GATHERING AROUND THE FIRE PIT

“All good parties end up in the kitchen.”

Lin White 

(1934 – 1999)

Opera director, party connoisseur, my fairy godmother

My godmother, Lin White, used to say that all good parties end up in the kitchen. A notorious party-giver, she was an opera director who threw at least two scheduled parties for every production – the opening night party and the closing night party – and then several impromptu gatherings in between, as she invited cast and crew, audience members, and family back to her house after rehearsals for a bite to eat and some wine.

Whether the gathering was formal or improvised, Linny’s parties always ended up in her kitchen. Even when it was a tiny, ranch-style kitchen, by the beginning of the second hour, at least five people would be huddled tightly in the cramped kitchen, around Linny’s warm oven, drinking wine, picking at whatever had failed to make it as far as the bar or the buffet set up on the dining room table. A sad, brief experiment in trying to thwart this was attempted when her husband installed swinging saloon doors to separate the kitchen from the rest of the living area. They lasted around two years, before they finally got so sufficiently abused by the constant influx of foot traffic that they were removed for good.

Linny’s kitchen was where we wanted to be. We preferred it if Linny were there, too, but her presence was too much to hope for when she gave a party, as she was careful to circulate and mingle, and sitting down seemed to violate her most basic spiritual tenets. But we were content with the company of each other, around a warm stove, waiting for the next hors d’oeuvres, or the next bit of salad, or even picking the scraps at the foil where the chicken wings had just been baked.

Why are we always drawn into the kitchens of our successful hosts and hostesses? What is it about the casual easiness of leaning against a kitchen cabinet, drinking a too-warm glass of wine because the bar is a little too far away to bother with the walk.

Some anthropologists believe that it is a vestigial part of our evolution. In the Lower Paleolithic era, naked, spindly hominids stood little chance of survival on an open, unguarded savanna and only managed to conquer it with the advent of one essential, life-preserving substance – fire. We sought out the shelter of caves and crevices where we could take cover and only have to maintain a watch over one hundred eighty degrees of our landscape, rather than the whole three-sixty. The addition of fire brought even more comfort by providing warmth, and spooking big animals that might be consider stealing our dinner – or, worse, making us their dinner. Man’s mastery over fire began to shape how humans developed, culturally, linguistically, socially and evolutionarily.

We stopped being a pack and became more of a tribe. We gathered at night around a fire, cooked and ate the days kill, developed language and storytelling, learned to create art on the walls of caves, cared for the sick and elderly, allowed others to care for our young (something a chimp mother would never allow), and developed smaller teeth and shorter digestive tracks. We groomed and huddled and conversed and shared in a way that no other animal does with its kin. We stayed together and helped each other raise our incredibly helpless infants. We cared not only for our children, but for the children of our tribe-mates, as if they were our own. Adoption is not unheard of in other large primate groups, yet it is far rarer and more deadly for a chimp or gorilla infant to be placed in the arms of a female not its mother. Chimp mothers usually carry their infants in arms for nearly twice as long as humans, though chimp babies learn to walk in half the time as their human counterparts. Soon, our teeth, our builds and our digestive tracts adapted to eating cooked meat, and our fate as fire gatherers was sealed.

Our propensity for seeking out and gathering with our kin around the warm, protective comfort of the fire to eat and talk and care for each other persists. That is why all good parties end up in the kitchen. Because the food we make there, the warmth and the casual atmosphere of working and preparing, brings us together. The backyard barbeque was perfected specifically so that humans could return themselves to a time when we cooked our kill over an open flame, while gathering together and sharing our gathered sustenance, good talk about weighty matters (where did we last see that heard of mastodons, anyway?), and care for each other and the young ones.  Is it a conscious gathering? Who knows? But it seems fairly universal, for even the non-cooks in a group will gravitate to where the food is.  Most non-drinkers can stay away from the bar, but rarely can a dieting non-cook stay out of a warm kitchen during a cozy party.

~C~

Please, Not While We're Eating

To say that my mother and I had a contentious relationship is a masterpiece of wild understatement. When I was small, we were quite close. My father was largely absent and she was, for all intents and purposes, a single mother. She was my world.

