Vox Meditantis

What are your family’s top 3 favorite meals?

Friday, 21st November 2025

The recipe card propped against the bowl this evening is a relic from another weather system – Mother’s hand, slanting decisively across yellowed paper, the margins dotted with old butter stains like punctuation. Ginger Biscuits, it declares at the top, no preamble, just imperative verbs and the brisk confidence of someone who learned to feed people in rooms that didn’t forgive hesitation.​

I’d pulled it from the guest-room box on impulse this afternoon, not for any immediate purpose but in that restless Friday-evening way of sorting through things whilst contemplating something larger. Michael rang yesterday, obliquely checking whether I’m “managing the winter descents” with sufficient company. Susan sent a photograph of her youngest attempting a school play, the subtext unmistakable: family happens in rooms together. Even David, with his careful courtesy, mentioned in passing that he’s never tasted my cooking beyond that single risotto evening, the sentence landing like a question he was too polite to complete.​

So there I stood – Friday dusk, harbour light doing its pewter-and-amber theatre through the Victorian windows – holding Elizabeth’s card and realising I was designing a menu for a gathering that doesn’t yet exist, something that might bring Michael and Susan here in a fortnight or so, perhaps that first December weekend, braiding three generations without any of us quite noticing the ambition.​

Which Meals Are Actually Ours?

The question beneath the flour and the careful measurements is less comfortable than it sounds: which of these dishes genuinely feel like “ours,” and which belong to the personas I’ve spent decades performing? Competent hostess who can produce risotto on cue. Dutiful daughter who remembers Mother’s recipes as acts of filial devotion. Un-needy sister who feeds people to prove she hasn’t entirely retreated into her consulting-room hermitage.​

This matters more than it should, perhaps, but I’ve spent the past months attempting small experiments in ordinary courage – saying yes to watercolours with wrong brushes, booking Québec without an excuse, letting David see me less than fully assembled – and food has become another frontier where performance and presence keep negotiating terms.​

Mother’s Audacity, Refined Into Something Shareable

The first meal that feels genuinely ours – mine and the family I’m slowly learning to feed without armour – is the lemon-fennel risotto I made for David that October evening when Bartók and dishwater became a kind of secular liturgy. But that dish carries a longer pedigree than a single Thursday.​

Mother’s Nevada cooking was all brightness and improvisation – her risotto was really a brave, imprecise pilaf, sharp with lemon zest and the audacity of someone who trusted people to help her get the technique right. She cooked the way she moved through the world: leap first, adjust mid-air, laugh at the wobble. In our New Corinth kitchen, with the radio crooning standards and card games murmuring in the next room, she’d zest lemons with theatrical enthusiasm, toss in whatever looked promising at Elena’s, and declare the whole enterprise an adventure. The rice was sometimes crunchy, the stock occasionally ambitious in its seasonings, but the spirit of those meals – generous, undefended, alive – taught me something clinical training never quite managed: that nourishment is as much about atmosphere as technique.​

What I make now is Elizabeth’s leap translated into Joseph’s steadiness. I’ve learned the proper rhythm – ladle, stir, wait, listen – until the wooden spoon leaves a brief wake that closes like the harbour after a skiff. Arborio instead of whatever was cheapest, Carnaroli when I’m feeling brave, stock that I’ve actually simmered rather than reconstituted from a cube. Fennel for its quiet anise insistence, bay shrimp from Elena’s counter, lemon zest that lifts the whole line by a half-step without announcing itself.​

It’s become the dish I make when I want someone to feel safe – when I’m attempting welcome without performance, when the table matters more than my credentials. I served it to David that first time with my heart in my throat, and he laughed, low and surprised, at how something so patient could taste so alive. That’s the meal I’d make for Michael and Susan when they visit, for my nieces and nephews learning that Aunt Catherine has a kitchen as well as a consulting room. Mother’s brightness, refined into something I can offer without flinching.​

