Soffermare: August 2011

Part I - "Some Questions We Didn't Know We Were Asking"

By almost any estimation, our first Soffermare gathering was a resounding success. The theme for the evening was "Khleb I Sol," an Eastern European or Russian greeting literally meaning "bread and salt" and typically used to welcome guests (especially priests) into one's home or usher newlyweds into their new home. It seemed so appropriate to start our socio-theo-gastronomic experiment by echoing in a small way a very rich history of generosity and hospitality - especially one that simultaneously called us to appreciate the most basic, fundamental elements of any meal (including a five-course dinner).

The meal began with each guest tearing off a small piece from a homemade loaf and dipping it in some salt before holding the bread board for the next guest to do the same, until one by one the bread and salt had made their way around the table. One of the guests mentioned that this seemed"kinda like what we do in church," a comment I hope to return to in future posts. For now, it is enough to say that the series of courses not only was as good of a dining experience as it gets around here, but I think left us all more aware and appreciative of the potential this kind of meal could have. Whether the courses were inspired primarily by the bread and salt elements of the theme or by its Russian heritage (or both), all of the dishes were clearly expressions of (and therefore tremendous gifts from) the people gathered around our table. We went from caviar-topped potato blinis (I've never tasted caviar before), to a chilled ginger-carrot soup with artisan (i.e. homemade) yogurt , to salt-baked rainbow trout with a panzanella salad (basically a salad built entirely around one of my favorite ingredients - croutons - true genius!), to a salt-pork larded beef wellington, and finally, nearly four gloriously gluttonous hours later, to the simple yet perfect comfort of a caramel bread-pudding (a most appropriate note to end the symphony). Clearly, the cooking and the sharing of wine and conversation were inspired, and as the night wore on we too were inspired by what could be. (Click here or skip to the bottom of this post for some evidence...)

However, even before the last guests left we also became more aware of the many questions and difficulties that, for better or worse, this meal had raised. As we began intellectually digesting what had just taken place, some of us were surprised by how unnpracticed we were at the art of feasting. I think we like to assume that if there's anything that comes to us naturally it's the ability to have a good time, and yet, here we were, conscious that we still needed some practice and that there was genuine work we need to do to recover our instinct for play. The kind of "feasting" we are familiar with has mostly been proscribed by our culture's commerce and largely divorced from any authentic connection to what it is that we're supposed to be celebrating, or to say, the season, or the liturgical year. Even wedding receptions tend to be more about doing what is expected than they do about celebrating the almost reckless generosity of two people surrendering their entire selves to each other for the rest of their lives. For many of us, Super Bowl Sunday is about as authentic of a feast as it gets. This is the occasion when we feel most at home, most honest, most comfortable with our celebration. And yet possibly the real reason we like it is that we have been given permission, a kind of cultural blank check, to really indulge ourselves. Indeed, most of our feasting it seems, is really under-girded by this "license to indulge" philosophy.

In our post-meal conversation, someone suggested that perhaps the only way to truly understand a feast is to understand and partake in the fast that precedes it. I suspect this is a question that will become more and more pressing the more we do this.

We also became aware of the logistical difficulties of regularly holding such an event, particularly as they affected complicated and intertwining friendship circles. Everyone clearly had a good time and wanted to come back to do it again. Presumably others would also be interested. How then could we introduce new people in future dinners without, as one person put it, "uninviting" someone else? Could we just make it bigger? Did we even have the facilities or materials to do that? Would that ruin the "feel" of the evening or go against a fundamental (though admittedly tentative) ideal of "sharing a common board"? Moreover, what would happen when other palates, other tastes, other values, other skill levels participated? How would new people change the dynamics of something we were all beginning to really like?

In the end, these questions also revealed some uncertainty about the character and identity of Soffermare, about what it is and what it should be. It was clear that the dinner created at least some anxiety for all of us. Was it possible to still emphasize making excellent food without taking ourselves too seriously? How could we minimize the anxiety while maximizing playfulness? Was that even possible without making significant and fundamental changes? Was taking big, culinary risks and embracing the likelihood of failure something we really believed in, something we could really live out, or were we all doomed to simply make this into another one of our underground competitions, judging others and ourselves even more severely than we normally do? Could we have fun pretending that we were star-quality chefs and judicious diners, without just being annoyingly pretentious? Or were we just a bunch of wanna-be's and posers, hipster foodies (I'm starting to hate the word) doing the most middle-class thing imaginable: pretending we weren't middle-class?

