A Writer Afoot » the secret of everything

The Lost Art of Family Dinners

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:59:49 +0000

Dinner in Suburbia by Make Less Noise

When I was a child, we ate dinner together nearly every night. I did not necessarily love the whole ritual, especially when my mother made hamburger pie, covered with mashed potatoes, or when I was in trouble for one thing or another (which was a lot), but I can see from this angle that it was a good thing.

Our kitchen was large and we ate there, gathered around the white melamine table with its painted edging of lacy gold leaves. We had assigned seats, mainly because my sister Merry is left-handed, but also because there was sometimes a scuffle over who landed the seat next to my dad. My parents pinned the ends, and I sat between my mother and my sister Cathy (who still jockeys to sit next to my father at all functions). My father would ask, “What was the highlight of YOUR day?” and we’d have to answer.

Supper was rarely anything fancy. Tacos and spaghetti and sometimes a Sunday roast beef, most every meal made from ground beef, which was affordable and stretched over six people. We did eat Hamburger Helper, which honestly didn’t seem that terrible to me, and jello with fruit, green beans from a can (I absolutely despised frozen vegetables) and applesauce from a jar, and sliced wheat bread with margarine to fill up whatever didn’t get full from the main meal. (Four growing teenagers can eat a lot!) When my father worked for awhile at a 7-Up bottling plant, he sometimes brought home six packs of Nehi, but we mostly drank Kool-Aid. (Hey, it was the ’70′s. Nobody had discovered cuisine, at least not in the suburbs.)

We talked, made conversation. Sometimes my father would ask us all to tell the highlight of our day, and we’d moan about it, but it was fun. We talked about everything, and if anyone had a problem, they stayed at the table after dinner to sort it out.

So naturally, when my own children came along, I also created a tradition of dinner at the table. American standbys had shifted a bit by then. Chicken and soups and Mexican food were my standbys, things that wouldn’t burn if I became distracted by my work. We drank milk and iced tea. Again, simple food on a simple rotation, the same 30 meals in endless rotation. In our house, we sat in the dining room with blue walls (light blue for a long time, then a bright, bold deep blue I loved madly), around a heavy wooden table someone gave us early in our marriage. The dogs were banished to the line on the other side of the door, and waited politely to finish. We talked about school, and I asked them sometimes to share the highlight of their day. Somebody would tell a joke. Someone would lodge a complaint.

But it was good.

There has been much made about some (flawed) studies of children and family dinners, and I’m not going to bother with statistics here. I’m an observer, not a social scientist; a curious writer, not a statistician. We don’t need statistics. Our gut knows that this is an important ritual. Time Magazine said it best in this article from 2006:

“There is something about a shared meal–not some holiday blowout, not once in a while but regularly, reliably–that anchors a family even on nights when the food is fast and the talk cheap and everyone has someplace else they’d rather be. And on those evenings when the mood is right and the family lingers, caught up in an idea or an argument explored in a shared safe place where no one is stupid or shy or ashamed, you get a glimpse of the power of this habit and why social scientists say such communion acts as a kind of vaccine, protecting kids from all manner of harm. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200760,00.html#ixzz0gEQfFb8l”

Yet, over and over we read that the family dinner is in decline. There are likely hundreds of reasons. Parents who work long hours to keep the mortgage paid, the decline in cooking skills, fast food, irregular schedules. I suspect, however, that we’ve simply fallen out of practice a bit.

In THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS and THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING, family dinners end up playing a small but crucial part of the narrative. And I’m forced to admit that I believe in it, family dinner, believe that it has the power to cure all kinds of ills and problems. Not everything. Heaven knows family dinners didn’t keep me out of trouble as a rebellious (and obnoxious) teen. They did, however, give me a place to retreat, fall apart, even make reparation by showing up and behaving myself. “Pass the potatoes, please,” and “Does anyone want this last tortilla?” can go a long way to healing rifts.

Family dinners don’t have to look like they do on television. Maybe both mom and dad can’t be at the table. Maybe the family is mom and one child, or dad and his visiting children, or stepfamilies assembled in all their glorious and inglorious incarnations. Maybe it’s even grandpa bring home some chicken and biscuits from the local Kentucky Fried.

