St Martha's Day
© Copyright 2010. Do not copy. All rights reserved and enforced.The 29th of July is the Feast Day of St Martha of Bethany, the Patron Saint of Cooks.
Poor Martha, often depicted with a broom, often gets a raw deal.
She lived in the village of Bethany, 2 miles (3 km) from Jerusalem with her sister Mary and brother Lazarus. In the Bible, she was the one scurrying around the kitchen, doing all the work to get a meal on the table (at a time when 1 cup of flour mean grinding it yourself first.) In the end, she got reprimanded for speaking up about her sister Mary just sitting around, while Martha was doing all the work -- Mary didn't even offer to chop so much as an onion.
How many times have male preachers told us we should be more like Mary -- and you've thought, easy enough to say when you're a man and your meals magically appear on the table. As blasphemous as this is to say, if you were Mary, wouldn't you have wanted to tell the lot of them to clear out of your kitchen if they weren't going to help? Or that fine, you'd stop working, but they'd better hope that "take-out falafels" get invented in the next few hours, because they were going to want them by suppertime,
Perhaps it's not surprising that Irma Rombauer chose St Martha for the cover of the first edition of her "The Joy of Cooking", which she paid for, printed and sold herself from her own house, as a 54-year old woman widowed a year earlier when her husband committed suicide. She got her daughter, Marion, to do the cover art, which is a drawing of St Martha, handbag in one hand, broom in another, and what looks like a dinner plate for a halo, slaying a dragon, which is presumed to be the dragon of kitchen chores. In other words, Irma chose for the cover of her first book someone who just gets on with it and gets things done.
And maybe that's why Martha is good as the Patron Saint of Cooks. Chefs get all the glory, with their heads up in the clouds, and frilled this and expensive that -- but it's the cooks who put meals on the table 365 days a year.
Martha has also been tasked with looking after butlers, dietitians, innkeepers, and waitresses.
Legend has Martha, Mary and Lazarus travelling to the south of France in a boat -- without oars or sails -- afterwards, where they spent the rest of their lives. There, she reputedly saved the town of Tarascon by lasooing a dragon with her girdle and leading it away from town.
