The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon December 13th, 2008

I’m going to sit at the Welcome Table – hallelujah!  I’ll sit at the Welcome Table one of these days.

I’m going to feast on milk and honey, hallelujah! I’ll feast on milk and honey one of these days.

All God’s children gonna sit together, hallelujah! All God’s children gonna sit together one of these days. -  Traditional Spiritual “River Jordan”

I don’t think it is overstating the case to say that a lot of us are feeling powerless right now.  Most of what’s going on in the world is not something we have power over.  Most of us rightly try not to let that stop us – that is, we try to claim what power we can as often as we can.  So even though we know it might not help, we talk to our representatives, we give money, we demonstrate.  But at some level, most of us are living through events that we are powerless to control, through a history that will sweep us along with it.  Frankly, this sucks.

All of us need to devote some energy to fighting battles that will probably be lost, simply because we have an obligation to fight the good fight.  But most of us can’t live on a steady diet of tilting at windmills – we also need to do work where we know we can accomplish something, and where we know we matter.  That’s why I talk about ordinary, simple things like dinner – which, of course, has already ceased to be simple for many people.  We need to win some, even as it seems like we are overwhelmingly losing much of what we value.

And here, I think is something that we can win, and desperately need - the recreation of the welcome table.  I think one of the things that most surprised me once I became an an adult with a table of her own and the capacity to put some food on it was how rarely most of us actually sit down and eat with our friends, our extended family, our community.  Heck, most of us don’t sit down together even as a whole family that often, much less invite guests.

I think part of the problem is that we are so terribly intimidated by the idea of “entertaining” in the Emily Post/HGTV sense.  All you have to do is to read the magazines in the supermarket check-out line around this time of year (the one month of the year we actually do have people over)  to realize that “entertaining” is one heck of a project – you have to have little bits of smoked salmon in cream puffs shells with lemon-thyme creme fraiche.  You are supposed to have fancy dishes and multiple courses and serve meals that cost enough that you have to take out another mortgage on your house.

Now there is a real place for the occasional lavish feast – it isn’t something we invented yesterday, the idea that you might save up the best foods for a celebratory display has a long history.  But so too does something other than “entertaining” – the sitting down together at a meal with others to whom you are tied. – just a plain and ordinary meal, which is celebratory not because of what’s in it, but because of who is at it.  And the more we watch famous people show off their homes, cleaned by underpaid minions and their elaborate buche de buttercreams (and yes, I think it is fun to make this stuff sometimes too), the harder it becomes for a lot of people to imagine eating a simple meal together.

They say that everyone has a mitzvah (Jewish good deed) that comes naturally to them – for me, hospitality is one of them.  I like nothing better than a crowd of people eating from my table.  But part of this is because I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t have to be fancy or complex – real hachnaset orchim (the mitzvah of hospitality) isn’t the creation of the most fabulous meals or the perfect environment – it is simply being welcoming.  The most perfect practitioner of this I know is my friend Joe, a synagogue friend.  I once joked that we were invading them, but at least we hadn’t all arrived at their home at 3 am, demanding food.  Joe knew I was joking, but looked at me with absolute seriousness, and said “If you did, we’d do our best to make you welcome.” 

All of us have different lives, and the creation of a welcoming table can take different forms.  Kathy Harrison uses “Another Place at the Table” as the title of her lovely book on foster parenting, on the project of welcoming children in need.  That’s one possibility.  And there’s a real place in the world for opening the welcome table in a world of need – I used to pack extra sandwiches when I worked in downtown Boston – it wasn’t much trouble for even a graduate student living on a pittance to make another peanut butter and jelly or hummus and pickle sandwich.  There were always homeless folks out, and it was a gift to be able to offer them a sandwich.  The park bench I used to sit on most often was transformed – it became a table at the moment that I was able to offer food to another person.

The welcome table can be as simple as inviting an elderly neighbor to dinner, or making sure that you really sit down with your sister in law once in a while and drink tea and eat something.  It can be welcoming an army of neighborhood children in for milk and cookies, or setting the church table for an army of people in need.  It can be dropping that extra casserole or pie over at the family that just had a baby or lost their job.  It can be taking the risk and asking someone to come eat with you – that step in a casual friendship that opens you, perhaps frighteningly, up for more.

We’ve lost the habit of the welcome table.  I once taught a Hebrew School class of fifth graders about Passover, and I asked them how many of them, when the Haggadah commands them to cast open their doors and call out “let all who are hungry come and eat” actually do so?  What, I asked them, would they do if someone actually tried to come in and sit down?  Overwhelmingly, these children in a comfortable suburb told me that they would never really open their doors, and that if a stranger tried to enter and eat, the would be afraid.  And there are perhaps some legitimate reasons for fear – but some even greater reasons for overcoming it.  We are people who have learned to fear the idea of casting open our doors to others.

There are things we can only understand about one another by sitting together for a meal.  Seated together, we learn about each other’s food culture – in fact, we create a food culture.  Until we eat together, there are intimacies we cannot share.  Eating together is a powerful way of tying our lives together.  Building community depends upon it – and because so many of us are too busy, or too afraid or intimidated or simply not in the habit, we lose community and intimacy in precisely the measure that we do not share food.  It is a starting point for most human connections.

Every faith that I know of has elaborate laws of hospitality, and it is worth remembering that these faiths – and the secular moral identities (for example the anarchist movement _Food Not Bombs_ takes this as a basic principle)  that share their basic ground grew up not in worlds of wealth and privelege but in times of vulnerability and uncertainty, when we were far poorer than we are now.  These moral systems do not emphasize hospitality because they are concerned with minutia, but because these are not minutia – the welcome table is simply the basis of strong communities and humane society.  The welcome table is a source of power of which we have control.  It is time to invite someone – or someone new – in to sit and eat.