Or, after all that, did these questions simply reveal that we were taking ourselves way too seriously? As one of the guests put it to me several days afterwards, "is it a dinner or a movement?" Beyond gently suggesting that, in asking so many questions, perhaps we were getting the cart before the horse, the question revealed a set of underlying, perhaps unstated tensions. Could we hold a dinner that was uniquely memorable while still thinking about the larger meaning and possibilities? Was the individual occasion itself threatened by our desire to see this as more than just having a really good time for a few hours, as something that could be instructive, formative, even healing - as something with spiritual, cultural, and relational implications? How much could we dream up and hope for, yet still be genuinely present and enjoy the uniqueness of each dinner?

Part II - "Some Unexpected Answers in Unexpected Places"

In a sense, such questions (and there are many more of them) are the "good" kind of problems you actually want to have. And, when I'm being more optimistic than I usually am, I'm reminded that these are "problems" only because this first meal was a good thing - so good, in fact, that we want to share it with all the good people we know. Furthermore, the event was successful in a large part because "guests" had in such a real way bought into the promise and possibility of the meal and then taken genuine ownership of it - felt such a part of it, in fact, that the thought of missing out on future occasions was almost unbearable. So what did the next step look like when it was clear that so much was at stake and that these earliest decisions would have such significant implications? How could we move forward when what we were so aware of now was our own inexperience?

And then, something clicked - somewhere between reading a book and gathering an egg.

Inspired by that first event and the conversation that it provoked, one of the participants from our first Soffermare gathering lent me a copy of Michael Rhulman's The Soul of a Chef. I quickly got sucked into Rhulman's own fascination with and reflections about the rigorous (you might say, sadistic) 10-day exam that professional chefs take to be certified as "Master" chefs. As he observes a batch of examinees (most of whom are already highly decorated chefs), Rhulman explores the question about what makes a person "great" at their craft, what separates the "master" craftsman from the craftsman. Is it meeting a set of necessarily artificial, though not arbitrary standards? Or is there something else? Something intangible and immeasurable, yet identifiable; something we know immediately when we see it, even if we can't quite describe. Here, Rhulman asks more questions than he answers, but his account will be fascinating for anyone who wonders what it takes to be the best in their field.

In the next section he offers a character study of Michael Symon - a Cleveland based chef, who knows just enough of the rules of "classical" cooking to break them and still get away with it. Symon is a wildly successful chef (surprisingly so, given that he is in a place where talent has so often met a dead-end). But what is so interesting about this section is Rhulman's realization that what ultimately makes Symon's restaurant work is Symon himself - not only the fun he has while he's cooking, but also his ability to share that with others. Symon's obviously a gifted chef and has enough technical skill to be really inventive, but Rhulman is persuaded that what really brings people in (including the employees), is Symon's inability to laugh quietly.

And then, Rhulman gets to Thomas Keller, a chef he has a serious man-crush on. I was almost uncomfortable reading about Rhulman's first experience at the "French Laundry." His experience is so unlike any he's ever had (as a "food writer" he's eaten at a lot of great restaurants) and he's at such a loss for words, that you almost feel like you shouldn't be watching this budding love affair between eater and chef. But what you quickly learn from Ruhlman is that Thomas Keller pays attention to every little detail about his food and that "perfectionist" or OCD doesn't even come close to describing the way he is in the kitchen. Oddly, it's pretty inspiring stuff. At one point, I actually looked up from the book and had the thought that what I most wanted to do right then was scrub all my stainless-steel pots and pans until they became as shiny as they were when I first got them, make a complete mess of them again by cooking some ridiculously lavish and ornate meal, and then scrub them all over again. That impulse was a bit insane (not to mention thoroughly out of character for me), and I'm convinced that Keller's obsession is a tad on the crazy side, but you can't also help but admire the respect Keller has for what he does.

One of my favorite parts of the book is a really beautiful section in which Keller is sharing about his first time butchering live rabbits and the tremendous burden he immediately felt to honor the life he had just taken by making it into the absolute best dish he had ever made. This was a crucial, formative moment for Keller in which he recognized his responsibility as a chef to honor and appreciate the being-ness of the life that had been taken by giving it his utmost attention and care. It's also an important part of the book as Rhulman moves through his quest for answer about what makes a chef "great." What really impresses itself upon you is that Keller is like this about everything - not just the "meat" of animals, but their offal and vegetables like asparagus and carrots.

