rationale was Underground passengers did not travel on London streets, subject to red lights and other traffic delays. They moved in a parallel world beneath ground, one of tunnels and individual stations.

Beck also ignored scale when designing his map. After all, passengers don’t care about the relative distance between stations. They just identity their start and end stations, and work out the tube route they will take, including possible line changes. All that’s left after that is to buy a ticket and newspaper and start the journey.

Beck’s brainwave in effect produced a simplified, schematic map that conveyed information quickly by identifying separate color-coded subway lines and used multiples of 45 degree angles for a basic north-south-east-west orientation.

What’s more, each subway station was clearly labeled, as were interchanges, in contrast to earlier maps that showed a meandering track structure more akin to spaghetti than clean lines.

When the London Underground rolled out Beck’s first map design in 1933, the public reception was instantly popular. London tourists and newcomers could now more easily plan a tube journey in under a minute, while locals could map out a route in seconds. The trick was to use color cues or the direction of travel to discern different tube lines, or to work off of the map’s inner loop, the Central Line.

Now how does Harry Beck’s London Underground map, which has undergone many incarnations over the years as the city’s tube system grew, help us understand the mechanics of martial holiday stories?

We have seen how many martial holidays were inspired by famous battles. And written battlefield accounts often mix geographical and historical themes. Recall the battle of Crecy, where a battle on the sandy, loamy soil of northern France had the British forces in a defensive crouch between a stream and a forest into which opposing French advanced, only to be slaughtered by superior weaponry.

Traditional battlefield accounts often include a geographical introduction because a region’s physical scope – towns, hills and valleys, river mouths and lakes -- will dictate the converging paths of competing armies. In past ages, when noble armies clashed in open fields or valleys as at Crecy, generals were forever sending scouts forwards and backwards to report back on what was ahead and behind, and where a battlefield foe might be hiding, headed or encamped.

In more recent times, topography matters even more when battles are fought at close quarter in towns and cities like Beirut, Belgrade or Gaza City, with high local casualties.

In a way, attention to geography in war accounts is obvious. If soldiers are prepared to fight over a specific plot of land, possibly to give up their lives to protect or seize hallowed ground as if engaged in a sacred task, then it makes sense for a historian to take the time to describe the physical space in question.

And much military history consists of discussion of generals and armies ranging over a battlefield, such as we encountered in our discussion of Dunand, Napoleon and the battle of Marengo. We see where they advance or retreat as part of battlefield formations. These discussions of battlefield strategy, gone over time and again in military colleges, also helps prepare young soldiers for future battle.

Now the rub is modern-day martial holidays, in their focus on festive pleasure and plenty, have rendered talk of battlefield strategy and geography virtually obsolete. It’s largely left to military historians to recreate what famous generals and their troops did, and to deduce cause from effect. Participants in martial holidays have opted instead for a simpler temporal historical narrative that puts less focus on actual events and topography than on how war has changed a people over time.

The result is more chronicle, or a record of events in a specific order. Here space is represented less as physical geography than in linear terms. So, during the Passover seder, for example, we don’t get expansive descriptions of Egyptian geography, whether the the Red Sea or endless deserts, out of which ancient Israelites built palaces and pyramids during their slavery. We don’t discuss a possible scientific basis for the ten plagues that convinced Pharoah to bend to Moses’ threats, or the burning bush that spoke to the Israelite leader.

Instead, we get Moses starring in an Exodus narrative anchored in a biblical account that portrays the successive actions of God and Moses to end the ancient Israelites’ captivity. And it does so by recalling their path out of Egypt, and into a desert wilderness, as a series of stations on the way to deliverance in the land of Canaan. The Egyptian setting hardly matters. Biblical historians have ventured Egyptian place names as possible venues for the Exodus narrative. But it’s the route of travel for the ancient Israelites that the Seder meal invests with epistemological significance. Moses’ parting of the Red sea, for example, to allow his people to escape the pursuing Egyptian army, has rhetorical force.

