A blog about the food we eat and the tables we share
Merridie Costello has written a very generous review of Eating Heaven in the Autumn issue of Zadok Perspectives.
Zadok Perspectives is the quarterly journal of Ethos: Centre for Christianity and Society. It’s an award winning publication well worth a subscription. When it comes to issues of food, the latest instalment ‘Faithful Eating in an Unjust World’ is certainly worth a look. It includes some terrific articles on the big issues of agriculture and globalised food production from…
Twenty-five years married to my Southern Belle and I’ve never once made her chicken and dumplings. I hang my head. In the rural South, chicken and dumplings is a signature meal. While it may not win a prize for the prettiest, it’s a defining dish of the family table. Though nowadays cheat’s versions are as common…
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 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…
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…
From time to time I’ve participated in a silent retreat, an ancient religious practice of prolonged silence — five days is my personal record. Most often such retreats are in the company of others. You gather at some agreed place conducive to the practices of quiet and, according to an ancient routine of prayer, solitude and…
After reviewing Keeping the Feast yesterday, some words of poetry from the author communion we pass the silver plate of broken bread with less confidence than we pass the peace easier perhaps to hug than to admit to our hunger we take and eat without a word and wait for the wine’s weaker friend shot glasses…
‘We make bread so that it shall be possible for mankind to have more than bread.’ So said the ecologist John Stewart Collis back in the 1970s. He’s right. Food is never just about the food. In fact, when we write about food as an end in itself, it’s likely we’ve misunderstood our subject. That…
“Really Paetus, I implore you to spend time in honest, pleasant and friendly company. … I am not thinking of the physical pleasure, but of community life and habit, and of mental recreation, of which familiar conversation is the most effective agent; and conversation is at its most agreeable at dinner parties. In this respect…
“Food is ‘everyday’ — it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or hunt or cultivate first of all; for most of human history we have spent a much longer portion of our lives worrying about food, and plotting,…
Near the end of her biography A Cook’s Life — one I’ve commented on before — Stephanie Alexander shares an insight into her daily life at the ‘greying’ end of an extraordinary career: ‘Despite these marvellous trips and all the activity associated with being the founder and figurehead of the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation…
I’m no fan of Macca’s. Frankly, I would rather go without than line up for a Big Mac. But with close to a thousand outlets around Australia, I’m sure management is not overly concerned with my indifference. What’s more, my son has worked at a local franchise for the past couple of years. Likely he’s…
‘The idea that ordinariness should be so fraught with heaven, and that a thing like mere eating should open out onto vistas that we thought were the province of religious mystery — it is all too heady. Not that we are transported every time we sit down to our cornflakes, any more than we are…
I’m often asked what I love about cooking. It’s a fair question. I not only cook a lot; I read and write about it; I teach about it; and I find endless connections between food, tables and other things. The trouble is, when asked about my love for cooking, I often feel as though my…
My beloved has left me. Actually, she’s gone to some exotic place for ‘work-related reasons’, but the long and the short of it is I’m left here beloved-less, alone, and on the verge of serious melancholy! We all have our coping mechanisms. Mine is chocolate, so, considering the clouds gathering overhead, I decided to act….
‘Dreams drive hospitality. While some people like to think of it as a component of the service industry whose responsibility it is to address the needs of the body, for those on the inside it is a weird and sometimes wonderful dreamscape of ungodly hours, ridiculous pressures, unkind owners, absurd customers, torture, humiliation and occasional…
‘Between the rhetorical and the real lies ritual. And wine is a ritual thing before it is any other kind of thing.’ ‘ … it is not wine that makes us happy for no reason; it is the alcohol that makes us happy for no reason. Wine is what gives us a reason to let…
After posting my lemon and lime tart recipe yesterday, I was reminded again just how difficult sharing such a thing is in this medium. So much about cooking is intuitive. To give intuition words is fraught. I look through my mother’s tattered box of recipes, little bits of culinary wisdom scrawled on yellowed pieces of…
There’s another review of Eating Heaven by Sheelagh Wegman in the Tasmanian Anglican. You can read it here.