I was reading this section while tending a garden and a few chickens for some friends who were on vacation. I had never really held a live hen before and had certainly never pushed one off her roost so I could see if she had laid an egg. Luckily, no one was around to watch and eventually I got over myself (in no small part thanks to my friend's assurance that "the hens will probably flap and squawk, but they won't peck"). To my delight, as I reached under the warm feathery breast of an obviously annoyed hen, I felt the hard warmth of an egg. And then it happened. As I felt the weight and heat and the fragility of the freshly-laid egg in my hand, I realized what Soffermare is all about.

What it's about (or should be about), I see now, is paying attention.

As I stood there between my abstract musings about Rhulman's book and the hard, indisputable concreteness of that egg, I realized that the surest antidote for pretense is presence, that as long as we were committed to paying attention to people and the food we served each other, everything else would fall into place. Without diminishing the worthiness of our desire to make something special, something excellent and extra-ordinary, the mandate to "pay attention" nonetheless calls us to be present (to people certainly, but also to places and things) in a way that will not tolerate our false, pretentious, posturing selves. True attention is not satisfied by mediocrity or our half-assed efforts, but neither does it tolerate "using" something or someone as a means to an other end. True attention will not ultimately tolerate our use and abuse of matter for self-aggrandizement. Nor will it allow us to turn people or things into "movements," no matter how good our intentions.

In this, "paying attention" is a lot like love (whether or not that word can be said with a straight face anymore). It demands taking a risk, it surrenders, and it constantly pushes us to be our truest selves for the sake of really knowing and really enjoying the truest (albeit dangerous) expression of something or someone else. True attention says get yourself out of the way so that you really experience the uniqueness of the be-ing before you. It also says, somewhat paradoxically, you can't experience this unless your own self is fully present.

So, while most of us in this culture can really only associate feasting with indulging and hedonism, what a true feast seems to be calling us to is to be present and to pay attention. True attention doesn't say, "Go ahead, spoil yourself, you deserve it." Rather, it says, "Be there, be all there. Take it all in because this moment will never be again and the uniqueness of this particular miracle is un repeatable." Most importantly, it says, "This miracle is here primarily so that you will be able to see the everyday miracle in everything everywhere."

It follows also that paying attention is essentially about showing hospitality. True attention always prefers the actual presence of the object over one's pre-conceptions. It says, despite our fears and apprehensions about how we might be changed, "I'll give the unfamiliar a real chance, the kind that sets aside my prejudices or associations in order to experience this unknown at its fullest." True attention generously invites and rejoices in the newness of strange ingredients and delights in the surprise of previously untested combinations. It appreciates the taste of this particular tomato, not just tomatoes as a general category. Likewise, it sits across the table from actual people with unique histories rather than mere characters, or worse, caricatures.

Ultimately, what I realized while the being-ness and history of the egg was now indisputably before me in a way it usually isn't when I'm grabbing a product off the shelf in a grocery story, is that what food does to us, perhaps it's greatest gift, is that it forces us to make the abstract concrete, to take a concept or recipe and use real ingredients, real tools, in a real place ("place" being a word that indicates both history and boundaries) to feed real hunger. In other words, food teaches us that matter matters - not just that the matter we use to feed people matters, but that people themselves, as matter made up of, dependent on and sustained by matter, matter. This gift of food and it's nearly irresistible demand it makes on us to pay attention - to histories, to health (of our environments as much as our own), to enjoyment, to our responsibilities and our indebtedness - perhaps explains why so many of our most famous family quarrels take place around the Thanksgiving table. It's also why, I think, when we talk about the kind of love our grandmothers and mothers or others have show us, we often do so by acknowledging that they paid true attention to us precisely by paying attention to the food they made.

Soffermare is not a movement. It's not a club, nor is it an excuse for a blog. It's not a guest list, nor a competition. It doesn't seek to be trendy, and it is counter-cultural, if at all, only accidentally. And it's certainly not yet another clever justification for pampering ourselves.

It's an invitation, as all of life is, to cultivate our capacity to pay attention and to become more ourselves in the process.