There were several chefs in the Bible: the Levites who got roast dinner every day; Habakkuk (it’s in the name); Ezekiel who favoured the cooking-over-human-excreme
And incidentally, Haggai took his name from the plural of Haggis.
But the ‘chef poissonier’ in the kitchen of the Bible is of course Jesus Himself, who on a number of occasions is shown to have given His followers a good seafood dinner. The following is a transcript of one of Jesus’ own famous recipes, taken from the recipe book of an early church father who followed in Jesus’ fish-cooking footsteps, coming to specialise in multi-fish dishes: Polycarp.
‘Poisson sur le Pain’
Preparation time: as long as it takes your disciples to click and get their act together.
Ingredients: Five loaves of bread, two fish.
Serves: four to five. Thousand.
Take the bread and the fish and lift them up to heaven. Make sure to lift them nice and high – you don’t want your guests to miss this one! Give thanks for the food, for one to two minutes. Make sure to stir in a healthy dose of “Father” – and if you’re pentecostal, then a dash of “glory” and “hallelujah” could add an interesting twist to the mix.
Then, simply begin distributing bread and fish fairly evenly among the disciples for them to give out. This part requires special patience as disciples can tend to be quite thick and tough to move but, given some time, the process should become smoother and easier. Keep doing this until there is an even spread of food.
Once the bread and fish have been consumed, you can use the disciples to pick up the leftovers that might be lying around – these make great basket-fillers! This way, you can have some for people to take home.
Best served in groups of 50s and 100s, after three days of no food, miles away from any shops.
Ben David Trigg 