The Importance of Food

My brothers became gourmet chefs, for their private consumption, because they missed the food. I became a gourmand consumer of vast quantities of everything, because I missed the food.

It was always only the food that brought us together -- good, sometimes great, food. I remember rolling pie dough with Daddy and icing cakes with Mom. I remember Mommy-made cookies and Daddy-made candy -- all kinds of candy -- at Christmas time to give for gifts, to ourselves mostly.

For instance, there was that Thanksgiving that we sat around the ten-foot diameter table that he built for the occasion, with 14 adults in a circle, and the 10 kids in the other room at card tables and TV trays. We started with hors d'ouevres of bits of things on crackers and hand-trimmed toast with wine. Then there were shrimp cocktails for the adults and tomato juice for the kids. Three bottles of wine accompanied the meal. There were two 20-lb turkeys and too many side dishes -- two kinds of stuffing, apple/raisin and chestnut; three kinds of cranberry sauce (two canned, one with berries and one jellied, and fresh chopped berries and oranges); hand-mashed potatoes made with cream and 1/2 a pound of butter with giblet gravy; candied yams with marshmallows melted brownly over the top; two green bean dishes (they had been picked one by one from the grocer's bin) with fresh mushrooms and slivered almonds (depending on the whims of the chef); corn coblets dripping in butter; a large mixed-greens salad with tomatoes, croutons and hand-shaken oil & vinegar dressing; a large dish of olives, three kind of pickles, carrot sticks, celery sticks, green onions, radishes and cucumber sticks; fresh rolls hand-punched and risen with real butter or margarine; and three kinds of pies for dessert -- pumpkin with fresh whipped cream, apple with cheddar cheese and cherry with ice cream,

And then, three hours later, after dinner, while the kids were running around in the twilight, the adults sat around the table and discussed politics, religion and other taboo subjects before running wet fingers around the rims of singing wine glasses and breaking into song and laughter.

This is why food is important. It brings people together.