What this means is the dynamics of the Seder Exodus narrative are as true today as they were for Harry Beck and his original London Underground map. Go straight and simple with a compressed and unified narrative. Produce a user-friendly, chronological account, and ignore geography and surface truth or facts. What was done or said on the historic battlefield, by whom or to whom, and at what time and in what order of events, little matters. That has more to do with real world events that have long vanished into dust. What matters is a parallel world of emotion and feeling, fable and folklore, mostly born of invention and illusion. What our study has focused on are familiar story-lines, often anchored in biblical scripture, or an epic poem or fable, rolled out for retelling on calendar holidays. This is sacred time, time that stands outside of historical time. And in such time, the dead can be encapsulated in a shankbone and a people’s dreams and aspirations can be captured in an apple dipped in honey.

Bastille Day: the French Pause for a Summer Picnic

How big a battle-inspired holiday becomes over time depends in large part on which turning point in an historical conflict a people chooses to isolate and celebrate. Take the French. You have to hand it to them. It’s July 14, Bastille Day. And the French see the birth of their nation in a jail break from a poorly-protected prison. And for that they annually take a day off and take part in military parades and fireworks and communal and family meals.

Talk about a calendar day as a political tool for nation-building.

The French didn’t come to framing their nation's birth in the storming of a prison overnight. Instead, the political left in France has long argued that the French Revolution got its start in 1789 with the Bastille break-out as that event saw the common people take their destiny into the their own hands and finally overthrow the Old Regime and the yoke of oppression.

And with that, the First Republic of France rose from the ruins of a toppled monarchy.

The political right, by contrast, maintains the French Revolution started well before July 14, 1789, with the increasing corruption of the Old Regime eventually causing the overthrow of the nobility by the emerging middle classes. Here the crowds gathering round the Bastille prison in July 1789 are but a sideshow that, while lending its name to France’s holiday with accompanying festivals and picnics, is well wide of the mark to explain the roots and results of the country’s defining revolution.

Whatever that protest from the right, the benefits to the left from focusing on the storming of the Bastille over all other stages of the French Revolution designates the festive holiday's much-needed hero: the common man, the sans culottes and peasantry ready rising up against corrupt power for justice and liberty.

We've seen retroactive hero worship elsewhere in this blog, with Moses and Napoleon, figures in their respective people's memory invested with superhuman powers that, as mere mortals, they may well have never claimed for themselves.

Martial holidays often spotlight not the outcome of an historic battle or struggle, but instead circle back to prior dramatic events for symbolism. Examples might be Paul Revere’s dramatic midnight ride, Daniel being saved in the lion’s den or Jesus Christ on the cross.

Here you get to, in Winston Churchill’s immortal summation of a victorious Egyptian campaign in 1942, “the end of the beginning,” a tipping point worthy of celebration and commemoration.

And July 14, 1789 is one of those days, and events. Indeed, Bastille Day has gone mainstream. Its roots date back to a year after the original event, with the Fête de la Fédération held on July 14, 1790. Official French celebrations in Paris had to wait until June 30, 1878, and the Third Republic of France on July 14, 1879 commemorated for the first time the prison break that was Bastille Day on July 14, 1789. And with military processions now a part of the festive celebrations, Benjamin Raspail introduced legislation on July 6, 1880 to make July 14 of that day officially Bastille Day.

On July 14, 1889, as it happened, 22,295 French mayors gathered in Paris to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille prison with a giant feast that comprised Rouen duck loaf, chicken from Bresse and ballottine of pheasant.

It is said waiters had to ride bicycles to reach the mayors over four miles of tables.

Food-wise, July 14 has no prescribed food as, being a summer holiday, revelers generally take to the outdoors. So the French are loathe to eat food too fancy or time-consuming to make. Think French bistro and brasserie fare, which is fitting as the Bastille Day is widely believed to have given the modern-day French restaurant its start. After all, as the old regime nobility lost their heads or fled the country as the French Revolution gathered steam, their former cooks saw an opportunity to open restaurants and feed the masses.

