The Generosity of Simple Food

There is generosity in serving something simple without apology.

A bowl of soup with bread.

Tomatoes sliced onto a plate with salt and olive oil.

A piece of fish, a handful of potatoes, lemon cut into wedges.

A cake that has sunk slightly in the middle.

Fruit carried to the table in the bowl it was already sitting in.

I think we have somehow learned to believe that feeding people requires explanation. That if a meal is uncomplicated, we should account for it.

I didn’t have much time.

It’s only something simple.

I hope this is enough.

As though the table were waiting to judge us.

But perhaps one of the loveliest things we can offer another person is a meal that does not need defending.

Sit down.

There is bread.

There is soup.

Eat.

There is something wonderfully assured about this kind of hospitality. Not grand confidence, but the quieter kind that comes from understanding that care is not always measured in courses.

Sometimes it is measured in whether there is enough bread to pass around twice.

Whether someone remembered you like the crisp end of the loaf.

Whether the water is cold.

Whether the tomatoes were left on the kitchen bench long enough to taste of something.

Whether another chair can be pulled to the table without anybody making a fuss.

I have eaten meals that must have taken hours to prepare and meals that were assembled in the time it took to slice a peach.

I remember both.

But it is often the simpler tables that stay with me.

Perhaps because there is less between the people sitting around them.

On a complicated table, the food can sometimes become the event. We admire it. Ask how it was made. Talk about ingredients and techniques.

At a simple table, the food has another job.

It allows the conversation to become the event.

There is a particular ease to sitting with someone while tearing bread into pieces and dragging it through the last of the olive oil on a plate. Nobody is performing. Nobody is keeping track of whether dinner has been impressive enough.

You begin talking about something else entirely.

A place you once lived.

A person you miss.

Something you are considering doing.

A child who is worrying you.

A journey you keep imagining.

Meanwhile the bread disappears.

The tomatoes leave little pools of pink juice across the plate.

Someone gets up to make coffee.

This, too, is hospitality.

Perhaps especially this.

I think of the meals encountered while travelling that have made the greatest impression on me. They are rarely the elaborate ones.

A piece of grilled fish beside the Atlantic.

Bread and cheese eaten from paper after walking through a market.

A bowl of soup in a small restaurant where nobody seemed particularly interested in making the soup famous.

Figs placed on a plate.

Coffee poured into a thick white cup.

There is an honesty to food that knows what it is.

A ripe tomato does not require much ambition.

Neither does good bread.

Or an orange eaten slowly at the end of lunch.

We can interfere with beautiful ingredients until they begin to look as though they have something to prove. And sometimes, of course, there is pleasure in that too. Cooking can be invention and theatre and celebration.

But it can also be recognition.

This is good.

Let us eat it.

There are evenings at home when dinner is not the dinner I imagined earlier in the day.

Plans shrink.

Energy changes.

Someone arrives later than expected.

The refrigerator offers fewer possibilities than optimism had suggested that morning.

And so dinner becomes bread toasted with olive oil. Eggs. Tomatoes. Leftover vegetables. Perhaps fruit afterwards.

For years, I think I carried a small instinct to apologise for these meals.

As though somewhere there existed a more accomplished version of me who would have made something else.

Something requiring several pans.

Something with a proper name.

Something worthy of being called dinner.

But the people I love rarely seem disappointed by toast.

They are mostly pleased that food has appeared.

And over time I have begun to understand that the apology diminishes something.

Because when we say it’s only soup, we are not really describing the soup.

We are describing the value we have attached to our effort.

Only soup.

Only bread.

Only fruit.

And yet these are foods people have been placing before one another for centuries.

Perhaps the better sentence is simply:

There is soup.

It is warm.

Come and have some.

There is a kind of abundance that has very little to do with quantity.

A table can contain three things and feel generous.

Bread.

Olives.

A bowl of something made from what was in the garden.

Generosity comes from the spirit in which they are offered.

Take more.

There is plenty.

Stay.

We can open another bottle.

I’ll make coffee.

These are some of the oldest forms of kindness I know.

And perhaps the most reassuring thing about them is their ordinariness.

Hospitality does not have to wait for the house to be clean or the menu to be planned or the right plates to be found.

It can begin exactly where we are.

With what we have.

A friend can arrive unexpectedly and there can still be dinner.

A child can bring someone home and another plate can still appear.

Someone can sit at the kitchen table looking tired and we can still cut an apple, make toast, put the kettle on.

This is how food becomes more than food.

Not through complexity.

Through attention.

Through noticing that somebody is hungry.

Through putting something in front of them without making them feel they have created work.

Perhaps that is the true generosity of simple food.

It asks very little of the person receiving it.

There is no need to admire.

No need to compliment.

No sense that the cook has spent all afternoon waiting for approval.

You are simply allowed to eat.

To take another piece of bread.

To mop the plate clean.

To linger.

I would like more tables like this.

Tables where the food is beautiful because it is good rather than because it has been arranged to appear so.

Where a loaf can remain on its wooden board.

Where peaches can be served whole.

Where the olive oil bottle can stay on the table.

Where nobody feels the need to explain that dinner is simple tonight.

Because simple is not the absence of generosity.

Sometimes it is its purest expression.

Something good.

Enough of it.

A place at the table.

And no apology at all.