“And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself. When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.”
- MFK Fisher.
This is not a recipe blog,
breathless advice on how to most nutritiously feed your toddler or smug secrets to dapper dinner parties.
While recipes certainly abound, cooking is not the primary preoccupation here, responsible as it is for only a fraction of what is one of nature’s finest spectacles and life’s great opportunity: the table and its bottomless pleasures.
An obsessively collected and curated chronicle
of foods, meals and culinary moments, meticulously sought-out and pondered over a duration of many years and counting: from world-class chefs, life-long devoted mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers, bakers, fruit and vegetable growers, livestock farmers, market-stall holders, philosophers, winemakers, activists, horticulturists, curators, historians, gourmands, bons vivants etc. etc..
If cooking is the how, this is about the why;
the how takes care of eating, the why is the aspect that looks beyond hunger and appetite and feeds not only the body but also the soul. It pertains only to the human race.
The writer is not a professional chef. She is however a most studious, enthusiastic and highly curious eater – and a well-practiced hostess. Much of her active culinary development is attributed to her time living in Italy, where while working in luxury fashion she quickly fell prey to Italy’s other key export and past-time: la dolce vita. Beguiled by endless culinary avalanches, their picture-book settings and unfathomably regular and natural occurances, a casual interest morphed into a serious, full-time quest: in search of the best an occasion of a meal has to offer.
A gentle but enduring enquiry into the pleasures of the table.
Just as the audience makes the actor and art is validated through the spectator, it is true that the table only exists through the knowledgeable joy of its participants. Yet while knowledge can be imparted, and appreciation cultivated, deriving joy from life’s plethora of pleasures – what some go as far as calling an art – is a deeply personal and intricate matter.
Luckily, we are gifted a lifetime for their discovery.