Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

241 Pages·2013·0.98 MB·English

by  Shauna Niequist

Bread & Wine
a love letter
to life around the table,
with recipes
Shauna Niequist
For my boys —
Aaron, Henry, and Mac
And for the Cooking Club —
Brannon Anderson
Margaret Hogan
Amanda Hybels
Melody Martinez
Casey Sundstedt
contents
Cover
Title page
Dedication
AN INTRODUCTION on bread and wine
part one
my mom’s blueberry crisp
Blueberry Crisp
what the table is for
Mini Mac & Cheese
hungry
Nigella’s Flourless Chocolate Brownies
start where you are
Basic Vinaigrette
go-to risotto
Basic Risotto
enough
the chopping block
Steak au Poivre with Cognac Pan Sauce
on tea and pajamas
Breakfast Quinoa
run
Green Well Salad
hummingbird
Goat Cheese Biscuits
part two
delicious everywhere
Watermelon Feta Salad
jazz and curry
Mango Chicken Curry
open the door
White Chicken Chili
baking cookies with batman
Breakfast Cookies
morning, noon, and night
Sweet Potato Fries with Sriracha Dipping Sauce
what my mother taught me
Real Simple Cassoulet
cupcake in the oven
feasting and fasting
Robin’s Super-Healthy Lentil Soup
love and enchiladas
Annette’s Enchiladas
meeting mac
part three
hail mary
magical white bean soup
Magical White Bean Soup
present over perfect
Bacon-Wrapped Dates
the bass player’s birthday
russian dolls
on scrambled eggs and doing hard things
Goat Cheese Scrambled Eggs
happy new year
Dark Chocolate Sea Salted Toffee
swimming in silence
Esquites/Mexican Grilled Corn
part four
what money can’t buy
Gaia Cookies
last-minute lunch party
Maple Balsamic Pork Tenderloin
city love
better late than never
Brannon’s Caesar Salad
swimsuit, ready or not
Farmers Market Potato Salad
the mayor of the river
Mar-a-Lago Turkey Burgers
pont neuf
Simplest Dark Chocolate Mousse
take this bread
Sullivan Street Bread
come to the table
appendix
four-week book club/cooking club discussion guide
four-week book club/cooking club menus
FOR MARGARET:
on weeknight cooking, with pantry list
DEAR BECKY:
my best entertaining tips, with sample menus
recommended reading
recipe index
recipe index by category
acknowledgments
author’s note
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Share Your Thoughts
AN INTRODUCTION
on bread and wine
I’m a bread person—crusty, golden baguette; hearty, grainy, seeded
loaves; thin, crispy pizza crust — all of it. Flaky, buttery croissants;
chewy pita; tortillas, warm and fragrant, blistered by heat. Whenever my
jeans are too tight, I’m reminded that I know better than to love bread
the way I do, but love is blind, and certainly beyond reason. And I am a
wine person—the blood-red and liquid gold, the clink and glamour of
tall-stemmed glasses, and the musty, rich, almost mushroom-y smell.
More than that, I am a bread-and-wine person. By that I mean that I’m
a Christian, a person of the body and blood, a person of the bread and
wine. Like every Christian, I recognize the two as food and drink, and
also, at the very same time, I recognize them as something much greater
—mystery and tradition and symbol. Bread is bread, and wine is wine,
but bread-and-wine is another thing entirely. The two together are the
sacred and the material at once, the heaven and earth, the divine and
the daily.
This is a collection of essays about family, friendships, and the meals
that bring us together. It’s about the ways God teaches and nourishes us
as we nourish the people around us, and about hunger, both physical
and otherwise, and the connections between the two.
It’s about food and family and faith. It’s also about everything else,
because all of life is a jumble of ideas and experiences and the things we
find under the couch cushions. All of life is a whirling mash-up of the big
and little things—the things we see and think and remember and smell
and feel, the deep values that guide us and the dirt under our fingernails,
the undercurrents of belief and doubt and the coolness of cotton sheets
right when we slide our toes down to the bottom of the bed. It’s about
food, and it’s not. It’s about life, which is to say it’s about everything.
A few Christmases ago, my dear friends Steve and Sarah gave me a
book called My Last Supper. It’s a gorgeous, oversized hardcover with a
collection of interviews with fifty great chefs about their last suppers.
Apparently that’s one of those age-old kitchen questions chefs and cooks
discuss ad infinitum, in lulls between service, as they close down the
kitchen at the end of a busy night — If you knew it was your very last
meal, what would you eat? Who would cook it? What would you drink, who
would be around the table with you, if you knew it was your very last meal?
Being married to a musician, I’m very familiar with the musician’s
