I have learned a few things in my first year of
marriage. Some I expected to learn: how
Superhusband likes his coffee, how to do twice the laundry in the same amount
of time, how to call my mother in law by her first name and not feel like a
creep—you know, the usual. I have also
learned some things I never expected: how it feels to walk into a room and have
no interest in how many of the men in
it are single (what a relief, I must say), how to drive on a corrugated road
made of sand and vibration, how to correctly interpret the British names for
car parts in casual conversation, etc. One thing, however, which has surprised
even worldly and jaded me was how I have developed a very acute cooking
phobia. I am terrified of making gravy.
Let me place a few caveats on that before all of you run to
your Southern mammas and get my heritage revoked. I’m not speaking of the lovely, rich,
sausage-filled, milk gravy that goes with biscuits. Nor is it the Red-Eye for grits, the Giblet
for turkey, or the non-sausage-filled poor-man’s gravy made from the bacon
grease remainders, flour, and water, and best served with loads of black
pepper. No, my friends, for these I have
allegiance and affection—these gravies are for specific purposes and are
formulated to pair with humble, accessible foods. I am speaking of English gravy. English gravy is ubiquitous, occurring with
every meal involving a meat-n-three (which in my experience with English
cooking becomes a meat-n-SIX.) It is as if this substance is the primordial
ooze from which the British Isles rose and all its inhabitants must feed upon
it to sustain their power over under-industrialized nations. It is made with
broth or stock, and each English individual has their own proportions and array
of condiments with which to further flavor it.
It can be made from a packet, though this route is most often scorned.
The scorn, however, is not limited to packet usage. There
are SO many things which can go wrong with the relatively few elements of
gravy. First there is the roux (it strikes me as odd that the English would use
a French word as a basis for their most-loved sauce.) The fat (in most cases
butter) melts over medium heat in a sauce pan. Don’t add the flour too soon, or
it will clump, ruining the finished product unless one is prepared to spend
much time with a sieve; or too late, or the butter will over-brown and start to
smoke. After a smooth paste is hopefully achieved, one must add the
broth, not too much and not too little. The broth must come from a reputable
brand, Oxo being the Australian best. If one uses an inferior stock the whole
effect could be lost. Best to use two cubes per batch, dissolved in 1-2 cups of
boiling water. If you have made it this far, you have done well. But you are not done. Now the array of condiments must be chosen:
tomato sauce (think ketchup, but not) for sweetness, Worcestershire for tang,
salt to supplement a weak stock cube, barbecue sauce for smokeyness, black
pepper for depth, red pepper or chili pepper for heat, and any number of herbs
and spices. If you would like an onion
or mushroom variety, you’re too late.
You SHOULD have sautéed them in the butter at the beginning, and adding
them now will not do. And this gravy has
to be good, for it will be ladled onto every item on the dinner plate, from
sweet potatoes to stuffing. So
basically, if you mess up the gravy, you’ve messed up the meal.
This is where the fear has its root. I have always considered myself a good cook.
One who has a reasonable idea of what goes together on a plate. My first mistakes
in this marriage cooking-odyssey sprung from not having gravy present at all,
because, really, I viewed it as a breakfast condiment or for holidays and
Sunday roasts. Then, when Superhusband impressed upon me that it is an absolute
necessity, I was left to experiment a bit, having only my American background
from which to draw. Obviously I do not
come from an imperialist enough culture to fully grasp gravy’s complexities, so
my experiments did not always satisfy.
But just ruining a meal or two is not enough to produce such fear—the
plot thickens. Living, as Superhusband and I do, almost exclusively with members of each others’ families,
it means that those experiments become testing grounds for family identity. In a “normal” marriage, the husband and wife,
in relative solidarity, hammer out the details of week-night dinners in a trial
and error fashion, deciding which they like and which to scrap. Not so for us. Making dinner usually means making a family
meal, and making a family meal means risking indigestion (or worse, utter
disgust) of more than two people at a time.
