How to Make A Happy Meal

The greatest labour of hosting is emotional, feeling up and open and capable of dealing with the needs of those around the table, even dear friends. I admit that sometimes I have used the serving of food as a substitute for talking. You know, when the day of a long-arranged dinner arrives and suddenly, with the exception of serving up something edible or even delicious, you don’t feel able to host, not just at that moment.

A text message about eating together with zero anticipation of success has most often resulted in the best meals of my life. Miraculous occasions when an unforeseen chance opens up to eat and talk talk talk to people who you really need to see are my favourite. I may not have thought about the food in the first instance and rarely remember what it was unless I recorded it. And so it was with Sophie.

After several attempts to organise in advance, both mornings that we shared breakfast were the result of last minute messaging replete with exclamation marks. Breakfast was the time before we both had to be elsewhere. During Sophie’s first visit we talked and ate so lustily that we forgot to pay much attention to the purpose of the breakfast, or perhaps its correct unfolding was beyond our power. Sophie didn’t take many pictures. For both of Sophie’s visits I had also forgotten to buy any special ingredients apart from eggs, which are rarely missing from the scene. 

Eggs are truly my own and eggs made me my own. 

Or, casting off the notion that a genealogy of enduring predilections can only begin at the family table, wonderful though my own was, I only began eating eggs at the age of 21. First I had them mean and hardboiled (they’d have bounced) much like me at that age. I carved them up on slices of tough, chewy rye bread toasted to cardboard bought from Lidl across the road in Berlin and covered them in table salt and black pepper. Over time my eggs turned softer until they are just set and I cannot overstate the role that eggs have played in opening up the kitchen to me. In particular, eggs have been instrumental to my developing a tender way with vegetables and feeling that I have a kind of voice when I cook. When I started to record moments of pleasure at the table a few years ago (with sets of instructions included), I intermittently sub-headed my blog ‘Eggs and things’. There are many iterations of egg with tomatoes in my early recipes and subsequently most vegetables within my reach have met with an egg, especially novel ones. 

So it was nothing out of the ordinary when I made eggs cooked in tomato sauce for Sophie and it was also everything I knew about cooking. Before I found eggs, there was the Marcella Hazan tomato sauce I read in the Guardian in 2006, relayed by one of the founders of the River Café. That recipe had taught me to pay attention to things, each thing.
 

____________________________Poached eggs with monk’s beard (agretti)

Text by Rebecca May Johnson @rebeccamjohnson / https://dinnerdocument.com/

Photography by Sophie Davidson @sophieedavidson / www.sophie-davidson.co.uk