Put simply, the whole point of Soffermare is to spend an amazing evening with good people enjoying great food. It is a conscious attempt to counteract a tendency we have to be inattentive with our food no less than our friends and an invitation, therefore, to linger, to dwell, to be present in ways that we are usually no longer very good at. The goal is to collectively create a once in lifetime, five-star kind of meal that we might normally consider excessive and overindulgent, yet do so in a way that is not only affordable but intensely communal. At its heart is a paradoxical imperative: to be extravagantly frugal. It is both pleasure-seeking and self-giving, indulgent yet remarkably efficient and practical, part potluck part banquet. Here, everyone shares in both the expense—not just of cash, but also of labor and energy—and the enjoyment of the creativity, the surprise, the risk-taking, and the appreciation for the thingness of the thing present as much in the food as in the people sitting around a common board. Everyone partakes by participating.
Of all the definitions in the dictionary for linger—to dwell, to be slow in moving or quitting something, to tarry, to remain, to last a while, etc—perhaps the best one I’ve come across is this: “to remain alive though slowly dying.” I suspect Merriam’s dictionary intends this to be a fairly morose, negative association, but I think it perfectly sums up the whole point of this thing—to experience life, to linger on an evening for a bit longer than we normally would and over food that we usually reserve for only the best occasions preciselybecause, not in spite of the fact that we are dying. On one hand, it reminds us that our enjoyment is directly tied to the plants and the animals which had to die first before they could nourish us and give us such pleasure. It is also, however, a reminder that no matter how good the food it is, it too along with our dying bodies will pass. These are temporal pleasures and we do ourselves a great disfavor if we ignore that. But rather than occasioning despair, we think this is even more reason to accept, cherish, and celebrate the cycle of gift-giving, of life giving way to death and of death giving way to life. At very least it should keep us from taking ourselves and our duck confìt too seriously.