Diwali: India's Festival of Lights

For anyone in India or the Indian diaspora nostalgic for ancient times, there’s a difficult choice to be made each fall on which hero to worship during Diwali, India's festival of lights.

Hindus in northern India celebrate Diwali as the homecoming of the warrior King Rama of Ayodhya after a 14 year battle that ended with the defeat of the evil king Ravana.
Legend has it that the people of Ayodhya lit the road of the king’s return with oil lamps to ease his path from darkness into light.

Hinduism, being a collection of sects, has other origins for Diwali. In Gujurat, Hindus recall the killing of Narakasura, an evil demon, by Lord Krishna and his wife Satyabhama, while others see in Diwali an occasion to celebrate the birth of the goddess Lakshmi.

Buddhists in Nepal, and followers of Jainism have their own reasons to celebrate Diwali, as do Sikhs, who use the occasion to commemorate the return of their sixth Guru, Har Gobind Ji (1595-1644), after he gained freedom from captivity in the city of Gwalior at the hands of the Mughal emperor Jahangir.

The elder gods disapprove, but few in India take much notice of these ancient roots. Instead, they revel each year in yet another calendar event with shared meals with friends and family.

Diwali, which falls each year in either October or November, depending on the lunar calendar, is traditionally known by its Sanskrit name Deepavali, which means 'a row of lights'. The feast holiday is also marked with long and bountiful meals of sweets and savories during a period of thanksgiving.

Typically, Diwali begins each year under the haze of a dawn sunshine, when shoppers sparing little expense at the local market buy amid hawker’s cries, blaring car horns and the occasional blast of fireworks required ingredients to make popular festive dishes on the day: semolina, chickpea, milk, almonds, raisins and coconut.

Overhead everywhere are arrayed diyas, or cotton-like string wicks inserted in clay pots filled with coconut oil, that are lit at night to symbolize many things to many different people: paying homage to the gods, to what is positive during a calendar event of new beginnings, to the triumph of light over darkness, and of good over evil.

Like many gift giving and shopping festivals, Diwali is best known for its mithai, or sweets, handed out to friends and family as part of offerings to the Gods. The range of sweets on sale in specialty shops during Diwali would make Charlie in the chocolate factory envious: Kaju Katli, a cashew treat, Barfi, made with coconut, and almond seera, made with almonds, milk, sugar and ghee, or clarified butter.

Diwali cooking, like Indian cooking itself, varies between regions within India, and from country to country worldwide. But the more popular of the holiday’s feast foods include sheera, or a sweet semolina fudge, or dhana therus, a sweet porridge made with cracked wheat and sugar that helps break a fast on the second day at sunset.

Spices like fragrant nutmeg, cardamom, and saffron season many of the Diwali dishes, producing aromas that regress the faithful back to childhood or to Grandma’s and Grandpas’ day, if not further, and bring them back to holidays year after year.

Other popular choices during Diwalki include kheer, or a a milky pudding prepared with crushed rice, milk sugar and sago, or vegetarian dishes – as many Hindus shun meat. These include puri's, or a fried flat bread, or pakoras, or a fried potato and vegetable dumplings often eaten with chutney.

But surely it can’t be only popular Indian dishes that are eaten at any other time of the year that has sustained Diwali as a national holiday through the ages.

The answer to its staying power is instead found in a martial holiday that fits nicely into this book’s mould: a calendar event that celebrates victory over evil in a way that defines a group’s identity during an historic struggle that in itself put that identity at possible breaking point.

The Hindu epic poem Ramayana, which sets out the slaying of the evil Ravana by King Rama, says of the hero’s return to Ayodha, with celebration and accompanying feast: “The people of Ayodhya were eagerly awaiting their rightful king's return. Even Rama's brother, Bharatha, was overjoyed, for he, too, wanted Rama to be king and had merely been looking after Ayodhya until his return. They lit rows and rows of lamps to brighten the dark night and greet the royal couple. Rama's coronation was celebrated by a burst of fireworks and a great feast. Fine clothes and sweets were distributed to everyone.

And, to this day, many Hindus celebrate the defeat of Ravana and the return of Rama from exile by lighting lamps on this darkest night of the year!

