House Dinner

by: Annie Wilson

“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness-
Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow!”

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur, stanza 12
Edward Fitzgerald 1859

The Summertime produce section of any Whole Foods market makes me misty-eyed with longing. I go to my neighborhood Whole Foods on either Saturday or Sunday to shop for my weekly groceries. Getting inspired to make something from what is freshest and what sounds delicious to me, I shop accordingly. I shop alone, and then more often than not, cook alone. I have never thought that this was a forlorn routine, but lately I have wondered at the tensions on my heartstrings as I browse the aisles. The sharp, cool scent of mint, pungency of basil, and the tart, dirty perfection of tomatoes – each of these arrest my thoughts of other kitchens, other times, and other friends. My circle today includes women who are mirror images of myself, working all day, attempting to exercise, eat some semblance of a meal, and relax before bed, before doing it all again in the morning. Friends are for the weekends when we eat out together. My own kitchen is so small and without any proper seating area that having the girls for dinner is nonsensical. Cocktail parties with little nibbles are fine, but to sit and eat off of plates? The idea makes me nervous and embarrassed. And why? Cooking obviously results in eating, and eating is most pleasurable among friends. Jamie Oliver has often preached that cooking doesn’t need to be costly or elegant, it’s just merely about getting friends together for some company. The kitchen is the center of a home, the hub of activity, aroma, discussion, arguments, and enjoyments. If you live alone and cook alone, can your home rightfully possess any of these things? Having a grown-up kitchen carries a lonely responsibility that shrinks from the fun of suppers organically generated by entropy and others.

I once had a home built on entropy – nature’s way of disorganizing itself. Perhaps entropy is what makes people gather in a kitchen despite every hostess’s best efforts to lure guests out to the terrace with a sunset view, or the newly re-upholstered living room; people want to be disorganized and close to the food source. People stand, chat, get in the way, laugh, and enjoy each other. Kitchens are now designed to accommodate this party culture, being built with an open plan, revealing all of the culinary goings-on to the rest of the house. While designed to welcome this international cultural zeitgeist, the French snobbishly call the open-kitchen design une cuisine americaine. Yet it is the houses with the smallest, most cramped, bottlenecked, kitchen plans that seem to generate the best party atmosphere. My own dorm in Paris had one centralized kitchen with only a sink and a hotplate – people sat on the counters while cooking, and “dinner parties” spread to sitting on the floor of the hallways. Languages and cultures squatting together, happily mixing over the international student food of spaghetti with sauce. Late nights, drinking too much, smoking even more, singing songs, arguing, telling stories, and generally carrying-on until day break. Upon returning to California after months at the Cite Universitaire, I cried for days. I woke each morning aching for the aroma of diesel and cigarettes, and the flavors of early baguettes, dirty, rich espressos, and cheap Greek sandwiches before class. I could hardly manage my grief at homecoming. Gone were our nights of cheap wine and chocolate by the river, of afternoon snacks of soft cheeses and home-cured olives, of navigating night club bouncers with insouciance, of going to classes the next day with glitter still smeared over the cheekbones. I was home, and in the middle of nowhere.

