Of all the luminaries in the court of President Zeram-Lehi by the Salt Lake, the oldest was the head chef Ezias Stryn. Keeping a careful balance of bold originality and consideration for his clients’ wishes, through decades of service to the first two Presidents of House Reid, Ezias crafted his own piece of the cheerful and bombastic high culture of Deseret's Restoration Era. This is a short account of the celebration of the victory at
Fort Bridger. The battle was the culmination of the struggle to restore the sovereignty of Deseret after an ignominious period of foreign rule; the feast in its honor, a national sigh of relief releasing decades of tension, would have to be quite the party.
Amid the poppies and manzanitas of the rolling lawns on the north side of the rebuilt Beehive Palace, nearly five thousand Mormon braves, the victors of the battle, sat expectantly at trestle-tables. Serving so many was a job for the subsidiary staff of the palace kitchens— their recipes for pot-roasts, fried chicken, and pickled-trout pies were not quite to Ezias's standards, but would surely impress footmen used to daily meals of wheat, corn and greens (with meat reserved for festivals like this one). The concern of Ezias and his three hundred assistants were the guests in the palace antechamber. Among the commanders and captains waiting there, resting their elbows on gold-trimmed velvet as they traded stories, were Samson Dog-Ear, the chieftain turned governor of the Stake of Wyoming; Strand the Blue of Provo, whose expert longbowmen gave the outnumbered Mormons a decisive advantage against the nomad cavalry; and the President himself, icon of the realm.
After prayers and handwashing, the meal started with buns of fried dough studded with cubed peaches, glazed with butter and honey; hard candies of raspberries and cherries dipped in boiling sugar-beet syrup and left to cool and crystallize; and fluffy slices of sweet cornbread running over with custard and topped with strawberries. There were thin flatbread sleeves filled with eggplant and mild yogurt; wide Dinetah peppers stuffed with the mincemeat of turkeys and chunks of tomato, garlic, and sharp cheese; and fried cheese-curds in a gravy of mushrooms, horseradish, and mustard. All along the tables, the salt-boats were placed so that men of higher rank would not have to reach overmuch, or deign to ask others to pass the condiments.
After clearing the tables, the servants brought out the heavy-hitters. Skewers of cubed Dakota lamb marinated in dark beer and dusted with salt from the Bonneville Flats. Chicken and turkey eggs poached in tomato sauce stewed with shallots and scalding-hot Arizona chilies. Steaming Kuluradan-style haleem (a porridge/stew of wheat and mutton), which smelled of Denver’s own saffron and tasted of New Mexican paprika. Duck-meat dumplings in a creamy soup of spinach, chunky with walnuts and carrots. Casseroles of pork sausage and rough-sliced potatoes, layered alternately with goat cheese, papery strips of cured beef, and the parsley and mint grown by increasing numbers of enterprising Hilljacks. Steaks slow-roasted with bay leaves and basil from the Free Zone, in fragrant olive oil from the territory of the Andersons. This cornucopia had some conspicuous absences; relations with the burghers of Columbia were still cold. California wine was also gone from the tables, but for reasons of internal politics— it would not do for the great men of state to (openly) flout the customary laws, especially when the Tabernacle authorities were attributing the same behavior to weak-willed collaborators. Instead, the guests washed down their portions with a slightly bitter tonic of lemon, water, and wild Yellowstone caraway.
The most memorable desserts were the chocolate-pepper cakes. Since the day cocoa was first imported from the faraway continent of Mexico, through the polyglot harbors of Bajo Colorado and the toll-booths of Vegas, Deseret had taken to it like a long-lost kinsman. The bottom layer of the cake was of a thick batter of cocoa, milk, and sugar, and it was embedded and overlaid with prunes and Nevadan oasis dates. Atop this was a batter mix lighter in cocoa and heavy with Mexican allspice and cinnamon. Then came a layer of tart cherry syrup, and finally a batter mix of chocolate and another exotic ingredient, this time from the far east— the flaky fragments of Florida’s pink peppercorns, which filled the coffers of many old families in New Orleans. Every way of attacking this cake— slicing vertically, dividing horizontally, partaking only of small bites— offered a different experience, though only a few still had the hunger to adequately explore them all.
