It’s dinnertime, at least it is on the East Coast, everyone,

Will you look at this woman’s glorious face?  It is the face of the famous Marion Cunningham, who said, in an interview in 2002,

No one is cooking at home anymore, so we are losing all the wonderful lessons we learn at the dinner table. People are living like they are in motels. They get fast food and take it home and turn on the TV. Schools and sports groups have soccer practice or what have you during what used to be called the dinner hour. We don’t need more competitive sports. We need to sit facing people with great regularity, so we are making an exchange and we are learning to be civilized.

I am a huge believer in cooking at home and having a daily meal together. How can I not believe that, being of Italian (American) heritage, a people for whom food is nutritional, celebratory, conversation inducing, love-enhancing, ritual respective, and an absolute necessity in life…like breathing and sleeping.

History has it that my father was the cook in our house.  He was the Italian one.  My mother, born into an Irish midwestern farming family, viewed food more as sustenance.  She met my father and her life changed – in that she was lucky she had someone to cook for her.  My mother was a basic cook, not a great cook, but she was a natural at the social aspect of what happened at a dinner table when people eat together – the conversation, the laughter, the sense of community, the friendships, the bonding.  

She was not so great at this when my father died and our household fell victim to exactly what Marion Cunningham talks about in the above quote. My older brother preferred to spend hours after school at sports and the nightly family dinner eventually went by the wayside.

This was a huge loss in my life.  I could never get used to the convenience of eating packaged food and even in my poorest moments (and there were many, all through college in fact) I would fix something for myself at the end of the day, even if it was just a salad, a chicken cutlet, a better than average sandwich.  As history would therefore have it, I cooked all the way through college, often for friends, often with friends and I have never stopped.

Well, the only thing that sometimes stops me is an occasional I’m on strike mood because I’m tired of cleaning up.  Because like a painter who needs to leave their brushes clean for the next day’s work, a cook needs to clean her pots and pans for the next evening’s deliciousness.

And I really rather dig that with the royalty check from her first book, Marion Cunningham bought a Jaguar.  My kind of car.

Rest in peace Marion, and thank you for being one of the great women cooks who has influenced me and championed the power of friends and families breaking bread together.  What a great tradition.

If any of you have heard of Alice Waters and Chez Pannisse in San Francisco, well, it was Marion who discovered her.

Chin chin everyone.  Whatever it is, salad or soup, enjoy it.  Food is soul sustaining.

‘Night.

GM

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/us/marion-cunningham-cookbook-author-dies-at-90.html?_r=1&hp