Beautiful, brilliant and creative, she had come to Los Angeles with the touring company of a fairly successful Broadway play, and stayed when the run of the play was over.  Unfortunately, while she was a working actress in New York, she found that Los Angeles was a different game altogether -- one she never was able to master.  After a few spots on The Phil Silvers Show, she never seemed to be able to land a professional acting role again, and was forced to take a job as first a secretary, then as a full-charge bookkeeper. These were jobs that paid the bills and supported us, but they didn't harness her astounding energy, or help her in expressing herself creatively. Life in Los Angeles proved an exercise in frustration and failure for her. A bad relationship with my father and an unplanned pregnancy (you're lookin' at her), and that pretty much sealed my mother's fate.

As I entered my teens, we began to bicker, then argue, then fight. It didn't take long for our fights to turn physical. This shocked me, because while I'd received the occasional swat on the seat as a small child, my mother had never really spanked me. By the time I was fifteen, our fights when from yelling to beating in 6.2 seconds.  It destroyed our relationship, and because she became chronically ill when I was in my mid-teens, then died when I was thirty-one, we never fully reconciled.

Still, there was one time of day that I could count on relative peace in the house. Mealtime. My mother was a working mother who was stressed and miserable and overwhelmed. But she made dinner every night, and we ate dinner at the table, together. Sometimes, she'd turn on the news and we'd watch Walter Cronkite together. Sometimes, we'd sit and talk. We might have been screaming at each other only moments before dinner was served. I might have been lying on my bedroom floor while she beat me repeatedly.

Still, dinnertime rules of engagement were clear. At the table, you spoke in civil tones and discussed civil things. At dinner, things were nice and calm. We behaved like ladies and gentlemen at the table, not like low-class swine.  We saved the low-class swine behavior for after dinner. This is where I learned that dinner could be my salvation. Sometimes -- often time -- the time spent being civil at dinner made my mother forget her anger, and the rest of the evening would be peaceful coexistence. Food was the thing that soothed her savage breast. She was my teacher -- not in cooking, but in food and all of its detriments and benefits.

I've been struggling with my ambivalence toward food ever since. This blog is my therapy -- my way of coming to grips with my love/hate/lovelovelove relationship with food.


You'll find that, here on this blog, I will resist the temptation to use the phrase "addiction" or "food addict".  I wish not to be misunderstood here. I believe that food is as much a potential drug as alcohol, sex or gambling. It's just as cunning, just as baffling. But in reality, unlike the other addictions, technically speaking, we're all addicted to food. If you don't believe me, try giving it up cold turkey, and see if you don't go through some really nasty withdrawals. Unlike sex addicts or gamblers, I can't stay away from my addiction. I still have to find a way to walk that tiger three or four times a day, if I'm going live to tell my tale.

I have been trying to stay away from fast food, since I think that most fast food companies are trying to kill us.* But I also began to become obsessed with cooking shows. I blame Rachel Ray for this, as it was on her mainstream morning show, where she prepares a quick meal in the last segment. I have a whole theory as to why Rachel Ray is a gateway to stronger, more addictive cooking shows, but that's really a subject for another post. For now, I'll say only that, eventually, I progressed to Giada at Home, to Alton's Good Eats, and to Ina's Barefoot Contessa.

Along the way, I discovered that, for me, much of my food addiction could actually be assuaged with the process of cooking. If I concentrated on what I was doing, I could make the entire experience rather zen and calming. Cooking and food have gone from being my enemy to being my oasis and refuge. Writing is hard, there is no roadmap, and there is absolutely no instant gratification to it.  Cooking is hard, too. But you get a recipe, which is a roadmap, and if you follow it carefully, and enjoy the process of the journey, in a fairly short period of time, you get to sit down to a lovely meal that includes all the foods you love.

Times are hard now, for me and for my family. Things are uncertain and a little unstable. We have amazing moments of joy and deep moments of anxiety and depression. But dinner has, once again, become a salvation, at least for me.  It keeps me sane, which keeps me from driving everyone else crazy. Just as it did with my mother.

Not that I'm like my mother mind you.

Look... Just have a seat at the table, and I'll try and explain it all to you. Given enough time, I'm sure we'll figure this voyage out. But I warn you -- mind your manners. I have my eye on you. Yeah, you... over there.  I see you're up to no good.

All I have to say to you is... Please... not while we're eating.

~Catharine~

*In the interest of full disclosure, your intrepid author was in the midst of typing that asterisked sentence when her daughter (you'll meet her later) and her boyfriend decided to take a quick run to MacDonald's.  I finished typing this blog post in between bites of a Big N Tasty. It was big. And tasty. So sue me.