Tasting Knowledge

Written by Lucian Paradise – HELLoFRESH Chef and Foodie

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So you’ve recently come across some wonderful fruits in Eden, a serpent has approached you, and is making some excellent points as to why you may wish to eat them. After all, what could it hurt to have just a little bit of knowledge? I mean, God won’t know will He?

Let’s see some of our fruitatious local delicacies, describe their enticing flavors and pair them with some wonderful accoutrements so you can share them with your 1 friend in all the world.

We will start with the fruit from Eden. In Eden, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is known for bearing the sweetest apples, remarkably close to Honeycrisp. This combination of sweet with light acid will be a perfect pick-me-up for the long days wandering the garden.

We really want to accentuate these fruits, so building around the apple is really important in your pairings. We want every bit of this wonderful apple, so I suggest a sharp cheese (such as a nice cheddar) and a mild nut. In our plate we used almond, which gives lots of healthy fats! Finally, to accentuate the sweetness and light floral notes of the apple, we bought a spicy honey. Guys, this is the kind of thing that will bring your fruit and cheese platter to the next level! A little fire goes really well with something so indulgent!

So that’s the apple, but what else can we make with all this fruit here? Well this wonderful tree has many different fruits on its limbs. Here we have a preserve we’ve already made from the figs of the tree. Honestly, there could not be anything sweeter. We at HELLoFRESH have paired the fig preserves with cream cheese to make the knowledge you’re going to gain a lot easier to swallow. We have also paired it with some delicious seedy crackers and nuts to bring out some of the earthier notes of fig. Yum yum!

Our final fruit is a real nasty one to deal with sometimes, the pithy, sweet, and seedy pomegranate.

Despite being referred to as the “fruit of the dead”, this gorgeous, bright, sanguine fruit is worth all the effort it takes to get into it. Much like the other fruits on the list, it’s about dedication and trusting that you can do this for yourself! This pairs really well with other fruits and walnuts, which can help with brain functioning! Here we added a cranberry-cinnamon goat cheese spread, the wonderous walnuts, and plenty of crackers to hold everything together!

Now now now, what would fancy cheese and fruit be without some cocktails? Oh… you don’t know? Well here’s some other cool stuff you may want to check out.

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For a drink that celebrates apple and pomegranate, may I suggest the Jack Rose, a drink popular in what will come to be known as the “Prohibition Era”. But hey, here in the Garden of Eden, we don’t care about what’s prohibited, do we?!

Here’s the recipe we used at HELLoFRESH (we totally used Rose’s Grenadine though, we’re not made of time!).

Now here’s where you gotta make sure to bring in a friend! It could be anyone! Literally any other additional different person should probably also join you! It would be rude to drink alone! Hell, it would be rude to eat alone! EAT.

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Now that your belly is full, sit back and relax with your wonderful drinking buddy and enjoy a nice nap. While you’re sleeping, try not to think about everything you’ve done. It really hurts your head the morning afterward.

Oh also don’t worry about the death thing, it’s chill.

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I have never before been able to day-drink and eat cheese with my best friend for a project before, and honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.

It also seems appropriate for the project to be subverting societal norms of when it is acceptable to drink (we are both over 21 though, don’t drink, kids). For what it’s worth I’m not really much of a drinker anyway, so this was an inherently subversive act, which connects quite well, I think, to the temptation of Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost. What I liked throughout the scene in the garden was how Satan was mostly trying to rationalize the decision to eat the fruit. I had always thought that curiosity alone would be enough to convince me to eat the Knowledge of Good and Evil Fruit. Frankly, it sounds kind of tasty.

I think I leaned pretty far into the coerciveness of Satan in Paradise Lost. I really played that up, and I played up the idea that Eve didn’t know what lying was, so the author, Lucien Paradise (did you see what I did there?) was able to be honest in a comedic way with the audience, creating some dramatic irony with how the implied Eve would read this piece. There’s a lot of weird levels to this, including the weird part saying “in what will come to be known as the ‘Prohibition Era'”, implying that this version of Satan is kind of outside of time itself? I don’t know, I wanted to work the link into the piece itself while maintaining some of the through-line that Eve was supposed to be reading this at the dawn of time.

So, as I kind of explained in the interstitials of the pretend food-blog-post, I wanted to do a tasting menu for this fruit. As I was researching the fruit, I found that many fruits were possible candidates for the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but Milton helped make the apple the most recognizable. I took some of the other ideas of fruits from the list too, and tried to build a full board of options. In the long run this became a few smaller boards with a great deal of overlap in ingredients to save some cash. I also just used what plates were available because I didn’t want to buy a giant hunk of wood to serve the food on.

If we had all been in a class together this semester, perhaps this would have been a big thing to show off to the class. It would’ve been nice to break bread with you all! Probably would not have included day drinking though. You can probably make a great virgin-Jack Rose by swapping the applejack for a sweet apple cider. We also lengthened our drinks with diet ginger-ale. Zac is a bartender, but he refused to use his jigger, and so our drinks ended up tasting a little like cough syrup. Probably went light on the lime juice.

The next question has to be: did my best friend Zac and I actually eat all that food, and YES I’m very proud to say that none of the food went to waste, and I left him the applejack. Again, I’m not really a drinker. But, yo seriously, you need to try the spicy honey. That tiny 1-ounce pot cost me 3 bucks, but honestly it’s the best thing I’d eaten in the whole project.

Now finally, why does literature matter? Well here, I think more than anything, it gave me the impetus to reach out to a friend of mine, share ideas, and talk about the world. Zac and I shared a lot of conversation about the nature of sin, and why each food worked for another, and where in the poem I was pulling ideas from. Literature gave me just another excuse to spend time with a friend of mine. We have had plenty of charcuterie parties with our friends in the past, but in the time of COVID it has become infinitely more difficult to do things as a group. This gave me an in to at least see my boy. This also gave me a chance to talk about literature with him. Sharing tales is a very cathartic experience for me, and literature has given me the chance to see all sorts stories this semester.