A Season of Slow Cooking

Call it Good Kitchen Karma. The happiest kitchens are democracies.

by Bruce Schimmel

I find that a busy, bustling kitchen, full of friends and family, is very calming.

Individual cooks may be chopping and dicing. But despite the clatter, the psychic space that cooks share feels as languorous as a summer evening.

Personally, I'm deeply addicted to the joy of cooking with others.

A pleasure even greater than eating is the satisfaction of making food together.

And over time, I've fed my need with a creed of making peace in the pantry.

It's a creed that's worked even with a kitchen full of kids: other people's children and little ones, too. For several years, I taught fifth graders in an after-school program about the quiet joy of cooking at the speed of a snail.

Despite hot pans and sharp knives, the children suffered nary a burn nor a scratch. In making food to take home to their families, the children also made friends with each another — which is, after all, the real goal of dining together.

Even adults, colleagues at work, will come together when they cook in a slow ensemble. On several occasions, about 25 or so City Paper people have come to my house in rural Delaware for a weekend of making music, merriment and, most of all, food.

Feeding one another, magic sometimes happened.

Workers who'd hiss at each other at work found their differences would melt away over a hot barbecue. At these culinary retreats, we produced more than food, we built trust.

Cooking together will do that.

I fell in love with cooking together during the first Thanksgiving I can remember. I was maybe 8 or 9. As a child with little hands, I was given the bothersome task of stripping wisps of bread from loaves of challah that had been soaked in water.

Shredding wet challah can be even more annoying than separating tinsel for a Christmas tree. Certainly, it's stickier. But shred we did, creating eggy strands that eventually became stuffing for the turkey.

It was a dish that only my father really liked, but one that we all cherished anyway. The challah stuffing was part of our Thanksgiving ritual, and it's funny how you will love some food that you don't really like.

My family's Thanksgiving feast was filled with such rites, some even more tedious.

My mother would uncover and re-cover her turkey with a wet paper bag. Every 20 minutes, she'd remove the bag, soak it in water and re-mantle the bird in water-logged paper. This went on for hours. Meantime, my aunt would press scores of tiny marshmallows into her sweet potato pies, while the rest of us performed a thousand little chores.

Home cooking is slow work, and so forms the core of Slow Food, a philosophy of cooking and eating that eschews all that is easy and quick.

Have you ever noticed how preparing traditional meals — Thanksgiving, Hanukkah or Feast of the Seven Fishes — seems to inch forward so slowly?

I think there's a reason for that. For as families and friends chop and chat their way slowly toward supper, personal hurts are often shed along the way. As people produce a feast, dish by dish, relationships are repaired.

The happiest kitchens are not autocracies or plutocracies. At home, being the host or the best chef doesn't matter.

Call it Good Kitchen Karma, but the best home kitchens are democracies that honor all cooks, of any skill or age. When you're cooking with friends and family, everyone who brings their time and care to the table is a top chef.

(bruce@schimmel.com)