We had beef stew tonight, though the name undersells. I used a Maggie Beer recipe with a more embellished title. The end result was delicious. The combination of red wine, vino cotto, orange zest, kalamata olives, fresh herbs and six hours of slow cooking resulted in a rich, warming end to a wintery Saturday. It…
Category: Food & Family
Buttered toast
“The smell of buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy…
The loyalty of soup
It’s winter in Melbourne. This morning my dear son and I stocked up my trolley at the market with neck bones and veggies and bacon and herbs. And today I’ll make soup. A big pot of warming, nourishing soup. I like soup. In the season of thick socks, scarves and pesky viruses, soup fits. When…
E.B. White on kitchens
At a meeting of the American Society of Industrial Designers in the 1950s, one of the speakers made the assertion that “the kitchen as we know it today is a dead dodo.” In response, White offered this: I think the kitchen, like the raccoon, is a dead dodo only if you choose to shoot it…
How to cook like a man
A few years back I read Daniel Duane’s book How to Cook Like a Man. I was intrigued by the title. The truth is, as I look back, the cooks I have most respected are women. While their gifts and technical skills were often admirable, what I came to value was their innate understanding of…
Isabella Beeton on cooking and happiness
“[in the past] only to live has been the greatest object of mankind; but, by-and-by, comforts are multiplied and accumulating riches create new wants. The object, then is not only to live, but to live economically, agreeably, tastefully and well. Accordingly, the art of cookery commences; and although the fruits of the earth, the fowls…
Nouwen on the table
‘Although the table is a place for intimacy, we all know how easily it can become a place of distance, hostility, and even hatred. Precisely because the table is meant to be an intimate place, it easily becomes the place we experience the absence of intimacy. The table reveals the tensions among us. When husband…
What’s for dinner?
So about this home cooking business. I enjoy it, mostly. But honestly, cooking in this weird time of social isolation and lockdown, the pressure to make each meal an event — a highlight of an otherwise grey day — is considerable. The stakes are higher, don’t you think? It reminds me of a passage from the…
Muto on gratitude
“To be a taker of food or any other commodity without appreciation diminishes our humanity. The height of selfishness corresponds to the avaricious depths of assuming that we are the reason the giver exits. Mother’s table is for me; all the thanks she needs is for me to eat my fill of what is on…
Memory in the kitchen
In the most recent issue of the wonderful Bread Wine & Thou is a beautifully written piece by Melbourne writer Ramona Barry. In it she recounts her journey with cancer and its impact upon her family’s life at the table. It is an extraordinarily moving piece, and there is really nothing to do but go…
Van Gogh’s table
“The Van Gogh family ate where they lived, in the back room of the parsonage. Like everything in Anna’s life, food was subject to conventions. Modest and regular eating was considered crucial to both good health and moral wholeness. But with two cooks in the tiny kitchen, Anna could indulge her middle-class aspirations to larger,…
Halligan on Food, Family and Melancholy
It is Christmas in Newcastle and the family home is full of family. We moved the big dining table into the garden, under the shade of the pohutukawas that I had given my parents for Christmas the year I was eighteen; a tree their size is a rare thing in this wind-scoured seaside suburb. I…
dinner time at your place
A while back I clipped an article from a newspaper. The reporter had asked a group of young people to describe dinner time at their house. Here’s what they said: ‘I eat dinner with my mum, my dad and my dog, We don’t talk a lot, ’cause we’re too busy watching catch-up TV that we recorded earlier in…
Sex in the Kitchen
Sex in the kitchen is not what it used to be. For men of my father’s generation, the kitchen stove was a woman’s place and home cooking an almost entirely feminine task. Men did other things. Granted, the kitchen sink was sometimes less gendered territory, but the distance between the tasks of cooking and washing…
Eating with kids
If ever I talk of eating as a spiritual experience, I am inevitably eyed with weary disbelief by parents of young children: ‘Honestly?’ they say, without the need for words, ‘You’ve clearly never been to my house!’ A few years back I came across an essay by Joey Horstman. He makes the same point, though with much…
Gopnik’s ‘The Table Comes First’
The table comes first, before the meal and even before the kitchen where it’s made. It precedes everything in remaining the one plausible hearth of family life, the raft to ride down the river of our exitence, even in the hardest times. The table also comes first in the sense that its drama — the…
Kitchen Table Memoirs
I’m not long back from a few days in Christchurch, New Zealand, with the wonderful communities that make up the church formally known as Spreydon, now Southwest. More of that later. On the way home I passed the transit hours (always too many) reading Nick Richardson’s Kitchen Table Memoirs: Shared Stories from Australian Writers. It’s a…
Dinner time
As after-dinner conversations go, this one was not my best. One of my offspring wanted to address aspects of our family life that were a cause of discontent. High on the list —the long list — was our practice of family meals: “Why can’t we be normal?” Apparently, ‘normal’ is the practice of allowing each…
EATING HEAVEN 