How I Eat and Drink on Purpose
10 personal rituals!
Hello and happy Mother’s Day! My mom is in Vermont, soaking up the sun, walking in the woods, and snuggling her dog, which makes me so glad. I’m with Teo’s family for the weekend, and we’re seeing Gillian Welch in concert tonight! All is well with us.
In today’s Dish, you’ll find a list of food and drink-related rituals I find beautiful — and that I implement in my life. This list began as a musing on setting the table (see #1), which Teo and I make a point of doing despite our mismatched kitchenware and the all-around mid-twenties state of our apartment and lives. But then I kept writing and discovered a whole set of pre-existing rituals in my life that give eating and drinking meaning.
Thank you for reading, and I welcome your comments and responses as always!
1. Setting the Table
Although Teo and I by no means have a fancy dining room (or a dining room, for that matter), we do have a kitchen-adjacent dining table that we share with our roommates. Our collection of plates, silverware, glasses, and mugs is eclectic — the classic ragtag kitchen of four twenty-somethings still toting around the domestic paraphernalia given to them for free when they got their first kitchen in college.
We’re only now getting the itch to replace our chipped, uncoordinated kitchenware with intact, maybe even matching (!) items, and so our gradual upgrade process has begun. A stainless steel skillet to replace a non-stick pan that had become decidedly stick-prone after many a college stir-fry. A set of periwinkle East Fork mugs to replace the “Future is Female” mug that now says the “Fut i Fe” and other mugs of unknown origin, equally worn. We’ve also accumulated a small collection of cloth napkins and candlesticks, and I now ask for taper candles for my birthday, which feels very adult of me.
Neither our lack of dining room nor the in-between state of our kitchenware prevents us from setting the table. Almost every night that Teo and I eat at home together (which is often), we set the table. It’s minimal: just cloth napkins, silverware, plates, water glasses, wine glasses if we’re drinking, and a candlestick or two with my favorite chubby beeswax tapers. It only takes two minutes, and doesn’t look particularly elegant, but it feels dignified, and has become a ritual.
(To cosplay as an influencer, I started a Shop My page where you can find links to my favorite things and those that I’m eyeing. Click here for a shelf I made with kitchenware, if you’d like to see.)
2. Lighting Candles
As mentioned above, I light one or two candles at the dinner table nearly every time we eat at home (even if I’m dining solo!). This is for the ritual of it all, and because candlelight is the most beautiful light — hazy and warm.
Despite this habit, we don’t actually race through candles. This is because, at the end of the day, we are American and not French, and dinner is a brief, one-course, one-plate affair — which means that the candles are lit for only twenty or thirty minutes on an average night. A sustainable habit!
3. Cooking Family Recipes
A personal obsession. My late paternal grandmother meticulously organized her beloved recipes in binders, for which I’m eternally grateful. There, I can find the recipe for Viv’s rice, rich with tomato and heavy cream, and for silky linguine with white clam sauce, and of course for pots de crème au chocolat — a dinner party favorite. Teo’s maternal grandmother, with whom I was lucky to spend many a Sunday dinner before her passing, was a similarly excellent and prolific cook — famous for blueberry cake, pasta with red sauce, and gingerbread — with a dog-eared copy of Fannie Farmer always close at hand. These culinary matriarchs are my cooking heroes, and I like to keep their recipes in rotation — in their memory, but also because they’re just really good recipes.
4. Aperitivo/Aperitif à la New York
Nobody aperitivos/aperitifs like the Italian and French, but in New York, we do know our way around a post-work drink. Although the drinking culture in New York can get out of hand, I admit that I love the feeling of meeting someone at a bar after a long, manic city day and settling in for a drink and a bite. I met up with a new friend (hi,
!❣️) at Cellar 36 recently, and we had so much to talk about that a drink turned into two drinks, and we ended up ordering enough snacks that it turned into dinner. Back in Brooklyn, Teo and I frequently go to Threes Brewing in Gowanus with our portable backgammon set, and when our roommates are free, we visit our local watering hole (the dive bar around the corner) for cheap beer and free popcorn. Can any of these experiences be considered aperitivo/aperitif? I’m not sure, but there’s definitely a through line: connective early evening rituals that we look forward to after long days.
5. Sunday Lunch
It’s a rare luxury, but I love a long, lazy Sunday lunch that overtakes the day. It’s fun to go out, but the best Sunday lunch is at home, with a table full of your favorite people.
6. Morning Coffee
A morning coffee must be among the most widespread rituals, and it’s one I treasure. Lately, I’ve been enjoying a decaf or half-caf cappuccino at home, courtesy of Teo; and then, when I arrive at my office, I pick up a free drip coffee at the café there in my to-go mug, which I sip slowly until lunch. I’ve had so many cups of their drip coffee that I’ve become habituated to it and thus crave the taste. Plus, the staff there knows now that I am Phoebe with the to-go mug who gets a drip coffee with whole milk — and it gives me great satisfaction to feel known.
I love the idiosyncrasies of people’s coffee rituals (maybe there’s a Dish there??), like my friends Hannah and Alex who make a French press of decaf and serve it with local milk and a comically large glass jug of maple syrup to glug into your mug.
7. Eating with the Calendar
Compared to the hyper-seasonal cooking at Ballymaloe Cookery School and the Rome Sustainable Food Project, I feel like I don’t cook seasonally at all, but I do try to lean into the calendar and eat what’s good, when it’s good. In the spring, I freak for artichokes and sweet English peas, and in the summer, tomatoes and basil dominate a considerable portion of my brain space. In the fall and winter…let’s just say I do my best. I certainly think that seasonal cooking and eating are admirable endeavors, and that the ritual of inviting new ingredients into your life as they come into season and bidding them farewell when their time is over is a beautiful thing.
8. Baking and Listening
Baking while listening to a podcast is one of the most effective methods I’ve found to get out of my head when my thoughts start spiraling. Both activities require concentration, but different kinds of concentration, so you can double up and enjoy the departure from your own mania.
A few recipes I recommend:
And a few podcasts:
Good Hang, Amy Poehler’s new serotonin-inducing podcast, which comes out on Tuesdays and makes me the weird person stifling a laugh on my morning subway ride to the office amidst grumpy commuters.
Telepathy Tapes, which made me question everything and believe what I thought was impossible! (Not to be dramatic or anything…)
Home Cooking, Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway’s charming podcast, offering creative ideas for home cooks and musings on food
9. Celebrating with Cake
On the baking note, I think that making someone a birthday cake is one of the most endearing human rituals, full stop. I don’t know who declared that we’d make each other sweet, fluffy cakes to celebrate each other’s existence, but I suspect I’d like that person very much. I recently made a cake for friends, not for a birthday but for a spring picnic, and it was such an enjoyable experience — baking two layers of Victoria sponge, whipping cream, roasting rhubarb with sugar to make a compote, assembling it all at the picnic table, and diving in.
10. Eating Spicy Cumin Lamb Noodles…Alone
Let’s end with a silly but critical ritual. I’ve written about this recently, but it’s worth repeating: eating Sichuan spicy cumin lamb noodles alone in New York is a tenet of my sanity and a ritual of the highest order. I hope you have a similar solo dish.
Thank you for reading! More soon.
x Phoebe
Love this. I also love setting the table and can’t start making dinner until I’ve set the table. Kind of the gastronomical version of sharpening my pencil before writing?! Rituals are so soothing, and I also love my cuppa java and book-reading first thing in the morning when the birds are chirping and the kids are still asleep!
About to go put a pot of decaf on🤓❣️