The important part is the regular-ish timing of it. It’s the setting of the table and the sitting down to a meal on plates, whether it came out of a bucket or an oven or is peanut butter sandwiches and a glass of milk. It’s the dumb requirements of conversation (What was the highlight of your day? What was one thing that happened today?) and the attempts to be present for each other, even if—as in the Time paragraph—everybody would rather be holed up in their rooms in front of the television.

So, those would be my rules for magical family dinners.

Same time every night
(If evenings don’t work, make family time at breakfast.)
Seven days a week.
Every family member is required to sit at the table unless they have to work (and parents should not use this as an excuse very often. Aim for a time that’s realistic.)
Everybody has to participate even if they think it’s silly.

Bonus points:
Prepare meals from scratch together
Offer a blessing from your tradition over the food before you begin
Aim for one really great meal every week, maybe Saturday evening, and follow with family games or movies.

Triple points for teenagers showing up. I shamelessly used bribery with mine, but you may be more squeamish.

Eat. Talk. Prosper.
—————–
Do you find it difficult to arrange family dinners? What gets in your way? What tricks have you found to help? Did your family eat together?

Playlist for THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING

Barbara Samuel — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:10:25 +0000

I’ve had a good number of requests to post the playlist for THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING, and here it is. I had no idea there was so much music in this book, honestly, but music is always playing in my head (and Tessa’s!), so I suppose it is no big surprise.

I had a soundtrack that kept growing and growing and growing as I worked, and this is most of it. Not all songs showed up on the actual pages, of course. And not all the folk songs have names I know.

Orphan Girl, Emmy Lou Harris

The Garden, Mirah

Dark on Fire, Turin Brakes

Ballad of an Outlaw Woman, Annie McCUe

Our House, Crosby Stills Nash and Young

Deja Vu, CSNY

Helplessly Hoping, CSN

It’s a Beautiful Day, It’s a Beautiful Day

Bombay Calling, It’s a Beautiful Day

Guinevere, CSN

Long as I Can See the Light, Creedence Clearwater Revival

Hanging on a Star, Nick Drak

Chasing Cars, Snow Patrol

Friend of the Devil, Grateful Dead

Truckin’, Grateful Dead

No Sleep Tonight, Faders

Superman, Three Doors Down

Rescue Me, Aretha Franklin

Mother of God, Patty Griffin

Turtle Blues, Janis Joplin

All You Rolling Minstrels, Fairport Convention

Tessa’s List of Happy Artists

Entire Motown List

Beatles

Sound of Music (also Natalie’s favorite)

Kirstly McColl’s Tropical Brainstorm

Cat Stevens, Teaser and the Firecat

I would love to have made you a playlist so you could download the whole thing at iTunes, but I haven’t a clue how to do it.

Pancake kisses, bacon hugs

Barbara Samuel — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:38:14 +0000

THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING is out today! To celebrate, a love song to breakfast.

PANCAKE KISSES, BACON HUGS

Why breakfast is the secret of everything

I suppose I should confess upfront that I am a morning person. I wake up cheery, chatty and at the very first fingers of sunlight creeping over the horizon. I know you find this annoying. I know you wish I’d stop humming under my breath as I crack eggs and start the coffee, but I can’t help it. I was born a singing lark. This does, however, offer benefits to all you blinking owls and sleepy headed in-betweens.

Once upon a time, I had a job working the breakfast shift at an upscale diner. It meant getting up at 4:30 am to creep around the dark of my teeny-tiny house so I wouldn’t wake my roommate. I dressed in my uniform with its plunging neckline (an unfortunate feature of many waitress uniforms of the early 80’s), and braided my Rapunzel hair. In the cold dark, I drove to work in my clunker, feeling—yes, I admit it–smug that I was awake before the rest of the world. Here and there, a light clicked on in a kitchen, but mostly, the world slept on. Porch lights glittered against the velvet blackness of mountains on the horizon, the air was fresh. All was newly reinvented, and it was mine.