Father’s Steadiness, Served on Winter Evenings

The second meal belongs more properly to winter, though November has been making persuasive arguments for its early arrival. Father’s cooking was the opposite of Mother’s improvisations – shepherd’s pie assembled with municipal precision, stews that simmered with the patience of a man who drove the same routes for forty years and understood that some things cannot be rushed.​

He never called it “cooking,” exactly – more “making sure everyone gets fed,” the same practical ethic he brought to his bus schedules and his careful attention to whether passengers had made it safely to their seats. But what he produced, especially in the lean years after the shipyard troubles, had a dignity that I’ve only recently learned to name: food as the promise that tomorrow will come, and we will still be here to meet it.​

His shepherd’s pie was architecture – lamb browned properly, vegetables softened without surrendering their shape, stock that tasted of bones and time, mashed potatoes that crowned the whole enterprise with the sort of modest authority that could, as Jenny once said, “steady a listing marriage.” I watched him make it on winter Saturdays, his hands moving with the same quiet competence he brought to route schedules and broken door hinges, and absorbed the lesson underneath: that feeding people is a form of showing up, unglamorous and necessary.​

I make his shepherd’s pie now when New Corinth’s nerves feel thin – after the sort of week when too many patients arrive with the same haunted look, when the town’s fabric seems to fray at the edges, when the harbour wind carries more than weather. It’s not flashy cooking, but it doesn’t need to be. The smell alone – savoury, patient, unapologetic – announces that someone is tending to the ordinary work of care. I imagine serving it to Michael and Susan on a December evening, perhaps with Father Walsh if he’s still here and not yet claimed by Wilmington, certainly with David, whose hands would volunteer for dish duty with that peculiar integrity he brings to small domestic labours.​

The meal says what my father rarely did in words: I’m here, you’re here, the table will hold.​

A New Language, Still Being Written

The third meal isn’t quite formed yet – more aspiration than recipe, the kind of dish that lives in the category labelled “family in formation” rather than “family inherited.” This one belongs to the tentative grammar David and I are learning together, the syntax of chosen people at a current table rather than inherited obligation.​

It might be something as simple as pasta – cacio e pepe made in tandem, his careful hands grating the pecorino whilst I watch the pasta water with the vigilance usually reserved for difficult transferences, both of us learning that kitchens can be companionable rather than solitary. Or a soup assembled on a Saturday when neither of us has anywhere urgent to be – white beans and rosemary, perhaps, or something with roasted tomatoes and stale bread, the sort of forgiving recipe that allows for conversation between the chopping and the stirring.​

What matters less than the specific dish is the practice underneath: letting someone else stand at my counter without needing to choreograph their movements, accepting that “family” can mean the people who show up on Thursdays and stay for washing-up, discovering that a meal made in company tastes different than one produced in capable isolation.​

I’m not there yet – not quite. But I’m working toward it with the same patient attention I bring to risotto: one small step at a time, trusting that repetition eventually becomes invitation, that ordinary intimacy is built from exactly these sorts of domestic experiments.​

Closing: An Actual Invitation

So here’s the small act of courage for this Friday evening: I’m going to ring Michael this weekend and suggest he and Susan come for that first December weekend – the sixth and seventh, if they’re free. Guest room chaos and all, Victorian radiators that clank like determined ghosts, the whole imperfect apparatus of my actual life rather than the tidy consultation I usually offer. I’ll make the shepherd’s pie because it speaks my father’s language of reliability, and perhaps the risotto too because Mother would approve of feeding people with a bit of theatre.​

And I’ll ask David whether he’d like to bring something of his own – not because my menu needs supplementing, but because “family” might be precisely this: a table where everyone contributes, where the meal itself becomes a small parliament of chosen presence rather than obligatory performance.​

The recipe card sits propped against the bowl, butter-spotted and patient. Tomorrow or Sunday I’ll make the call, extend the invitation, and begin the quiet work of preparing not just a menu but a welcome. Outside, the harbour is settling into its November blue, and somewhere between the ginger biscuits I might attempt in the coming days and the careful work of setting extra places, I’m learning that the most nourishing meals are the ones we make room for – plural pronouns, modest courage, and all.​

Catherine

---

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