Cooking to Cook, Vol. 4: Hosting A Meal

This column came about last year, based around the idea of cooking for one’s own pleasure, for the purpose of making mistakes and learning along the way. Though sporadic, like life, this column brings us along on lessons of all kinds, surrounded by memories, seasons, and food we love and love to make. Looking to the festive season, Attic contributor and writer Annie Jo Baker talks holiday gatherings and hosting family.

Photos by Raquel Reyes.

“They just want to keep watch with you through the kneading and risings and baking. They want to be there when it comes out of the oven. They want to be privy to the process of creation.”

Not many media depictions of younger people show them in the kitchen. Their ineptitude at life is a plot point often emphasized by an inability to cook. Maybe this is because they’re often supposed to be “spoiled” upper-middle-class children. Maybe this is because of a gross disconnect between the creators of media and those depicted by that media—the young, supposedly inept millenials who are meant to consume it.

When you announce you’re going to bake bread in the kitchen of your university dorm, shared house, or apartment, people come and sit with you, even if you say you don’t need or want any help. They just want to keep watch with you through the kneading and risings and baking. They want to be there when it comes out of the oven. They want to be privy to the process of creation. People gravitate towards warmth, both literal and metaphorical.

The home kitchen has been where those individuals designated as women have been relegated to, but it’s also, to so many, and to many of those women trapped there, the center of life. Even the kitchen in a university dorm, where I learned to host. A young person’s rediscovery of the kitchen feels like a rediscovery of life itself. Bridget Jones going to bars every night and accidentally making blue bone gelatin doesn’t feel like a representation of what in my experience defines a young adult, even though she’s older than me by almost a decade. A great deal of #relatable content doesn’t feel relatable anymore.

When I was growing up, my family never entertained friends at home. Other than outdoor barbecues, all meals were taken strictly by family—whether biological or legal. In late high school, I started having friends over to my house, and was delighted to realize I could cook for them. Baking had been a hobby for a while, and I’d taken homemade breads, pies, and pastries to potlucks for school events before. Becoming a vegetarian in a family of meat-eaters necessitated I learn how to cook for myself on a regular basis, but hosting a meal in the vein of an archetypal matriarch (as opposed to the slightly different idyll of the socialite housewife) was not something I expected myself to love.

“A young person’s rediscovery of the kitchen feels like a rediscovery of life itself.”

It’s the holiday season, whatever that may mean to you. I for one will be hosting a late Friendsgiving at some point this winter. I’ve hosted or assisted in hosting similar large meals before, and the main goal is to prepare a variety of foods in appropriate quantities, so everyone has something they like and can eat. As delicious as they are, you don’t want to end up with three different types of mashed potatoes (which has happened at Friendsgivings I’ve been to).  As a marked occasion, the key is to provide a larger-than-normal, nutritionally-balanced meal that will leave everyone comfortably full and pleasantly satisfied. Something is being celebrated! Even if it is just the fact that everybody’s schedules finally matched up.

Here are a few more tips if you need guidance in planning a gathering of your own this season:

• If hosting, it is your responsibility to make sure the menu is varied and accessible—a protein (both carnivorous and not, unless a preference is cleared with all guests ahead of time), a vegetable or two, a dessert, and something nice to drink. You don’t have to prepare a massive feast of overindulgence, though keeping some form of medicinal relief on hand is never a bad idea. 

• Ask for allergies and other dietary requirements and restrictions for your guests. 

• If this is a potluck, make a shared online document of who’s bringing what to make sure you don’t get duplicates instead of options for those who need them. Once settled, be sure to follow up a few days in advance so everyone is still on board.

• Aside from a main protein, dishes don’t need to be prepared in massive quantities—the general rule is to plan for 1.5 times the number of servings to guests.

When planning a menu, I would suggest the following:

• Three different vegetables—a starch, a green, and an extra. Make at least one vegan and allergen-free if need be. 

• A starch can be as simple and traditional as mashed potatoes, but adding garlic or other herbs and leaving the skins on will add more flavor and texture. Greens can be a starter salad with in-season leaves, or something more elaborate like cooked collard greens. 

• Your extra side should be something deceptively special but still easy enough; a colorful side someone saw on Instagram, honey-roasted carrots, or a standalone stuffing (regardless of your meat choice—make enough to stuff the bird itself and bake a portion separately for variety).

• If eating meat, I strongly recommend doing some research and seeing what sustainable options you can afford. If you know a licensed wild game hunter, this may be a great opportunity to cook quail, pheasant, or even wild turkey or venison. In areas where human extermination of predators has led to an overpopulation of various prey animals at certain times of year, responsible hunting is necessary to prevent the animals depleting their own natural resources. (A note: quails and pheasants are smaller than you may think, so be sure to get the number you need, roughly 3/4 bird per meat-eater.) If you don’t know a wild game hunter, seek out a local farmer or butcher shop. Do what you can to ensure you know where your meat came from.

