Baking Through the Apocalypse: “Manifesting Collage Season”

St. Remedius’s Great Cooking Tradition As A Method of Expediting Autumn

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

All through Texas, its institutes of higher learning have their individual ways of welcoming new students and reestablishing connections between returning ones. Southern Methodist University has the annual Running of the Coke Dealers. Baylor College has Rohypnol Roulette. The University of Texas at Austin features its “Don’t Trip on the Carpet Pattern” marathons, and Texas Christian University reciprocates with its Football Goatse tantrums. With Texas A&M, the new students gather in the gigantic caverns below the student union and pledge their eternal and irrevocable loyalty to the Great Cosmic Prairie Chicken, and sometimes it raises one galaxy-sized wing from across the light years and blesses them back. For close to a half-century, the great tradition at St. Remedius Medical College involved crockpots and pruning shears. Every September, no matter blistering summer heat or thunderstorm deluge, the first Sunday was Collage Day, a holiday that inspired articles, poems, songs, a whole concept album, and endless television news “look at the freaks” reports. One thing Collage day never inspired was a cookbook, because anyone making St. Remedius collage would tell you that this was a fool’s errand.

Collage, both the dish and the day, started rather inauspiciously, beginning with the great Texas Heatwave of 1980. The Heatwave was not as brutal as the Drought of Record between 1952 and 1956, but the effect on the general Dallas area was extreme, with lakes, rivers, ponds, and streams gradually turning from waterways to vistas of cracked mud and dead fish. Lake Lewisville dropped so low that traces of ancient hunting settlements turned up among the endless beer cans and chemical waste barrels, and the Trinity River floodplain in both Dallas and Fort Worth yielded a veritable lagerstatte of prehuman artifacts and remains from innumerable failed visits and outposts from the Palaeogene to the end of the Pleistocene that are still being evaluated to this day. (This included fragments of the Great Floating City of Kuurrik, the last enclave of the Chukchuk on Earth before they left the planet forever.) Flora and fauna alike suffered under heat that only relented by the end of September, including trees and other landscaping that survived and thrived in previous droughts, and water rationing in the greater Dallas County precluded watering anything other than building foundations. This meant both death to a significant amount of the landscape plants around the campus and less time for what survived to recover before winter arrived. A delegation from the University of Applications in New Orleans, horrified by brown and dead St. Remedius gardens, offered aid, with Dean Jean-Guilliame Rochambeaux presenting a collection of seeds and cuttings from his own gardens as a show of solidarity between the two colleges. Among the seeds sent by the University, to be planted in the next year, was approximately a kilogram of seeds from a very special cultivar, the recently developed “Loki Williams,” with nobody at the time having even the slightest hint as to how associated this variety would become with St. Remedius in the future.

1980 ended, and the spring of 1981 was neither exciting or overly dull, weather-wise, so the grounds staff dutifully planted seedlings and saplings to replace the plants lost the year before. To everyone’s surprise, the red okra turned out to be so much more than a typical ornamental edible. The plants rapidly grew to over three meters tall, making impromptu hedges, with the brilliant chartreuse blooms attracting pedestrians and pollinators alike. What really surprised everyone staying on campus over the summer, though, was the explosion of okra pods, to the point where a single plant could yield over a kilogram of okra every day for months. The yields really jumped after the beginning of September with the first post-summer rains, and incoming students joked about making gumbo with the windfall. Ultimately, Elton Matheson, a junior Astronomy major, decided to stop joking and gathered approximately five kilos of okra pods, only to run into a problem: he had no place to cook.

