When I went up to University I was often asked who had taught me to cook. My school was a very old fashioned boys' school so there were no lessons there except for an extra curricular course held at the local girls' school during the sixth form, and the motivation for taking part in that course had little to do with food. However, it was a great surprise to my flatmates that I could produce a Sunday roast with very little fuss. The truth lies at a table in my childhood kitchen.
Our kitchen table was made by my late father. It was made for utility not elegance and served alongside its two pvc covered benches for decades. It had two broad white legs each with a wide foot and its surface was a mottled white and grey formica with a metal band around its edge. We sat at this table for all except the most important of meals, everything from hurried breakfasts to Sunday roasts. It was also where I did my homework on a Sunday morning - History set my Mr Williams or Divinity set by the Rev James. I was never much of a student as my magpie mind was easily distracted. Much of my time was spent watching my mother peel vegetables, baste the roast and, above all, make gravy.
When my teachers had been kind and I finished my scribblings earlier than expected I would help my mother, my speciality would be the gravy. From this I learned that you need to keep some of the vegetable water and the water that had been used for par-boiling the potatoes to enrich and help thicken the gravy. I also learned that the "marmitey" nuggets of caramelised meat and potatoes contain powerful flavour hits that need to be diluted and stirred in to enhance the broth. I did not need my mother to tell me what to do, I had watched it so often that it just seemed easy and natural.
Tables are important, they provide us with space in a complicated and increasingly noisy world. Kitchen tables are a place of gathering, a place where real conversations happen. Arguments, making up, admissions, announcements, professions of love, all have taken place around a kitchen table. If the heart of the home is its kitchen then the kitchen table is where the beat of that heart can be heard.
I have written before about my childhood holidays on a farm in Devon; the farmhouse kitchen had a massive table. I probably sat 10 or 12 but it seemed like a huge expanse of weathered wood to a small blond haired little boy. I remember it pilled with cakes and sandwiches to fuel the team at harvest time all made by Agnes in the Aga that sat alongside the table. I, of course, considered myself an important part of that team and thus entitled to my share of cake.
The long tables and benches found in the refectories and dining rooms of old fashioned schools and universities come from a monastic tradition of communal eating but they also force people into a situation where they have to communicate: with a person either side of you and 3 or four opposite, it is hard not to talk. Both of the schools which I attended were very traditional and valued the concept of communal eating as being a civilised and character building thing to do.
My present kitchen is way too small to have table, though the Beautiful Wife and I breakfast everyday at a table in the dining room. We ask what each others' days hold and make plans for the evening. I value this time more than I can explain here. Sitting up at table and eating together is the best way to start even the most stressful of days at the chalk face.
The table of my childhood has long since given way to the ravages of time as all things have their day. However, as lovers of food and good conversation we are lost without a table, somewhere away from screens and gadgets where we can celebrate our good fortune, commiserate other's losses and simply be human.
