Welcome to the Table.
The table has always been a central focus of my home - metaphorical or otherwise. A welcoming place, a compass point and the altar of rhythm and ritual.
This is not a recipe letter, it’s a kitchen letter. From the place I make food and feeding people. Building and rebuilding lives from the simple things that happen around a table.
In my lifetime, I have lost count of the number of dinner parties, shared meals and people who have sat around my table. It is my most primary ritual, to welcome people and provide food for bellies and conversation. So there will be food and talk of food, but it is unlikely that you will find my perfect spring pea puree recipe in here. Instead, I will share with you what I was thinking about as I grated the Parmesan and snapped crisp asparagus.
At best, the table is a place of forming identity as children and then as adults, hearing ourselves and others speak. It is a place of robust conversation with just enough governing precedent to draw out a respect for one another and being heard. It is a compass point by which we navigate and a lighthouse to ships on the way. It’s a place of comfort and candour.
We always need that compass point and we need a little comfort, no matter how lucky we are.
I’ve seen hope born in the eyes of the broken-hearted over a meal, even sans candlelight. Old, fraught friendships mended while we’ve passed coleslaw, potatoes and bread. Opposing perspectives sat down side by side and found common ground in the breaking of bread and the good olive oil. Sometimes it is just the wine that eases us back into the habit of human connection.
For many years, I invited friends and strangers to my table for Monday Night Dinners - an intentional resistance to our habits of eating out instead of inviting others in. When we eat out, we rely on others to practice hospitality for us, when it is we who need the practice. Perhaps I recognised in myself that I needed the practice as much as anyone else.
Because of this, Sundays have long been a day of ritual and preparation for the week ahead, organising my thoughts and taking a breath, preparing for the practice of hospitality.
The Sunday kitchen is often the place I find connection between small ideas - the beauty of a pot and what it says about being concave and human, walking (sometimes running then limping) through days where we are not gathering around the table as frequently as we would like. When we are empty of certain things yet still wanting to add our usefulness to the world.
Sometimes the ideas and stories in this newsletter will be desperately practical covering the banality of urban kitchen scraps and the growth of my zucchinis but other times I hope you will find a little moonshine and starlight in them, something that will take you back to the last time you gathered around a table with a fresh pot of coffee and nowhere in particular to be.
So a little dose of transformational thinking and sharing a story or two that emerges from my wide-eyed, quiet listening rituals each week. With a dose of food and probably a whisky or two.
Use this newsletter as a little ritual of your own - or just a coffee break. You can support my ongoing writing work by subscribing, becoming a supporter, sharing the posts you like and spreading the word.
See you at the table.
x
Tash