At St. Remedius as elsewhere, new students are usually starving students, even if they’re well-fed, and with the onset of autumn, the thoughts of young men and women turn toward soup. Soup, stew, casserole, gumbo…if it’s affordable and accessible, four or five students can leave a massive stock pot empty and spinning on its axis like a top in minutes. As such, many came with a few cooking implements for weekends when the cafeteria was closed. Many of those with culinary accessories also learned of the clearance sections at various grocery stores, as well as the wonders to be found in Asian, Middle Eastern, and Denisovian groceries through the greater Dallas area, so they were already learning how to keep their food bills lower than usual. As it turned out, the first week of school at St. Remedius coincided with when most chain grocery stores went through their inventories of soups and soup bases in preparation for autumn and winter, as well as barbecue equipment and sauces that didn’t sell over the summer, meaning that the clearance sections were stocked to the spiracles with discounted soup, stew, and gumbo bases, of varying quality but still edible. Take advantage of various animal, vegetable, and mycotal proteins marked down and put in their own clearance sections early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and the aforementioned okra, and access to a crockpot or discounted stock pot and hot plate meant everyone was eating well by Sunday night. And with a campus full of allegedly protocarnivorous plants more interested in trapping whitefly than students, the only question was whether the students could outstrip the okra or vice versa.

The first pot made in the dorms technically qualified as gumbo, mostly because of the prefab “meal in one hour” gumbo mix picked up for $2 from a Tom Thumb clearance shelf had enough filé to qualify. That said, subsequent pots went with all sorts of unorthodox ingredients, straying far enough from a traditional New Orleans gumbo that the various cooks admitted that “gumbo” was an insufficient and inaccurate name. The alternative settled upon was “collage,” and St. Remedius collage quickly became a distinctive tradition so long as the okra lasted. Then a set of students decided to have a tasting contest between multiple batches of collage, and chili cookoffs became a thing of the distant past.

In the last few years before the disappearance of St. Remedius, the College Collage Competition was a rite of passage for St. Remedius students. In the first few days, new and returning students organized into teams of one to five, all giving themselves distinctive and potentially offensive team names before starting. Winning team names were usually retired, but the Thaumaturgy students calling themselves “Witches With Woks,” mostly for their low-weight alternatives for cauldrons, gladly allowed subsequent students to use the name as they won contest after contest in the 1990s. Finally on the first Saturday after returning, the teams rushed to grocery stores, spice shops, hunting clubs, and the Last Dangerous Minyard for ingredients, rushed right back, and got to work. Okra pods reserved for the next spring’s seeds were tied with a purple ribbon by the groundskeeping staff, but any unadorned pods were free for the clipping: students who damaged plants while doing so were adorned with a bright orange Shunning Wig and required to wear it for the entire weekend. Those students living at home commandeered the family grill or oven, while those living on campus often found sympathetic faculty willing to make room in their office and break area refrigerators and freezers. Generally by Sunday morning, everything was back to the dorms and going, and may the best team win.

The first Sunday evening, when the rest of Dallas was focused on football, the teams with successful time management skills had complete pots, ready to go. For a $5 admission, tasters got a coffee cup and a spoon and went from dorm room to dorm room, perusing samples and deliberating on which ones struck their fancy. Would “Wizards In Space…Almost” get the nod as to the best collage that year, or would it go to “Okra Zuvembies”? What was the choice protein: chicken, shrimp, oysters, sausage, or hand-gathered truffle? Was collage better with standard rice or with various rice noodles? What about accessories, such as scoops of potato salad or dustings of dried habanero pepper? And what about complimentary drinks: beer, wine, Cheerwine, or Firescale? With the variety available with collage, could anybody agree on “best” when all of them might be showstoppers in any other competition? Students spent that evening wandering from pot to pot, sampled and debated, and then finally handed in forms with their top three favorites, with the final winner and recipient of the admission kitty chosen by ranked voting. By midnight Monday morning, the school knew the year’s winner.

Surprisingly for a city desperate to commercialize even the most noncompetitive events, precious few traces of the College Collage Competitions remained after St. Remedius disappeared. So many of the recipes were made on instinct and experimentation that cookbooks were nearly impossible, and attempts by others to make and sell shirts and hats celebrating the Competitions never really took off. In addition, some recipes were subsequently banned, such as the collage from “Campus Crusade For Kukulkan” accidentally containing ibogaine extract. Likewise, because of the spontaneous nature of collage-making, it also never took off as a food truck staple: nearly everyone agreed that the best collage was made that first week of September, and making it through the rest of the year was just unsporting. For the rest of the season, unberibboned okra pods were free for the taking, though, leading to everything from skewer-roasted okra to delicious and nutritious additions to microwave ramen.