Sharon

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Sharon December 2nd, 2008

Note: I’m going to be frantically finishing my next book _Independence Days_ which is about the ties between sustainable food systems and food preservation and storage.  This means not as much time to post new stuff.  So I thought I’d run a few old columns – after all, I’ve been writing this blog for years now, and my readership has expanded a lot, so hopefully some of the old content will be valuable to people. Apologies to those who are already familiar with this stuff.  More new come January, when I get to breathe again.  This one is from May, 2007, just as we were about to start the Riot for Austerity, as I was thinking how to get our energy cost for cooking down.

In the spirit of our really riotous reduction, I’ve been thinking about how to cut my cooking energy down as much as possible. Here are 25 ways I’ve come up with to cut cooking energy.

1. Turn off the stove/oven before you are finished. This is fairly simple – when you soup is almost hot, turn off the stove – it will continue to heat for a while. When your bread is 15 minutes short of baked, turn off the oven and let it sit in the hot oven. You can do this for longer with things that are hotter for longer, or less sensitive, like casseroles. Be cautious with meat – you don’t want food poisoning. Experiment.

2. Eat more salads, sandwiches and raw foods that don’t require cooking.

3. Make a hay box cooker – insulated a box with a blanket, hay or other good insulator. Get your food nice and hot, and then put it in that insulated box and let the retained heat do the cooking.

4. Use a pressure cooker – they save a lot of time when cooking beans, grains, stews and such.  Modern pressure cookers don’t explode like the old ones did, so don’t be scared!

5. Capture heat whenever you can. Instead of heating up several pots of water for tea or soup each day, heat that water and put it in a thermos, and use it for tea when you need it.  If the stove has residual heat, stick your kettle on the burner to warm up the water. 

6. Use a wood cookstove to heat your house and cook at the same time. Save heavy canning and long cooking projects for times when you would be heating the house anyhow whenever possible – for example, canning applesauce can often wait until winter if you have varieties of apples that store well.

7. Or, if you heat with wood but don’t have a cookstove, cook on your heating stove. Put your kettle on the stove. Keep soup on the back of the stove. Have someone build a sheet metal oven for you (just a metal box with a door) that will enable you to bake on the stove.

8. Build an earth or masonry oven outside and use twigs and other scrap wood to bake and cook. A hot earth oven will stay hot enough for you to start by making pizza, then move down to bread, stew and finally dehydrating. Info in _Build Your Own Earth Oven_ by Kiko Denzer and _Capturing Heat Two_ by Still, Hatfield and Scott of the Aprovecho Research Center.

9. Build or buy a solar oven. Instructions for making your own are available on many sites, and in _Capturing Heat: Five Earth Friendly Cooking Technologies and How to Build Them_ by Still and Kness of the source above. The Maria Telkes Solar Cooker gets a bit hotter than some other models, as do the commercial ones.  Tom at Sustainable Choice (who advertises on the sidebar of the blog) sells commercial Sunovens, and we’ve been very happy with ours, although we got along for a good long time with homemade versions.

10. Build a solar dehydrator for food preservation instead of using an electric one. Here’s a cool one: http://greenbluebrown.blogspot.com/2006/10/tomato-dehydrating-update.html

11. Don’t preheat your oven – that is, put your food in while the oven is preheating to capture that heating energy. The only exceptions where this isn’t a good idea are a few really delicate baked goods, but generally this works fine, although you may have to slightly adjust your timing. Practice makes perfect.

12. If you have an electric stove or oven, convert to natural gas or propane – they are much more efficient ways of making heat.  Or at least convert to convection heating, which uses less energy than conventional electric stoves. 

13. Build a rocket stove or rocket bread oven as seen in the first _Capturing Heat_ – a rocket stove uses biomass fuel much more efficiently than a woodstove or earth oven. A rocket bread oven can cook 20 loaves at a time.

14. Have a baking day, or two a week. Do all your oven work then and store your baked goods. 

15. Use a crockpot if you have an electric stove – a crockpot generally will use less energy than an electric stove, although not a gas one.  It can also save a lot of time and energy if you’ve been eating take out – it uses a lot less energy, generally, than driving for fast food.

16. Only bake in a full oven – plan ahead and while you are baking your bread, also consider roasting a pan of vegetables or baking that pie you’ll want later.

17. Don’t open your oven or remove pot lids more often than necessary. Keep the heat in.  Never boil water or heat anything without a lid.

18. Use a microwave instead of a stove (I personally hate microwaves, but they are more efficient than conventional stoves).

19. Make large batches of things and reheat, cooking less often (although this might not make sense if you could give up fridge or freezer otherwise – think it through carefully).

20. Lactoferment pickles, kimchi, etc… and don’t can them. Just keep them in a cool place, and save the canning energy.

21. Switch from a coffee percolator to a press coffee maker.

22. Soak beans overnight in cold water to reduce cooking time.

23. Use cast iron or other heavy cookware that retains heat better than cheap aluminum. That way, you can turn things off even sooner.

24. Make your own low-heat charcoal, cook over the process, and then use agrichar to improve your garden soil.

25. Get your cat to sit on the butter warmer (covered of course) when you need it melted. Ok, this one isn’t a real suggestion, but I’m one short, and it probably would work, if you could persuade the cat not to eat the butter.

Cheers,

 Sharon

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