Food is Love

A cook's contemplation of nurture

I started off my Mother’s Day with a family-style meal. Not that my children were here. Grown and flown, none of them could be with me today. I miss them, but this is how it is supposed to be, and I know that they thought of me (and called, or texted!). Instead, I was cooking for friends. I started cooking long before I was a mother - in fact, I was a small child myself - so I don’t necessarily link making a family meal with mothering. That doesn’t make it any less nurturing.

I’ve written before about the family contributions to my recipe box, and how that has endured as a lovely gift of practical recipes and insight into relations that have passed beyond the veil.

Over the years, I’ve been able to grow food for the table, and although this was just part of life when I was younger, I gradually (and suddenly, like a drop into cold water, at times) learned that no, not everyone gardens, raises stock, hunts, and fishes for the table. I don’t have room, time, nor inclination for more stock, but the current laying hens in the backyard are giving us nice eggs in pretty colors every day. Protein, and enough to share a dozen with a friend or neighbor from time to time now. Food is it’s own currency, even when we aren’t in a time of need. Many years ago I made Christmas baskets up with jams, candy, baked goodies… and my late husband would scorn them as ‘tacky’ because they were handmade instead of bought. That stung, and being young, I took it to heart. I still struggle with giving a gift of something I’ve made, even though I know logically now that chances are the recipient will appreciate a thoughtful edible gift. For one thing, it’s not going to add clutter to a full life. Unfortunately, some scars to the heart never really heal.

Cooking a meal, that’s my way of giving a gift. I do my best to make it good food - pretty, if I can manage it, like the fruit bowl above sprinkled with edible blossoms of viola and mustard. The strawberry and watermelon were drizzled with just a touch of pomegranate molasses, then tossed with fresh mint from my garden. On a busy day it would likely have just been the fruit, and none the less good. Taking the time to make it just a bit extra makes me happy, though.

Can you hear the chatter and stories, the laughter at this table?

Not too long after we moved up to the Tiny Town, and hosted the first Saturday supper at our home, rather than over at Old NFO’s house where it usually happens, one of my friends stopped me after the meal, and looked closely at me for a moment.

“You really love this, don’t you?” There was a note of surprise.

Yes, yes I do. Very much. Food is love, and being able to make it into an edible art and watch them enjoying eating, talking, and join in with that myself? I love hosting meals. I didn’t get to do it often as a young woman, as a mother it was rare big family meals on a holiday and small children to wrangle while cooking. Only now has it really come to the point where I can plunge into it, planning and preparing, then executing a complicated meal just for the joy of it. I get as much out of the cooking as they do from the eating. It feeds me.

So you see, if I ever offer to feed you if you are within range and can stop by my house, it’s a purely selfish move on my part. I get happy, watching people get flavor and fuel up at my table.

Handmade biscuits, because I can.

I already have plans for the next big meal, and they involve the grill, as it will be early June, and likely some highly-spiced meat onna stick. Everyone loves meats on sticks. We shall see what’s coming out of the garden then, for sides. And another angel-food cake made from a dozen of my hen’s eggs, with a eggy custard to use up the yolks, so very rich and sumptuous. I shall feed them a king’s feast! Food is love!