EARTH CEREMONY

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL TROUTMAN

Esselen Tribe members create a feast inspired by their ancestors

The newest event at this year’s Big Sur Food & Wine Festival was also one of our region’s oldest food celebrations—the local Esselen Tribe’s millenia-old Matsa Lelima, or Earth Ceremony.

Matsa Lelima, a groundbreaking collaboration between Big Sur’s Native people and BSF&W, was also one of the festival’s hottest tickets, selling out well in advance of the Nov. 6 event. Just 30 seats were offered to the public, allowing participants to join with tribal members in an ancient Esselen ceremony followed by a feast of foraged foods and creatively re-imagined traditional recipes.

The result was a beautiful and intimate evening full of heartfelt emotion and culinary revelation. And, of course, there was wine. John Krasznekewicz hosted the gathering on the rolling cliffside meadows of his family’s K Ranch, a stupendously scenic oceanside spot regularly traversed by long-past generations of Esselen. Krasznekewicz has never hosted a public event at his home in the 34 years he’s lived there. But he wholeheartedly welcomed the Matsa Lelima celebration.

“This is an area where the Esselen would summer,” Krasznekewicz said, noting that previous owners had found Esselen artifacts on the property. “There’s an oak grove, strawberries growing back in the canyon and a natural spring. It’s a very spiritual place, where you can see the sun set and the moon rise.

“This event was special and compelling,” he said. “It had such good energy.”

Ironically, the impetus for the celebration sprang from a natural disaster—the massive Rat Creek landslide that plunged a 150-foot segment of Highway 1 into the ocean in February, stranding residents and businesses already reeling from the COVID pandemic.

Compounding the hurt, CalTrans needed to cut through an ancient Esselen site to fix Highway 1, and it had to happen fast. The tribe cooperated, with heavy hearts.

“We decided to hand-excavate everything,” said tribal administrator and secretary Jana Nason. “We had two weeks of 10-hour days, working with archaeologists and tribal members, and it was absolutely heartbreaking.” But the excavation turned up a wealth of culinary artifacts, including kitchen firepits filled with limpet, mussel and urchin shells—evidence of celebrations past.

“As we worked, we talked about recreating ancestral recipes,” Nason said. “We even joked about doing it for Big Sur Food & Wine.”

Inspired by the encounter with her ancestors’ kitchen hearths, Nason began pulling the threads that brought together the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County, festival CFO Elsa Rivera, chefs Nick Balla and Norberto Piattoni, the Krasznekewicz family, winemaker Gary Pisoni and Roederer Champagne.

Nason sent friends and family foraging for dozens of local ingredients— elderberries, herbs, acorns, bay laurel nuts, madrone fruits, mushrooms and hazelnuts—and embarked on the months-long process of making hand-ground acorn flour and blue corn polenta. Local venison was sourced, and plans were made to harvest seafood and seaweed the day before the feast.

On an improbably warm and sunny November afternoon, all those threads came together seamlessly.

Minutes before the guests arrived, tribal members and volunteers held hands and gathered in a circle to calm their jitters and set the mood.

“I believe all these guests are here because they have an open mind, an open heart, and are yearning to understand,” said Rivera, as sage and wood smoke scented the air. “This will be a nourishing, invigorating event for everybody.” Arrivals were welcomed with a glass of elderberry and yerba santa tea made by a tribal elder. The cool, wine-colored tea tasted of sweet berry, followed by a hint of chaparral wildness, and a lift to the heart.

Guests then sampled vintage Champagne from Louis Roederer, the 242nd harvest from the historic Roederer Estate winery in France, perfect for savoring the incomparable scenery. The ocean horizon, viewed from the K Ranch clifftops, appeared curved and iridescent as a vast abalone shell. As the celebration unfolded, Mother Nature provided shirtsleeves weather, a sun-halo light show and a spinetingling moment as scores of pelicans rose from the ocean in an aerial ballet and suddenly, apparently, vanished.

“The ancestors are here with us,” said tribal member Stephen Vicente Arévalo to silent nods all around.

Summoned into a circle, participants unleashed a coyote howl amidst a swirl of cleansing sage smoke.

“What an honor to be on this sacred land of Big Sur,” said tribal elder Tom Little Bear Nason. “Our tribe lived here thousands and thousands of years, continually. We buried our people and birthed our children here.

“The land of Big Sur is the end of the universe,” he continued. “Tribal people know this is the western edge of the universe. A mystical place and healing place. We are honored to have you here.”

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A tall talking-stick topped with a carved coyote was passed around the circle, and Krasznekewicz, visibly emotional, took the opportunity to speak.

“It’s an honor to share my property with the Esselen, because I believe they have shared it with me,” Krasznekewicz said. “I’m so honored to be here.”

And then, it was time to feast.

Appetizers of venison meatballs with madrone berry glaze and mussels with wild-herb chimichurri were followed by a sit-down meal harvested from the surrounding fields, woods and shore.

A long table for 60 was quickly piled with tender acorn flour rolls, spreads of porcini mushrooms and hazelnuts, squash and wild fennel. A green-herb salad came alive with briny shreds of seaweed and pine nut-herb vinaigrette. The Three Sisters Seafood Stew paired impeccably fresh rock cod with beans, squash and cubes of blue corn polenta in a savory herbaceous broth.

The courses were accompanied by a trio of outstanding pinot noir and a golden chardonnay from Pisoni Vineyards, with winemaker Gary Pisoni generously holding court.

Dessert was a showstopper, with intensely flavored elderberries wrapped in crumbly hazelnut pastry, astonishing bay nut brittle and creamy bay nut chai that felt as invigorating as espresso but without the caffeine.

Not to be outdone, Mother Nature accompanied dessert with a simultaneous sunset-andmoonrise that literally stopped people in their tracks.

As the sun sank behind a flaming orangeand- purple horizon, a gleaming crescent moon reached toward sparkling Venus, across a blue sky veiled in vaporous pink clouds.

As darkness fell, cleanup crews went to work under bright stars and light beams from multiple iPhones, footfalls hushed by the meadow grasses. After an absence of many decades, the Esselen had returned to feast, pray and celebrate on this sacred land.