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There, in a nutshell, is the promise of martial holidays. Beyond the arrayed sweet and savories from the kitchen is something very primal: a hero, bathed in the light of reflected glory. The mysticism and appeal of the burning light as a symbol of hope and freedom after the triumph of good over evil is a recurring theme of holidays that commemorate historic battles.

The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, an eight-day winter holiday with origins of nearly 2,000 years when the Judah Maccabee and his small band of followers defeated Antiochus of Syria and reclaimed their temple, is also a festival of lights. Lighted candles on a menorah, or candelabra, and dreidels help celebrate the Jewish holiday that falls on Kislev 25 in the Jewish calendar, usually in December.

And the symbolic dishes that accompany Hanukah, whether fried latkes (potato pancakes) or sufganiyot (donuts), both like matzoh on Passover recalls a past need to eat quickly in times of battle, and are fried in oil, a symbol of the miraculous oil that lit the temple for the Maccabees.

But at the center of Hanukah is Judah Maccabee, who saved the hour for the Jews of Syria. Martial holidays all have their hero. Somewhere out there, a hero has been, or is coming. In Biblical lore, it’s heroes like Abraham, Moses and David, portrayed as ordinary men called to action by God. In Hinduism, it’s a King Rama, in Muslim lore …, good men all that surged to the fore in times of need.

Modern-day martial holidays have spawned their own military lions, generals like Napoleon and Wellington that stood tall in the face of danger and threat. Whether as ordinary soldiers or fearsome war lords, they too have been able to part the battlefield as if the seas to enable a daring thrust or safe escape.

Boiled down, the heroes of martial holidays are really all ruthless military leaders that avenged their people on the battlefield in a primal struggle for survival against wrongful enemies. And as we will see, the heroes of our study are not mere dead relics of history. They instead personify timeless aspirations for freedom and liberty and justice. And through festive dishes and holidays that recall their glory and possibly their name, these heroes are made incarnate.

History has also thrown up a share of woman that saved the day and lives of their people – Joan of Arc, Queen Victoria, Hua Mulan, Harriet Tubman. Each was as brave in the midst of danger as their martial ancestors, and enjoy a calendar day set aside for them. They too, like their male counterparts, through the tumult of time and circumstance, led their people to safety and victory. And in this hitherto unstudied and unspoken nexus of the chaotic and the culinary, we will see that, by their bravery, heroic leaders inspired and continue to inspire gratitude, and by their courage, admiration.

As their followers put it, their grit and total dedication led each heroic leader to victory. And there’s something ironically soothing about a past historical figure, really a composite of generations of hopes and aspirations, had your own and those of your people’s best interests at heart. Even if we hardly know much about these heroic figures. And we know very little about these heroic leaders. So as they gather and eat together on commemorative days, the call goes out to those who follow to exhibit the same qualities in their own lives as they equate the struggle for religious or national freedom in the past with their own struggle, and that of their group or nation for political freedom in the modern era.

Philadelphia Freedom

Philadelphia has known many speeches about liberty and freedom in its time. Among the more memorable took place on July 4, 1776 when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence to sever the 13 colonies' ties to the British crown.

But a year later on July 4, 1777, General George Washington led a grand dinner in Philadelphia to celebrate the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. By all accounts, the event was a blowout success. Speeches and declarations were barely heard for the band striking up patriotic airs inside the crowded hall, while outside a climactic volley of cannon fire and ringing bells could be heard.

As banquets go, elaborate flower arrangements, glittering jewelry and beautiful women to dazzle the eye were lost in this raucous affair. Earlier in the day, armed ships and gallies filled the city harbour, festooned in the red, white and blue colors of the United States as part of a show of force against their British overlords.

The bread and circuses comparison with ancient Rome was apt for this evening, especially as the anniversary dinner was thrown open to patriots in muddy boots, a move calculated to show both foe and friend that this ascendant nation was a sure-thing, and that rising spirits would not bend in the face of setback or complacency on the battlefield.

