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~