Friend of the show, Dr. Scott Hahn chats about his new book, “The Lenten Cookbook,” which features 75 recipes for the penitential season of Lent.
Dr. Hahn shares that the book is co-authored by former Swiss Guard and current chef, David Geissler. David provides the recipes in the book and Dr. Hahn contributes essays on fasting in the Lenten tradition.
Dr. Hahn discusses what he calls the “joy of fasting.” “It comes from the joy of the Gospel,” he says. “The joy of the Lord is our strength. But it also comes from the rule of St. Benedict. The only time Saint Benedict uses the word ‘joy’ is in his famous rule, when he speaks of the joy of Lent. That sounds so counterintuitive, but he’s talking about the rhythm of how we fast and then feast… In the 1930s, there was a St. Louis high society woman named Irma Rombauer. She wrote a book called ‘The Joy of Cooking’ where she took all of these amazing recipes and made them available not just to the elite, but to ordinary Americans who were overtly used to nothing but meat and potatoes. Her book became the runaway best seller of all cookbooks. It sold 18 million copies and went into nine editions. So, what we want to do is to highlight how the joy of the Gospel and the joy of Lent can be combined with the joy of cooking.”
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“Fasting is the physical way of being spiritual,” Dr. Hahn continues “So instead of just fasting for a diet to lose weight, we fast in order to grow closer to Christ. We fast in order to draw other people closer to him. In the process, we discover that it’s physically beneficial and even more spiritually…I would say that spiritual fitness is a lot like physical fitness that consists of diet, but also exercise and discipline. I have seen tangible results with fasting.”
Dr. Hahn shares that some of his favorite recipes from the book are the hot cross buns with rosemary and butternut squash quiche.