Even the suggestion of making the meal involves numerous negotiations: “What
time? Who can be there? What meat? How is it to be cooked? Does everyone like
Brussels sprouts? You won’t put honey in the marinade again, will you?
So-and-so doesn’t eat that.” You get the
idea. These are all convoluted
renditions of the same question…”Are you like us?” And when you find yourself a
new wife in an in-law situation, the answer to that question has very high
stakes indeed.
Those high stakes (in my mind) have recently struck me as a
mirror for Christian fellowship. So many of our metaphors surrounding
fellowship involve “table” language that I’m surprised this hasn’t hit me
before. (To some of you this might be
old news, but I have been enjoying my present ruminations on the topic.) As a
member of the church of Christ, I “meet around the Lord’s table” every Sunday
of my life. We have potlucks, pitch-ins, bring-a-plate dinners, picnics, and
Holy Communion which constantly and beautifully knit our physical feeding with
the spiritual feeding. Here in Perth I
have found, to my delight, that most congregations offer free (or very cheap)
tea, coffee and snacks after every Sunday service so everyone has this very
important chance for face time after worship. And it’s completely Biblical.
Jesus himself sets the standard in a way so revolutionary,
yet so taken-for-granted in my Pharisaical mind. Many times in the New
Testament He is seen “eating with tax collectors and sinners.” I’ve always
thought, “Why is everyone so scandalized?
The Guy’s got to eat, and we’re ALL sinners.” But I forget that a great
number of the population at the time did not think they were sinners, or if
they did, they sacrificed a dove or something and got sin out of their way. And
I had never contextualized the whole sharing-a-table thing until recently. I’ll tell you how it happened.
Superhusband and I went to the Perth Royal Show which is
like a state fair on steroids. It began
as an agricultural exhibition, and has grown to a festival of mass proportions.
While there, we stopped to have a snack in one of the crowded corners of a side
street where there was a picnic table half-occupied by an Indian family. We sat down to occupy the other half, and
before I knew it, I was watching out for this woman’s children. I did not know them. We never exchanged a word. But because of the mere act of sitting at the
same table, I felt a strange obligation to at least be aware of where her three
children wandered in the small courtyard. Then some beautiful, brown, exotic
early-twenty-something couples sauntered up and sat down across from us. THEN I
felt like the ugly step-sister among three Cinderellas and their princes. And I wanted them to behave nicely in front
of the little children who were now part of my family.
This is what Holy Communion IS. We sit around the same table. We look out for each other’s children. We are
saying, in a very real and spiritual sense, “I am one of yours.” For early
Christians this was a tad more jarring than I feel it is today. It was more like sitting around my in-laws’
table with a steaming plate of meatloaf—a dish they had NEVER had. Early Christians must have looked at each
other with the same kind of anticipation, the same kind of wonderment and
high-stakes anxiety. The “partaking
together” was not always a foregone conclusion.
For them, eating with a group of _________ (Jews/Greeks/Pagans/Idol-worshippers)
could get them killed.
As if to sum up this whole eating-with-you-makes-you-family,
one of the last times Christ is with his apostles before the ascension is on a
beach, feeding them fish. In John
21:1-14, seven of the twelve went out fishing on the Sea of Tiberius. They
caught nothing until Christ hailed them from the shore and had them throw out
their nets one more time. The catch was
no short of amazing: “153 large fish” we are told—don’t you just love God’s eye
for detail? And when they catch them and
realize that it’s Jesus, they haul their nets to shore in a frenzy and are met
with a campfire and the face of their Saviour saying “Come and have breakfast.”
Therefore, that feeling of “Come have breakfast” and of “sit
at my table” is the feeling I want to carry with me into Communion each
week. I want to look around the
gathering, however big, small, familiar, or one-time-visited it is, and think
about Jesus personally offering all of His family a big helping of “you fit
in.” And it will bring me even more joy to know that this Communion is a mere
non-fictional puppet-show of what WILL happen in heaven. We will bring our
different gifts to the table and make the biggest potluck the universe has ever
seen. And you’ll know which dish is
mine—it’ll be the one with perfect gravy.