Let’s call it military gastronomy. The political value of state dinners is well known. The long catered table, with kings and presidents and diplomats arrayed on either side, allows a frank exchange of ideas and informal negotiation, with each utterance not immediately noted or written down. And yet, because of that informality, you can hope the right ears eventually catch wind of your views and intentions. Beyond the clinking of crystal and set-piece speeches, the state banquet allows leaders and their advisors to gauge the opinion friend and foes.

But late afternoon on this Philadelphia day, as the newly-minted Congress, the President, the Speaker of the Assembly of Pennsylvania, army colonels and assembled men of office and power sat down for a commemorative meal, each ship anchored nearby discharged thirteen cannon shots and small arms, and each toast was me by artillery and small arms fire.

During the dinner, minds and congratulatory speeches cast back to recent imperiled years that saw the roots laid for a new country, and across the Atlantic where a King and another country (brutish, cold, calculated…).

Each speaker was met from the audience with hoots and hoorahs, or “huzzahs” as they were called in the day. As the Virginia Gazette recounted in its July 18, 1777 edition: “The evening was closed with the ringing of bells, and at night there was a grand exhibition of fireworks, which began and concluded with thirteen rockets on the commons, and the city was beautifully illuminated. Every thing was conducted with the greatest order and decorum, and the face of joy and gladness was universal.”

The newspaper account finished off with the hope that every July 4 could be celebrated with such gusto and abandon: “Thus may the 4th of July, that glorious and ever memorable day, be celebrated through America, by the sons of freedom, from age to age till time shall be no more. Amen, and amen.”

By the early 1800s, the Fourth of July celebration had begun to stick with Americans. Each year, July 4 began to draw more participants and attention to the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, with events like parades and picnics. The tradition continues to this day with a holiday as emotionally-charged as Veterans Day or Memorial Day.

How did this tradition grow up and sustain itself? And how did the Fourth of July evolve from a very public celebration of an American revolution that ended at the Battle of Yorktown to discreet affairs in backyards, where much expense and stress goes into bringing like-minded folk together.

To be certain, patriotic exuberance still colors the Fourth of July, as do fireworks, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture finale and the occasional cannon shot. Other contemporary links to the past include marching veterans bedecked with medals, flowers laid at monuments and top military men paying their respects to the nation’s leader during parades. And, after the somber formalities are concluded, there’s welcome festive food, fireworks, parades, battlefield re-enactments, the ringing of bells, music and toasts for celebration.

But while the battlefield is where warriors bury their dead, martial holidays are today mostly celebrated in the home or the backyard. It wasn’t always that way. As with the 1777 Fourth of July blowout in Philadelphia, communal parades, processions and dinners were the rule for centuries, since Roman times in fact. In the last century or two, all that changed, however.

With Passover, the forum is the dining room table, and with the Fourth of July, a summer holiday, it’s a family event of informal kitchen gatherings and backyard cookouts. Moreover, there’s fewer fixed menus or rituals to follow. Few martial holidays today follow Passover in specifying that food be eaten in a certain order. Another rare example is Imbolc, or Candlemas. But little about the ancient Celtic festival, Passover or the Fourth of July today calls for sitting among noisy, sweaty crowds in smoke-filled halls for a staged dinner, as in 1777 Philadelphia.

No matter, for out in the open summer air of the backyard barbecue, the aroma of burgers and ribs or hot dogs catching fire on the grill does as much as cannon shots or rousing speeches to recall past military glory that culminated with the British surrender to General George Washington at Yorktown.

We shall have more to say about the domestication of commemorative holidays later on. And our curious story will also have much to say about food smells that tap into emotionally charged memories of holidays celebrated for as long as we can remember. For now, it’s enough to say the Americans aren’t alone in being drawn to comfort food on calendar holidays that they associate in taste and smell with their childhood. Around the world, nations and peoples, young or ancient, fall back on food and dishes that excites the olfactory memory as much as celebrate victories or retrieves defeats on the battlefield.

Because when it comes to holiday heroes, there’s a soldier for all seasoning.

