The Taking of a Toast and Tea

On Rules, Rituals, and Returning to Work

The lovely porridge on my last morning in London, courtesy of Hally’s.

Every time I travel, I make a pledge to live differently. It usually starts with thinking about strategies for incorporating small pleasurable details into my daily routines. Take, for example, breakfast: while waiting for the ferry ride to take us from Dublin to Wales last week, I bought a scone from the terminal cafe. Slightly warmed, split, and slathered with Irish butter, each bite was a transcendent reminder that this would not be like every other morning. The rising and falling waves under the ship, the wrong-side-of-the-road car ride that took us from the rocky cliffs of Holyhead to Snowdonia, the stark contrast between the green hills of the countryside and the grey sands of the Barmouth beaches—each sensorial shift in the middle part of our trip reminded me to wake up and pay attention to my surroundings. To gather the sand between my fingers, and collect the rocks in my pockets. To find meaning in what would soon be memory.

Breakfasts abroad tend to shake me up, to think about more intentional ways of living, to get off the regular routine of yogurt and granola and instead assemble a little plate of pan con tomate and jamón ibérico, a ramekin of shirred eggs and cream, or even a composed bowl of porridge bathed in milk and sprinkled with brown sugar. The impulse to romanticize one’s life from the very first meal of the day is understandable, as it reveals our own magical thinking: if we can set the table just right, we can set the tone for the rest of the day. The old adage that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” may have been an invention of the cereal industry to move product, yet its psychological power is hard to deny.

Routines are just one way we establish and maintain order in our lives, how we demarcate the boundaries between what we can and cannot control. During last week’s Oxford Food Symposium, which meditated on the theme of “Rules and Rituals,” I got to thinking about what adherence to rules and rituals give us that make us feel safe, and what it means when we abide by or push against those restrictions. It’s easy to assume that routines are just one element of what we might call lifestyle: a quick look at the thousands of videos labeled with the #grwm (get ready with me) hashtag turns up any number of aesthetically precise, seemingly non-plussed individuals who have found sanctuary (and monetizable content) in small, pleasurable acts of self-care at the start of their day. Food is an immediately accessible subject through which to create and enact rituals of self-care: the little treat to give ourselves before we shift over to the sometimes self-sacrificing process of work.

Yet it’s easy to forget that rituals can also productively anchor in us in what we find uncomfortable: what can remind us that we are alive and deeply connected to something bigger than ourselves. The conference kicked off with a fantastic presentation from the anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas, whose work on fire-walking rituals in Spain and Greece and on body-piercing practices in Mauritius reminds us that sensorial awareness is a foundational part of what makes rituals matter to us. Though it might seem unusual to start a food conference with a meditation on physical pain and danger, Xygalatas’ work brought the attendees’ attention to the role that consciousness, good and bad, plays in the most important rituals of our lives. “Creating meaning out of things is what makes us human,” he stated, and rituals create meaning that allow us to order our minds, bodies, and experiences so that we can make sense of them.

As we moved on to the subsequent elements of the weekend—an exceptional array of presentations on global food history, practices, and meanings, the joys of the incredible dinners (more below on that), and the many provocations, sensorial and otherwise, to think deeply about the role that food plays in our lives—I continued to think about how fully each of the weekend’s participants believed in the importance of creating meaning around food. How what might be disparaged as “lifestyle” in one space is fundamentally life-sustaining in another, and how something as seemingly ordinary as the preparation of a cup of coffee has earned a place of pride in a renowned scholarly symposium. Not once during the weekend did any scholar have to argue that what they were doing mattered—they knew they were speaking to an audience that got it, that believed in the validity of their work. As a junior scholar, and as someone who wants to carry my appreciation for food in all its forms into my work, wherever it will take me, I found it profoundly gratifying to be amidst their company—to look up during my own presentation and see dozens of people laughing in sympathy, nodding in recognition, and tracking my argument with genuine attention.

So often I feel like my relationship to food work is one akin to the running joke in the superb second season of The Bear*–“chaos menu, but thoughtful”–where I am sometimes closing my eyes and gritting my teeth in the hopes that it all comes together and lands on the side of inventive rather than addled. The act of writing and refining my own work can feel like walking over hot coals, a mental and physical shock to my system, a Sisyphean task with no end in sight.  Yet on the other side of the mountain is the possibility of collective joy: the family-style feast of a conference, the reception of a generous audience, and the welcome into a space with scholars who I’ve admired for years and who, whether I ask them to or not, are going to refill my cup. The prospect of a audience for my work is sometimes daunting, but also what motivates me to write this dispatch each week, to offer up some thoughts that span the many categories and disciplines of my own thinking, and that hopefully resonate with some of you.

So perhaps what I need, in this moment of returning to desk life, is a new ritual that reminds me of both sides of the writing and researching process: the side that involves the intentional, strategic steps over the hot coals, and the one that finds a cool beach to rest upon on the other side. After all, there is time enough for a hundred indecisions, visions and revisions yet. But first, breakfast.

*(More on The Bear in a future post, I promise.)

Recommendation: Travel, for one (and if your travels allow it, a trip through Barmouth in particular.) But also a chance to catch up on your reading to-do lists. I made it through about a third of Up in the Old Hotel, a collection of essays by the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, and in particular enjoyed the opening essay on McSorley’s saloon, in which he explores the many social parameters of the saloon’s unofficial motto: “good ale, raw onions, and no ladies.” I also loved the later essay in the collection titled “A Mess of Clams,” in which Mitchell joins a sloop on its tour around the South Bay beds of New York as it brings in its haul. It's a joy to read how Mitchell, a Southerner and a born pillager of language, picks up the little details of how the clammers talk to each other, how one young man bemoans his “croshaying the mud for six hours [and] barely took enough to get a bait a hook,” or how the captain of his trawler calls clams “better behaved” than oysters. Pairs perfectly with a bowl of chowder, red, white, or splashed with sherry.

The Perfect Bite: We did our best to balance our consumption habits in Ireland, Wales, and London across the colonialist spectrum, eating from both the past empire (plenty of fish and chips, Guinness stew, lamb pie, and full English breakfast—a bit too much of the latter) and its current-day diasporic residents that have made Dublin and London into culinary destinations (we enjoyed spectacular Ethiopian, Indian, Chinese, and West African food on numerous occasions). The conference dining was no less astonishing: meals prepared by acclaimed chefs Kamal Mouzawak, Tara Habis, Simi Rezai-Ghassemi, and (at the last meal I sadly missed), a quartet of astonishingly talented young chefs: Andiswa Mqedlana, Jonas Palekas, Miwoo Jung, and Shannon Compton. Naming each dish would take more time and photo space than I have here, but the meal I’ve thought about most since returning home was the one prepared by Micha Schäfer, who has a commitment to creating sustainable meals through superseasonal, hyperlocal sourcing of ingredients. The meal seemed simple on the surface: communal platters of radishes with lovage, sliced tomatoes with crushed juniper berries, roasted eggplant and sweet peppers, and baskets of good sourdough rye bread with lots of local butter and cheese to go around. It was exactly the kind of food I love most, made simply and honestly and eaten at the peak of its freshness. Maybe it was the wine, the food, or the company, but I could have stayed at that table all night.

Cooked to completion: Despite the amazing eats over the course of our trip, the day we got home, we had the perfect return-to-the-kitchen meal: a big bowl of spaghetti with tomato sauce, and a side of steamed broccoli with a squeeze of lemon. Nick made it, so I can’t take credit, but it felt like exactly what we needed after a week in transit: bare feet under the table, cats hounding us for snuggles, a moment of respite before the return to work. Looking forward to more restorative home cooking this week.