Picture a long festive table decked with candles and lined with a dozen smiling faces. Surely, all the ingredients for sharing of food, laughter and good conversation? Well, not so much.
As I sat down excited to spend the evening catching up with everyone, I realized a good third of the long table was out of earshot and I was confined to chatting only with my immediate neighbour. Others dishes were also out of tasting/sharing range. By the end of the evening, I left for home feeling unfulfilled - increasingly convinced that other cultures, particularly in Asia, but, oddly, as close as Switzerland, know where it’s at when it comes to shared dining. Here’s why:
Circle Sitting:
Rectangular tables are recipes for isolation and are basically retrograde – some sort of throwback to medieval banqueting. They’re also hierarchical when you think about it. Why do we need a “Head of the table”, for example? Sitting in a circle does away with all that and facilitates a shared social and culinary experience. Chinese Dim-sum restaurants have got it right.
Cooking (!) the food at the table:
Last year’s Christmas highlight was having endless Swiss Raclette with my family. A stack of cheese and a two little propane fired pans set up around our coffee table was all it took to have an interactive, collaborative and leisurely meal.
Japanese 'Hot Potting'
This year, the highlight was my first Japanese Hot Pot experience with six friends. Again, we relaxed around two bubbling cookers, working together to keep the pots full of pre-prepared seafood, mushrooms, kim-chi and other delicacies.
Admittedly my international experience is limited and hence my examples are too. But I feel it’s safe to say the West has a lot to learn. Sure – we’re good around a campfire with wieners and marshmallows, but it’d be great to bring that communal experience more regularly into our homes. Chopping the corners off all tables square is good start!
I have wanted to figure out a source of ethically raised and organic local meat for a few years now. The problem is that Katie, my lovely wife, is a vegetarian and she shows little interest in pork, ethical or not. So I have been restricted to buying small amounts of meat from farmers markets or organic butchers, which is not cheap. Months ago, we had a group of friends enjoying the spring weather on our back deck, eating some “Naked” sausages [meaning they were flavoured only with a bit of onion, salt and pepper] I’d bought
The folks at KEG developed an interesting network of farmers, butchers and chefs to raise, kill and process pigs. An older, mostly retired farmer, who has been organic longer than label, keeps a couple of sows and one boar from a collection of heritage breeds Berkshire, Tamworth, Hampshire, Yorkshire, and Landrace. He does the farrowing, or pig birthing, for KEG. The young pigs are then passed on to one of two farms who finish the pigs, feeding them locally grown grains and legumes and allowing them to forage around outside. Once the pigs are ready for slaughter, they are sent to a multigenerational butcher in Lindsey for custom small scale killing. The final leg the journey and the one that is really interesting in my mind, is the kitchen of a high-end restaurant in Toronto. The chef and KEG came to an arrangement to process pigs. He then converts the lesser meat into excellent sausages and sells them back to KEG. These are the very same sausages that my friends and I were eating when we decided to found the Wilbur Collective back in May. On Thanksgiving Sunday the chef allowed me to join him in his kitchen and we spent the day making sausages, pork chops, smoked hawks, head cheese, bacon, pancetta and a huge ‘city ham’. After a few dozen emails we found a night that we could all come together and despite my poor defrosting plans, the ham tasted amazing.