The lute-players plucked out the last few strains, and the guests leaned back in contented stupor. Some nearly fell asleep right at the table; but Zeram-Lehi, after washing his hands and face, had the presence of mind to invite Ezias to the antechamber and thank him publicly.
“The Lord Elohim-Adam has given you gifts beyond anything I possess; but still, ask anything of me and I will deliver.”
Ezias paused a moment. He wanted to answer carefully.
“There was a time when I had nothing, sire, and wanted everything. In my youth I was one of many who served your father Gid-Jared in the camp-citadel of Price. We faced such deprivation there— we, the last free Mormons left in the world. So many came to us, fleeing the Columbian taxmen and fast Yaeger horsemen, but soon the grasses were too sparse to support the new herds. The herders raided the wheat-growers for animal feed and captives, and the disruption of cultivation threatened famine.
It was then that your father sent word to the East, to the Emir of Girandabad [Grand Junction, CO], warning him frankly that if the savages overran all Utah, the disunited fiefs of Colorado would lose their last bulwark. Many embassies were sent back and forth, and I was fortunate that the head chef of one such expedition chose me as his right hand. In Girandabad I observed the Coloradan style even as I honed my own. And a chef’s art is only as good as the places he has visited, and the people he has met.
After a few years I returned to your father Gid-Jared’s side, and walked by him through the blessed years. We took back the clear mountain streams, the fields of wheat and corn, the bushes teeming with berries, the dark forests and their wondrous life. As someone who partakes of the produce of the realm, I have become whole alongside the realm. I am blessed to take such personal pleasure and contentment from the prosperity of the Lord’s Zion-mount.
But for all that, there is still one thing I want. The salmon in the rivers of Idaho are either very young, or else nearing the end of their lives. But the salmon of the great ocean are in the middle of their lives, with flesh meaty and smooth. I would like to work with the salmon at its prime, sire.”
Zeram-Lehi understood. “I hope to be as hungry as you still are in my old age! Well then— if I am so blessed to ride with my host clear to Cascadia, the wind at my back, then I will bring home a male and female salmon, two by two, to our own Bear Lake! On that day the treasures of land and sea will be ours, and we will want for nothing!”
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The Vow of the Salmon was not fulfilled in the lifetime of Zeram-Lehi or Ezias Stryn, though it was symbolically reiterated by the President’s successors. The more immediate outcome of the Feast of Fort Bridger was that the guests in attendance, wishing to recreate the experience, requested that the kitchens of their own estates try some of Ezias’s recipes. Reminded of the expenses, some scaled down their demands; others, undeterred, invested in mills and salt beds, and sold merchants and peddlers contracts for the import of foreign spices. Ezias died knowing that his accomplishments were fast becoming the standard of high Desereti gastronomy.
But the widespread emulation of Ezias’s time- and resource-consuming style spoke of an underlying change in the ways of life. Deseret was founded, much like the pre-Regression American state of Utah, on an explosive pattern of colonization— from the first few stable settlements in the Wasatch mountains, Mormon colonists fanned out into the chaos left by the Regression. Not everyone managed to grab good land, but there was still a strong tradition of smallholdings, of clans residing on a traditional plot which was acknowledged as uniquely theirs no matter who they shared it with. The collapse of the old Deseret destroyed the traditional land regime, and the construction of the new Deseret rewrote the rules further. As if to dispel a collective sense of claustrophobia, Gid-Jared the Restorer appointed his comrades from the besieged city of Price to sprawling plots of conquered land in Utah and Idaho; his son Zeram-Lehi parceled out Wyoming similarly. The new culture was the fruit of a society which placed the Restoring knight in possession of resources once held by families who were now his serfs, and dared him to unreservedly express his pride in his personal role in his society’s grand project.