equivalent: Out of all recorded music, what song do you wish you had
written? Or If you were putting together your dream band, who would play
each instrument? For an English major like me, it’s something like, If you
could sit in a café with one writer, who would you choose? Or maybe, What
line do you wish you had written? It’s one of those questions you can
discuss forever, and change your answer a little bit every time, one that
you love answering, because it permits you to live in that world—the
food world, the music world, the literary world—for as long as you’re
working out your answer. If you’re like me, you keep changing your
answer, because you want to stay in that world for as long as possible.
For the record, my last-supper meal looks a bit like this: first, of
course, ice-cold champagne, gallons of it, flutes catching the candlelight
and dancing. There would be bacon-wrapped dates oozing with goat
cheese, and risotto with thick curls of Parmesan and flecks of black
pepper. There would be paper-thin pizza with tomatoes and mozzarella
and slim ribbons of basil, garlicky pasta and crusty bread and lots of
cheeses, a plummy pinot noir and maybe a really dirty martini, because
you might as well go big on your last night on earth. There would be
dark chocolate sea salted toffee and a bowl of fat blackberries, and we’d
stay at the table for hours and hours, laughing and telling stories and
reaching for one more bite, one more bite, one more bite.
What’s becoming clearer and clearer to me is that the most sacred
moments, the ones in which I feel God’s presence most profoundly, when
I feel the goodness of the world most arrestingly, take place at the table.
The particular alchemy of celebration and food, of connecting people
and serving what I’ve made with my own hands, comes together as more
than the sum of their parts. I love the sounds and smells and textures of
life at the table, hands passing bowls and forks clinking against plates
and bread being torn and the rhythm and energy of feeding and being
fed.
I love to talk about food and cooking and entertaining. I want to hear
about how other people do it, and about the surprising and significant
about how other people do it, and about the surprising and significant
things that happen when people gather around the table. Many of the
books I’ve read and loved most dearly have been about food and
gatherings at the table. My best moments have been spent in the kitchen,
and many of the most deeply spiritual moments of the last year have
taken place at the table.
It’s not, actually, strictly, about food for me. It’s about what happens
when we come together, slow down, open our homes, look into one
another’s faces, listen to one another’s stories. It happens when we leave
the office and get a sitter and skip our workouts every so often to
celebrate a birthday or an accomplishment or a wedding or a birth,
when we break out of the normal clockwork of daily life and pop the
champagne on a cold, gray Wednesday for no other reason than the fact
that the faces we love are gathered around our table. It happens when
we enter the joy and the sorrow of the people we love, and we join
together at the table to feed one another and be fed, and while it’s not
strictly about food, it doesn’t happen without it. Food is the starting
point, the common ground, the thing to hold and handle, the currency
we offer to one another.
It’s no accident that when a loved one dies, the family is deluged with
food. The impulse to feed is innate. Food is a language of care, the thing
we do when traditional language fails us, when we don’t know what to
say, when there are no words to say. And food is what we offer in
celebration—at weddings, at anniversaries, at happy events of every
kind. It’s the thing that connects us, that bears our traditions, our sense
of home and family, our deepest memories, and, on a practical level, our
ability to live and breathe each day. Food matters.
At the very beginning, and all through the Bible, all through the
stories about God and his people, there are stories about food, about all
of life changing with the bite of an apple, about trading an inheritance
for a bowl of stew, about waking up to find the land littered with bread,
God’s way of caring for his people; about a wedding where water turned
to wine, Jesus’ first miracle; about the very first Last Supper, the humble
bread and wine becoming, for all time, indelibly linked to the very body
of Christ, the center point for thousands of years of tradition and belief.
It matters. It mattered then, and it matters now, possibly even more so,
because it’s a way of reclaiming some of the things we may have lost
along the way.