• If you don’t eat meat, or are looking to include a meat-free option, a vegan nut roast will keep you within the traditional Western European-style holiday meal, or one of the many holiday variations available from plant-based substitutes on the market. To boost nutritional value, choose protein-heavy vegetables such as lentils or beans as your extra side.

• If you’d like to avoid alternatives altogether, a stuffed, roasted squash (butternut, acorn, etc.) will provide sustenance while remaining on theme.

• Offer your guests two dessert options—something heavy and sweet, like a dense chocolate tart, and something light and fresh, like a very airy loaf cake with fruit and nuts. Make sure at least one of the two conforms to any allergies and other dietary requirements. Everyone deserves a dessert if they want one. 

• Alcohol is a fine choice, but in most cases people will bring a bottle of their preference (you should never have to provide wine at your own party). Focus on having alternatives ready instead. Basics like ginger ale, club soda, and even cola will allow for people to fill their glass without question. For a step up, make sure you’ve got orange juice, grenadine, and plenty of limes on hand too. You never know when you’ll want a mocktail.

And now for bread. This is my own recipe, modified inside my head from a million different challah recipes I’ve found and tried on the Internet. It’s heavy and fluffy, chewy and crumbly. It’s the kind of bread I’ve learned to associate with special occasions, even if those special occasions are sometimes just, ‘I wanted to bake bread.’ I have shaped it into braids to be ripped at with your bare hands, rectangular loaves to be turned into French toast, round boules to be served with pomp and applause. I’ve squished it into shapes of the cast of characters from The Moomins. This is the bread that people expect when I say I’m making bread.

I don’t have the slightest clue of what to expect from life going forward—where I’ll live, what I’ll do, who I’ll be. It’s hard to be with people who appreciate you and not feel like a full person, someone who works, and plans their future, but who doesn’t only work and only plan. Creating is vital. Gathering with family, whatever family they may be, is vital. This is the bread that I’ve made for so many different families of mine—biological, step, adopted, and found. You don’t have to follow this recipe to the letter. Change it, find your own, play around with any recipe and make it for all sorts of people you care about. You don’t even have to be that good at it. You just have to make it.

❅

Everyday Occasion Bread

30 min prep / 2.5 hours proof / 45 min bake

5 tbsp sugar

2.5 tsp dry yeast

1 cup warm water

½ cup warm milk

2 large eggs

1.5 tbsp fine salt

6 cups all purpose flour (+ extra for dusting surfaces)

¼ cup olive oil (+ extra for greasing pan)

• In a small bowl, dissolve one tablespoon of sugar in ½ cup of warm water. Add the dry yeast to the sugar water and set aside, allowing it to foam.

• In a large bowl, dissolve two tablespoons of sugar in the warm milk. Add the foam yeast mixture to the large bowl. Mix gently with a small whisk or fork while adding in the remaining two tablespoons of sugar.

• Continuing lightly, mix in the eggs, salt, and remaining ½ cup warm water.

• Mix in, one cup at a time, 5 cups of flour. (Switch to a wooden spoon if it becomes too difficult around the third cup.)

• Turn the dough onto a floured surface and (with floured hands!!) knead in the sixth cup of flour and a quarter cup of olive oil.

• Cover and allow to rise for an hour and a half. 

• After rising, flatten the dough gently and shape how you want, placing it on a lightly greased pan. 

• Cover and allow to rise for another hour. 

• Preheat your oven to 375 F / 190 C.

• Bake at 375 F / 190 C for 30 minutes, then turn the temperature down to 350 F / 177 C. Bake for an additional 15 minutes or until it sounds hollow when tapped.

• Remove from the pan and allow it to cool before slicing. Enjoy!

Rediscovering the kitchen as the center of my world is rejecting the world of specialists outside of it. It is a rejection of the efficiency planning that overtakes everyday life—choosing to slow down, declaring logic to be illogical when it comes to human experience, and rejoicing in one of the most basic aspects of personhood—the preparation and consumption of food while surrounded by other persons, purely for our own enjoyment. You too, can make your own jam, or bread, or host an entire meal, even if another option sits on a grocery store shelf offering to save you some time and effort.

I think of the Carl Sagan quote: “To bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Read that backwards and perhaps the universe has come into existence so you can bake apple pies from scratch.

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Annie Jo Baker is 23 and lives in Kentucky. They have a myriad of interests, including science, literature, and activism.