Keepers of the Flame

A couple of weeks ago, Katherine and I spent an afternoon pasting hexagonal post-it notes on a large conference room wall at her office in San Francisco. On each hexagon (see examples in the photo) we wrote the name of a recipe or a story that has appeared on my blog since the middle of May. It was quite an impressive collection. We sorted the recipes by appetizer, soup, main dish, etc. and the stories by a more complicated system. Our purpose was threefold: to see what I had done in these last nine months, to look for any holes which I might want to fill in the next stretch of time, and to ponder the question of how to turn this blog into cookbook. We didn't get very far on this last issue except to determine that I still want to create a cookbook.

Here are the stats on what’s appeared: 7 appetizers, 4 soups, 23 main dishes, 18 salads, 7 salad dressings, 6 grains/starches, 10 vegetables sides, 5 relishes, 6 desserts, and 8 baked goods. The main dishes broke down as follows: 4 chicken, 1 beef, 3 ground meats, 3 pork, 2 shrimp, 7 vegetarian, and 3 pasta. No fish. So starting today with three nice warming winter soups, I’ll be filling in some of the missing pieces.

But something more important bubbled to the surface that afternoon.
“Keepers” for me has always referred to the fishing term. Keepers are the fish you keep to eat. Everything else gets returned to the pond. The recipes I give you are the ones I love the most. Recipes worth keeping.
But there is another meaning as well.

Those of us who cook regularly, who buy produce and raw meat, who chop and sauté, who dish out steaming bowls of home-made soup are “keepers” of a cooking tradition. Not unlike Ancient Rome’s Vestal Virgins who tended the sacred flame of Vesta, the goddess of hearth and home, and prepared food for rituals necessary for the health and well-being of Rome, we cooks, male and female, moms and dads, standing at our stoves, are keepers of the flame. Sitting with our loved-ones at a table over a home-cooked meal, we too tend to the health and well-being of our friends, our families and ourselves.

In my darkest moments, I worry that we keepers of the hearth may cease to exist. After one or two more generations of families with no one cooking in the kitchen (will houses cease to have kitchens?) and with the food industry doing everything it can to process our food for us and pumping it full of cheap ingredients that make us fat or fatter, what is the future for the home-cooked meal, made from real ingredients that nourish and sustain? Who will teach the next generation how to cook? Who will teach them the difference between a tomato and a potato?

This morning, I watched the TED speech of Jamie Oliver, a celebrated British chef, who won this year’s TED prize ($100,000 and the help of everyone in the TED audience to accomplish his goal) and who, at 34, wants to change how people eat in Great Britain and now here. His acceptance speech is tough, challenging and inspiring. His wish is to form a strong sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity.
We who are the current keepers of the flame need to find a way to join him, to find each other, and to make sure that all the recipes we love, our “keepers,” get passed along to the next generation. Our future depends on it. Are you with me?