The Fear of Gravy

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.