Vox Meditantis

What food would you say is your specialty?

Thursday, 23rd October 2025

The prompt arrives like all instructions worth following: simple on the surface, impossibly layered beneath.

A pan announces itself – that particular sizzle of brown butter meeting heat, rain on tin, small thunder in a quiet kitchen. Outside, harbour fog lifts with the ecclesiastical patience of incense clearing after mass, and the lemon on the cutting board releases its oil under the knife – bright, clean, a bell note that cuts through autumn’s perpetual grey.

What food would you say is your specialty?

At dawn, Father Walsh asks it differently: what would you cook if you were cooking for someone to feel safe? The answer arrives before thought, which is how the best answers tend to come – lemon-fennel risotto, harbour-style, with bay shrimp from Elena’s and a thread of olive oil that smells faintly of green hills and old vows. It’s the dish that forgives impatience and rewards attention, the culinary equivalent of a fifty-minute hour: one ladle at a time, one breath, one stir, until starch yields to silk and the room softens.

Naming the Inheritance

By eight, Marcus has the grinder humming – that small jet engine of mercy – and Jenny slides into the chair opposite with her librarian’s conspiratorial grin, a scarf the colour of quince. She asks, deadpan, if my “speciality” is still “austere salads with a side of professional restraint”.

I confess the truth: lemon-fennel risotto with shrimp; a romesco I could argue in court; and, in winter, shepherd’s pie that could steady a listing marriage. She approves, in that benevolent-headmistress way she’s perfected since Mrs Harper’s classroom, and says her grandmother would have called risotto a “reliable temperament test” – rush and you scorch it; attend and you’re rewarded.

Mid-morning, a note from Maggie at the Historical Society lands with the inevitability of tide: would I consider adding a family recipe to the oral history project, with a paragraph about where it came from and who it fed? I think of Mother’s Nevada kitchen, card games in the next room and the radio crooning standards, her “risotto” which was really a brave, imprecise pilaf, bright with lemon zest and the audacity of someone who trusted people to help her get the technique right.

Market as Testimony

At Moretti’s, the air smells of tomatoes that remember summer and the sharper perfume of Parmigiano rinds, clean as a bell tower in snow. Elena taps the rice sack like a piano teacher – Arborio is fine, but try Carnaroli if you want elegance that forgives distraction – and slips a heel of cheese into the bag “for research”. The fennel bulbs wear a dusting of soil like freckles; their fronds smell like a liquorice shop owned by a kind aunt.

At the fish counter, the shrimp are curled commas, translucent and cold as pocketed quartz. Outside, the harbour wind brings tar, rope, and a clean metallic tang that always feels like the city telling the truth about itself – work and weather, both.

The Rhythm of Attention

Afternoon sessions pass in their modest heroism – small rearrangements of courage, grief laid out like clean linen, the patient alchemy of attention. At half-five, sleeves rolled, the kitchen becomes a study in patience that smells of toast and orchard.

Butter foams, then quiets. Shallot softens to translucence. Fennel surrenders its crunch for sweetness. The rice goes in dry and chatty, every grain clicking like abacus beads, then wine hushes it with a sigh, and the first ladle of stock turns arithmetic into music.

There is the rhythm: ladle, stir, wait; ladle, stir, listen – until the wooden spoon leaves a brief wake that closes slowly, like the harbour after a skiff passes. Lemon zest lifts the whole line by a half-step; parsley confetti at the end suggests celebration without insisting on one. The shrimp go in last, pinking quietly, like a private blush.

Company Without Ceremony

David arrives with a bottle whose label is both modest and promising, a mutual friend from Dan’s shop having steered him true. He has the look of someone who dressed, undressed, and dressed again – an endearing earnestness that lives somewhere between adolescent and courtly.

We eat at the small table that looks onto the harbour – the risotto loose enough to ripple, glossy as late light on water, lemon cutting through richness the way a clarinet line threads Bartók’s thickets. The first spoonful is silk and salt and a whisper of anise, the shrimp sweet as if they’d been told good news.

He laughs – low, surprised – at the fennel’s soft insistence, and admits he once thought risotto was grandstanding when, in truth, it’s humility performed well.

We walk the block to the church hall for the concert, coats open to a wind that smells of rain thinking about it. Inside: varnish, wool, and the faint ecclesiastical dust that means choirs have lived here. Bartók does what he does – carves the evening into facets of ache and wit – and somewhere in the slow movement something in my chest unknots with the clean logic of stock absorbing into starch.

On the way back, a light drizzle stipples the pavement. He volunteers dish duty with the integrity of a man who understands that romance is made of small labours and mutually respectful tea towels.

What Food Is For

If the question is about recipes, then yes: lemon-fennel risotto with bay shrimp; winter shepherd’s pie deliberate enough to be trustworthy; a romesco that persuades even sceptical vegetables to present themselves well.

But if the question is about what food is for – safety, welcome, the elegant ritual of tending – then the speciality is attention. The steady, humane work of stirring whilst someone tells the day’s story; tasting, adjusting, offering the next ladle at the pace they can absorb; stopping, at last, whilst it is still a little looser than seems prudent, trusting carryover warmth to finish what heat began.

It is, admittedly, the same craft practised in the consulting room, made edible.

Archive Note

I wrote Maggie a paragraph before bed: “Maternal line: Nevada brightness, improvised pilaf. Paternal line: municipal steadiness, routes run on time. Combined here: Arborio and patience; lemon and risk; fennel and forgiveness. Served to neighbours, a man with careful hands, and the self who is learning to be fed as well as to feed.”

Folded the recipe card into an envelope that smells faintly of Parmigiano and citrus, and left it on the hall table beside the watercolour kit – a small, edible testimony that some inheritances can be cooked into kindness and eaten warm.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.