Even today, various rumors ran that the “Loki Williams” okra was a magically augmented cultivar, with various powers attributed to particular harvesting, preparation, and cooking. None of this was true: while this okra was especially tasty, it had no additional features, or at least nothing detectable with any equipment or apparatus available to St. Remedius students or faculty. Now, the planting of Devil’s Claw (Proboscidea louisianica) in 1995 as an alternative to okra…that is a much different story.

Recipe – Collage

As mentioned, collage has no one specific recipe. For starting purposes, this recipe should suffice for beginners, and can always be modified or augmented, especially for vegetarian or vegan cooks.

1 kilogram chicken quarters (many stores have “Buy 1, Get 2 Free” specials on chicken hindquarters)
1 kilogram okra pods (red or burgundy okra is the best for authentic collage, but go with what you can get)
4 liters chicken stock
Barbecue sauce (your choice)
One white onion
At least four liters of pickle juice
2 packages “One Pot” gumbo mix
Dried rice noodles, your choice
Lowfat Greek yogurt
1 jalapeno pepper

Equipment

Grill or smoker
Large glass jars or bowls
Large mixing bowl
Large stock pot or crockpot
Colander

Cut the chicken quarters into pieces and add them loosely in the jars or bowls. DO NOT TAMP DOWN: you want the pickle juice to get to all of the pieces. Cover with pickle juice and refrigerate for at least 24 hours.

At the end of the brining period, drain the pickle juice off the chicken, shake each piece dry, and put the pieces in layers in the mixing bowl. Between each layer, add barbecue sauce (in this case, a parmesan garlic wing mix found on discount in the barbecue grilling section at a local Lowe’s), and top the bowl with remaining sauce. Refrigerate for at least two hours.

Place the chicken on a grill or smoker with your choice of fuel (in this case, pecan wood and pecan nuts dropped by squirrels) until fully cooked. With this example, the chicken was smoked at 250F/121C for three hours. When done, bring the chicken back to the preparation area, let it rest for 15 minutes, and then debone it into bite-sized chunks. Set the meat aside.

Remove the tops of the okra and cut it into segments. (Handy Fun Cooking Tip: okra has to be picked early to remain tender and tasty, and growers sometimes don’t get to it in time. When segmenting okra, the knife blade should go through smoothly with no significant resistance. If the okra pod is full of filaments, it’s technically edible, but eating a piece is much like chewing a wooden popsicle stick, both in texture and in taste. Keep that in mind.) Chop the onion while you’re at it.

To three liters of chicken stock in the crockpot or stock pot, add the okra, onions, and gumbo mix, stirring well, and then add the chicken pieces. Add additional chicken stock or water to top it off and cover the pot. Keep the collage at a slow simmer for at least 8 hours, and 16 hours is preferable.

Just before serving, add the rice noodles to boiling water and cook until tender. Depending upon the diameter of the noodles, this may not take long.

When tender, drain the noodles in a colander and shake well to remove excess water. Put the noodles into a container before they stick to the inside of the colander.

When ready to serve, fill the bottom of a bowl, cup, or plate with noodles, and ladle the collage on top.

Toppings for collage are as common as collage recipes themselves, but this batch is best topped with a dollop of low-fat Greek yogurt and chopped jalapeno pepper. Extra collage and noodles may be refrigerated for up to four days, or may be put into freezer-safe containers and frozen for up to two months.

(And yes, this is a Nostromo bowl. Were you expecting anything else?)

Many thanks to Chloe N. Clark for inspiring this series, and just as many thanks to Force of Nature Loki Williams for inciting a discussion on his and my mutual disgust at the thought of kale and broccoli in gumbo.)

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Baking Through the Apocalypse collage okra St. Remedius