Once upon a time, an early 20^th-century farmhouse stood at the far western edge of Yolo County. Wanting to use the house on the burgeoning University Farm, the University of California moved the house to the campus at Davis. At some point during the 1970s, the house became the Davis Student Cooperative. Most old houses are renovated or kept up to date throughout their years, yet this house was largely untouched by reparation and impervious to most modern technologies. Electrical wiring was on the exterior of the walls and there was only a single phone line at the far, glassed-in room on the back porch. (Starting in the phone room, the phone wire slipped throughout the house in a maze of splitters and connectors, becoming enough of a phone line for all roommates to connect to the internet.) Ten roommates – mostly music majors, 110-degree heat, organic vegetables, a moody tail-less cat, a loud stereo, a steady production of quesadillas fueled by omnipresent marijuana, pumping out of one very tiny kitchen. Actually, the kitchen would not have been so small had it not been for the overwhelming juggernaut of a heating unit that some early-generation UC Physical Plant engineer decided to put in there. Massive, stainless steel, and rumbling steadily during the winter when turned on, our heating unit was truly the twelfth roommate. It was also a bulletin board and time capsule, detailing the complete history of our house. “Love your Mother” “Think Globally, Act Locally” “Imagine: Peace” “Clinton/Gore ‘92” – these were just a few of the many stickers that had been pasted to the heater. And then there were the recipes. Being situated as it was at the dead center of the kitchen, the heater naturally became a collection of the many recipes people made in the house at one time or another. Some of them were basic, such as the proper proportions for cooking rice, although my favorite was our roommate Neeru’s posting for homemade Chai tea: “Boil black tea in milk – let it rise & then cool three times. Then add sugar – a lot, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and allspice.” No proportions necessary. We did have cookbooks; the house favorite was The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, as well as any of the other cookbooks of the Molly Katzen/Moosewood variety, as well as The Vegetarian Epicure, and a beat-up copy of The Betty Crocker Cookbook. For fancy occasions, Deborah Madison’s Greens Cookbook was consulted. The first copy of Joy of Cooking I had received from my parents one Christmas I mistakenly left behind when I moved out, but my mom gave me Joy of Cooking on another Christmas, forgetting the first gift, so I came out even. It makes me truly happy to know that I personally endowed this bible to the house, although I wish I had switched it with the second copy, as I had hand-written the perfect pie crust recipe on the inside flap. Despite the presence of such cooking advice, most meals eaten at the DSC were impromptu inventions, never put to pen and paper. Dinner had to be vegetarian, even vegan. Stirfrys, pasta, soups, curries, chilis, even veggie fajitas were favorites. Our roommate Dave consistently challenged himself to make a weekly “one pot wonder” – usually resulting in a heavy, over-spiced concoction, served with beans or rice or both. 99% of all meals began with a sauté of garlic and onions.

Rules of the cooperative: No TV, no meat. Do your chores, respect your roommates, eat well, and cook dinner one night a week. Yes, house dinners provided Sunday through Thursday, guests are welcome. One cooked dinner with a partner – another roommate who would help with chopping, stirring, dishes, and overall organization. This is good to have when you’re twenty, and the chore of cooking for ten-plus hungry college students is daunting. Music was essential: Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Led Zeppelin, The Beastie Boys, and the soundtrack to Rent were on constant rotation. Prep space included the sink board, and a tiny home-constructed wooden “counter” made to fit the contours of the gigantic heater. If another roommate came to the kitchen, the cooks had to shuffle down and move out of the way to let them through. Sometimes, we had to do prep on the dining room table: an extremely large wooden spool with a hole in the center. Well, half of a wooden spool that at one time or another probably held industrial cable or wire – the kind that is used to build bridges. (The other half of the spool was next door, serving as a table to another CoOp household.)The table comfortably sat fifteen people, and was aged to a smooth antique wooden softness, with bumps and knots on the surface that kept things interesting when playing Jenga.

The true glory of the CoOp dinner came about in summer, when our house garden was overflowing with home-grown vegetables. One summer we had over thirty tomato plants, so one could enjoy the cleanly pungent scent of the dirty vines when gathering a warm apron-full in the golden evenings, while thinking: “What pasta sauce tonight?” The skin on my fingers would itch and burn from the pulp and acid from chopping a mountain of perfect sun-warm tomatoes. Then there were the peppers, corn, peas, and herbs: basil grew to three feet high, rosemary and oregano exploded their beds, and the mint spread from below the kitchen window along the back of the house. Mint we gathered and put into the dinner’s pitcher of water – cooling everything with some green from the garden. Dried herbs were kept in jars with beautifully colorful, hand-painted labels that offered little witticisms such as “Have you got the THYME?” Setting the table included gathering Mason jars or mugs, stacking plates at table in a mis-matched array- most crockery oddly familiar as it had been stolen from the dormitory dining commons, and bundling forks and spoons into a vase for the picking - knives were catch as catch can. Prior to dinner service we held hands in silence, breaking the circle only when the squeeze had been passed around to everyone.

Living as I do now with matching dishes, proper glasses, and a clean kitchen makes cooking too lonely, and frequently sad. Perfect kitchens make one hesitate to use them, kitchens that go unused generate a coldness throughout a home that makes visiting uncomfortable, never mind inhabiting. Then there is the grief at the sight of a beautiful Whole Foods produce section - paying for organic tomatoes is a bitter pill to swallow. Our small, strange, hodge-podge of a kitchen was the first pit-stop on the house thru-way between front door and back door, dining room and hallway. Not always clean, not always delicious, but always well-used, bottlenecked, uncomfortable, and fun. Standing at the stove, the back door would creak then bang and you knew someone was home to talk to, laugh with, and tell stories to, while you were preparing your weekly gift of food for ten others. I have never known myself to be so generous, to have such a heartbeat, such a carefree happiness, in a perfectly imperfect kitchen and home.