At first glance, I thought that Skye McAlpine’s A Table Full of Love might be some kind of theological work on the Eucharist – or at least a supplementary document to the Synod on Synodality – but then I caught sight of the longer subtitle: “recipes to comfort, seduce, celebrate and everything in between”. Perhaps one for the moral theologians, then, if any of them are on their way to the kitchen.
It is, however, more than a recipe book. McAlpine opens by explaining in her introduction – “Some Thoughts on Love and Food” – that “this is a book about love, the different kinds of love that permeate and underpin our world, that make life richer, more complex, at times more painful, often happier; the kinds of love that ultimately make life worth living”. Her subdivisions are not quite the ones that the nuns taught us about at school.
We called them affection, friendship, romance and charity; years later I learned their proper Greek names of agape, storge, eros and philia. McAlpine studied classics in her youth, and so she provides a few more. She has clearly thought long and deep about them – and even has a doctorate in the love poetry of Ovid – so we soon find ourselves in the hands of an expert in both the language of love and the art of cooking.
McAlpine divides her book into “Comfort”, “Seduce”, “Nourish”, “Spoil” and “Cocoon”. From the other end of the kitchen table, I see the appeal of all of them, and certainly four out of the five remain a regular feature even at the wrinkly stage. Each mood calls for a different set of dishes; they’re all well thought-out, attractively presented and relatively straightforward to make.
I suppose the obvious thing to talk about is the recipes. Mouth-wateringly appealing, I’ve tried several of them with great success. How to choose which ones to praise? Her pasta con panna e piselli was a great hit with our small grandchildren – a cunning way to get them to eat an abundance of green peas – and worked well as a side dish later; orange treacle tart was sublime with some thick crème fraîche.
Date and rosemary soda bread went perfectly with some sharp cheddar, while baked eggs with spinach and gorgonzola almost made me long for the evenings to begin drawing in. Meanwhile, scallops with buttery brandy gratin made for a lovely Friday summer supper treat; we had them with a fresh warm crusty baguette, extra butter, and a cold Chablis.
I know I should write more about the food, but this is more than just a cookbook. McAlpine peppers it with her own thoughts on the philosophy of food and cooking; she made me think through things that I’ve always known, but never really known that I’ve known them, if you see what I mean. “I cook because I enjoy how good it makes me feel to bring people together. I cook because I love the people I cook for.”
This is a book not only for the body, but also for the soul. What is remarkable about McAlpine is that she really understands the human element that surrounds cooking and eating, and the joy of gathering people around a table. Here it sounds theological again: “There’s nowhere I would rather be than sitting at a table full of love.”
She admits that her structure is unconventional, but who cares about that? “The recipes are ordered by mood and sentiment,” she writes. Much more fun and satisfying to cook a meal that suits the general feeling of the household, rather than to follow a prescriptive formula (notwithstanding the days of fasting and abstinence, of course).
Best of all, she puts her finger firmly on the one ingredient without which any meal will be a disaster.
“The real flavour of any dish will always equate to more than the simple sum of its raw ingredients: good food can’t help but taste of the tangle of emotions and memories we collect over a lifetime of eating, cooking and being cooked for.
“And all of those emotions, the most prominent and ever recurring – that feeling we want to hold on to and the magic, intangible ingredient which has a way of making all food taste like you can’t live without it – is love.” Amen to that, I say.
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