Where Patriotism Becomes The Icing on the Cake

When it comes to food and battle symbolism, the flag cake takes the cake.

As the Fourth of July nears, nothing says red, white and sweet more than mom and the kids plonking down blueberries in white icing for stars and arranging strawberries in rows for stripes.

Around this time, Canadians also get busy in the kitchen baking a flag cake from scratch for July 1, Canada’s birthday. This time, sliced strawberries or cherries help fashion a maple leaf pattern on a white icing cake.

And the French, for whom Marie Antoinette famously said “Let them eat cake!” – or brioche, depending on your tolerance for historical inaccuracy – they’ll be arranging their berries in vertical blocks – one-third blueberries, one-third plain white icing and one-third strawberries -- come Bastille Day on July 14.

Whatever your nationality, show your pride on your independence day with icing. Beyond the sugar rush, and a lesson in cake decoration, you get a window on the relationship between food ingredients and battle-earned freedom and nation-hood. It's like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Mom takes the ingredients off of the shelf and places them on the table. The kids measure out the portions, and add them to separate bowls for dry and wet ingredients. After mom completes a silver white cake, the history lesson begins. As the blueberries are arranged in rows in the top-left hand corner, with spaces left so the white icing resembles stars to signify the 13 colonies, mom recalls how America separated from Great Britain. Here the red strawberries, cut in half and arranged in rows across the cake, signify stripes of freedom.

The trick is to see past the assembled food ingredients to what they represent. Suddenly, something you normally run up the flagpole – a cloth with stars and stripes – lands on the dining room table, complete with forks and napkins.

Fruit and frosting just as easily kindles loyalty, honor and patriotism in British hearts, courtesy of the pastry bag, pipe or spatula, and select red and blue-colored fruit.

The possibilities of visual rhetoric are endless, whether in Mexico, where kiwi may be used represent the green, cinnamon for the eagle, and candy sprinkles for the details, or Jamaica, where options include banana for the yellow, kiwi for the green and black cherries for the black.

There’s equal variety in food ingredients required: berries, candies, sugars, icing, chocolate and fondants. And you’ll need to decide on the cake style, whether from Europe where cake is generally covered with a smooth icing and then decorated on top or around the border, or a ladder-style Victorian cake typical of weddings.

My favorite is the Lambeth style, where icings and fondants are layered, and applied using a piping bag for elaborate presentation.

You’ll decide how much complexity in decoration you want. Trying to represent the fleur-de-lis, or tricolors, takes some imagination.

That said, you’ll have a familiar flag to work from. Friends and family won’t question what you were trying to say, as if you created a piece of art. They’ll know what the cake says, because it signifies a flag, and by extension independence, freedom and, in many parts of the world, democracy.

Flag cakes also underline the principle that, over time, differences between peoples and nations, friends and foe, decrease and ultimately get reduced to a holiday-sanctioned day off and a pig out that everyone can enjoy.

That process happens in stages, however. And as nations generally adopt a new flag during a time of independence, which follows a battle or war with winners and losers, expect varied reactions to your flag cake. To some, it will invite patriotic fervor, to others possibly antipathy, and even disgust. For example, a U.S. northerner might well find a Confederate flag cake offensive. And you won’t find a swastika cake in Tel Aviv, nor in Passau, hopefully.

Clearly, one man’s flag cake is another man’s defeat and humiliation.

And while flag burning is forbidden, the morality of carving up a flag cake and mushing pieces into your mouth, or tipping leftovers into the garbage, is largely unexplored.

Nor do food conglomerates hesitate to profit from this patriotic culinary fad. Breyers ice cream, a division of Unilever, knows which side of the cake is iced. Its “Breyers Ice Cream Flag Cake” recipe for the Fourth of July predictably calls for two separate tubs of its vanilla and chocolate ice cream, fresh fruit and whipping cream.

You can even buy a flag cake pan for the Fourth of July to ensure the flag shape and 13 indentations so you get the stars for the original colonies in the right place.

It’s a peace of cake, really.

Etan Vlessing