At work, I dove into the bustle of getting the place ready for the doors to open. It smelled faintly of cleaning supplies from the night crew, of baking biscuits and potatoes grilling. Every morning, I fell in love all over again with the empty stage of tidy, waiting tables, with the clatter of cooks prepping, and the heat of flatware straight out of the dishwasher. We waitresses made pot after pot after pot of coffee, filled cream pitchers; wiped down syrup dispensers and set out glasses of ice to fill quickly with water. We drank coffee by the gallon ourselves, and snitched bacon when we could get away with it. It made me feel important to create a world of efficiency and nourishment for the hungry humans about to stumble in and beg for coffee.

This passion for breakfast arrived in a roundabout way, I must admit. My mother, who is a very good cook under many circumstances, was born an owl, and she finds early morning painful, especially when her lark child rose well before sunrise and was known to dust siblings with flour or lipstick or explore—well, never mind. It was early, that’s all.

Because she loved us, my mother did manage to get up and fix us breakfast. She believed in a hot breakfast, but cooking anything much would have been dangerous considering her eyes were barely open. So she made hot cereal. Endlessly. Malto-Meal and Ralston, Cream of Wheat and a colorless, gluey oatmeal I loathed with the considerable passion of a toddler foodie. Thankfully, she left us to our own devices once we made it to late grade school and we never had to choke down porridge again.

Not the best circumstances to fall in love with breakfast, I know. The happy accident is that my mother briefly took a job at a manufacturing plant when I was about seven. The other three children went to my grandmother’s house for the day while I stayed home with my father and walked to school on my own.

Once in awhile, my father got dressed and took me to a little café downtown, where there were individual jukeboxes along the counter and at the tables, and we ate pancakes and eggs and tea. We sat at the counter on round stools. I flipped through the jukebox offerings as if I knew what they were while he flirted with the waitresses and they flirted back, and there was usually music playing, and cigarette smoke hanging in the air with heady notes of bacon and coffee and frying onions. I loved the food—little balls of cold butter on top of my French toast, glass pitchers of syrup, tiny tubs of jelly—but mostly I loved the time with my dad, having him all to myself. Afterward, my dad would drop me off at school and I’d head up the stone steps feeling warm and special, a girl who had extraordinary experiences.

I fell in love with breakfast then and there. All good breakfasts, but especially a good café breakfast. And from that love was born a book.

At the heart of my new book, The Secret of Everything, is a restaurant called 100 Breakfasts, where a lark of a woman cooks to heal the hearts and souls of the people in her town.

It is to 100 Breakfasts that the protagonist, Tessa Harlow, comes to explore the questions that have been haunting her. She is heart sore and weary, recovering from a freak accident and trying to find answers to questions that have only just now bobbed to the surface. When she sits down at the long counter at the 100 Breakfasts Café, she unwittingly sets in motion a tangled array of connections and reveals secrets that have been hidden for a long, long time.

It is also at 100 Breakfasts that Tessa gets to know widower Vince Grasso, who is trying to heal his own family, including the troubled Natalie, a 9 year old who takes food very seriously, and is working her way through the entire list of 100 breakfasts on the menu.

The Secret of Everything was born out of my passion for breakfast, for the power it has to heal and renew, to nourish and ground. It’s a book that was born out of those days when I was a child hating oatmeal and loving the French toast at the local café; when I fought with my sisters and the mornings when my father took me out to breakfast, just the two of us, because this is, at the heart of it, a story about fathers and daughters and how that connection can make or break a woman’s spirit. Tessa’s father is nothing like my own, of course, but a father who is devoted to his child gives her permission to be as mighty as she can be.

Ironically, Tessa’s favorite breakfast is oatmeal, because in my adulthood, I learned to love great oatmeal. It is my own breakfast of choice most days. Whole grain oats served with butter and my own spiced apples that are cooked to a deep, dark flavor. Because I am that lark, so smugly and cheerfully alert at the first glimmers of dawn, it falls to me to get up and make the tea and start the coffee so it fills the air with its fragrance. I set the water boiling and set the table with cloth napkins and the good sugar bowl and the milk pitcher. I set the stage for my sleepy headed partner, sometimes a child, to come blinking to the table and fill his belly and drink his coffee.

In this small act, I am offering the most solid secret I know: breakfast is the secret of everything.

Breakfast is love.

What is your favorite breakfast?