Salter Kay - Life is meals: a food lovers book of days

O UR HOUSE IN A SPEN , C OLORADO , DATED BACK TO THE MINING days, and the kitchen was smallabout ten feet by twelvewith not much counter space and a worn floor, but it was honest and comfortable to be in. The dishes were kept in a wooden display case, and the pantry was a shallow closet with no door.

It was in this kitchen that we began cooking together when we moved into the house in about 1976. Neither of us had had much cooking experience, and there was no real decision to do it, it just happened naturally. We cooked side by side or back to back if necessary, following recipes, James Beards or Mireille Johnstons, which were among our early favorites.

The dining room was equally small and almost a part of the kitchen. It had a fireplace and a large framed mirror on one wall. Another wall was three shaky windows looking out onto the street and often on snow pouring down or, in the summer, light that lasted until ten in the evening. The early dinner parties were for friends or people who had come to town. Aspen was easygoing in those days. The streets had only been paved a few years before. Dogs were full-fledged citizens of the town.

When something we cooked turned out particularly well, we cooked it over and over, of course, and partly as a consequence began, in an old brown notebook, to keep a record of what we had served people so as not to give them the same thing, at least not too often. At the same time we began a handwritten book of recipes or versions of them that were worth keeping, often with when theyd first been served, and to whom.

Gradually, over the years, the descriptions in the brown notebookthe dinner book, we called itbecame longer and more detailed: who sat where, what was drunk, some memorable things said. The notebook ran out of pages. There was another and then a third. They became a kind of archive, stories otherwise forgotten, couples that had parted, familiar names, others hard to place. The framed mirror had a long scorched section on one side. In the middle of a dinner and impassioned conversation one night, someone happened to remark, I think your house is on fire. A candle had collapsed and was leaning against the wall, which was burning. We put it out and went on with the meal.

That had been noted in the dinner book. Dinner when someone, in need of a little fresh air, went out and was discovered an hour later, sleeping on the woodpile. The night a wild woman threw the roast beef onto the floor, pronouncing it inedible. There were also great successes, but in any case, we were always writing things down, not just things that happened but also from books we were reading, things of interest, bits of history, opinions, occurrences, odd facts. At breakfasttea and oranges for a period, as in Leonard Cohens beautiful songwe read aloud to one another and often leafed through cookbooks, deciding what to make for a party or simply at the end of the day. Life never felt richer.

Could any of this be put down in words and, if so, in what form? We began to imagine something for the kitchen, or even the bedside table, a book that could be opened at random or read day by day, like a diary or collection of letters, intimate, perhaps ending up with coffee stains or underlinings on certain pages.

In 1999 we mentioned the idea of a book to Nicholas Callaway, a young publisher and friend with whom we had sometimes dined. He liked the description and, coincidentally had even been gathering guidebooks and travel books, most of them rare, that for him had a similar appeal.

For us, over the years, cooking had evolved, and though it was still done together, it was more on the lines of, you do the salad, Ill do the tart. We wrote this book the same way, not side by side but with an agreed idea of what it would be, and then both editing what we each had done. Nicholas Callaway was not quite as young by the time it was finished. There was research, travel, much more to writing it than we had anticipated.

We put the book together not to be definitive but rather to appeal to those for whom eating is something more than a mere necessity. Its not meant to replace favorite cookbooks but instead, in a way, to complement them, to give them further context and, in the course of doing it, to give a year, perhaps more, of pleasure. If there are any inaccuracies, feel free to amend them in your own hand on the page. If there should be improvements or changes in recipes, do the same. We hope the book will be used as well as read. Life is many things, and among the best of them, it is meals.