Shauna Niequist - Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

Im a bread personcrusty, golden baguette; hearty, grainy, seeded loaves; thin, crispy pizza crust all of it. Flaky, buttery croissants; chewy pita; tortillas, warm and fragrant, blistered by heat. Whenever my jeans are too tight, Im reminded that I know better than to love bread the way I do, but love is blind, and certainly beyond reason. And I am a wine personthe blood-red and liquid gold, the clink and glamour of tall-stemmed glasses, and the musty, rich, almost mushroom-y smell.

More than that, I am a bread-and-wine person. By that I mean that Im a Christian, a person of the body and blood, a person of the bread and wine. Like every Christian, I recognize the two as food and drink, and also, at the very same time, I recognize them as something much greatermystery and tradition and symbol. Bread is bread, and wine is wine, but bread-and-wine is another thing entirely. The two together are the sacred and the material at once, the heaven and earth, the divine and the daily.

This is a collection of essays about family, friendships, and the meals that bring us together. Its about the ways God teaches and nourishes us as we nourish the people around us, and about hunger, both physical and otherwise, and the connections between the two.

Its about food and family and faith. Its also about everything else, because all of life is a jumble of ideas and experiences and the things we find under the couch cushions. All of life is a whirling mash-up of the big and little thingsthe things we see and think and remember and smell and feel, the deep values that guide us and the dirt under our fingernails, the undercurrents of belief and doubt and the coolness of cotton sheets right when we slide our toes down to the bottom of the bed. Its about food, and its not. Its about life, which is to say its about everything.

A few Christmases ago, my dear friends Steve and Sarah gave me a book called My Last Supper. Its a gorgeous, oversized hardcover with a collection of interviews with fifty great chefs about their last suppers. Apparently thats one of those age-old kitchen questions chefs and cooks discuss ad infinitum, in lulls between service, as they close down the kitchen at the end of a busy night If you knew it was your very last meal, what would you eat? Who would cook it? What would you drink, who would be around the table with you, if you knew it was your very last meal?

Being married to a musician, Im very familiar with the musicians equivalent: Out of all recorded music, what song do you wish you had written? Or If you were putting together your dream band, who would play each instrument? For an English major like me, its something like, If you could sit in a caf with one writer, who would you choose? Or maybe, What line do you wish you had written? Its one of those questions you can discuss forever, and change your answer a little bit every time, one that you love answering, because it permits you to live in that worldthe food world, the music world, the literary worldfor as long as youre working out your answer. If youre like me, you keep changing your answer, because you want to stay in that world for as long as possible.

For the record, my last-supper meal looks a bit like this: first, of course, ice-cold champagne, gallons of it, flutes catching the candlelight and dancing. There would be bacon-wrapped dates oozing with goat cheese, and risotto with thick curls of Parmesan and flecks of black pepper. There would be paper-thin pizza with tomatoes and mozzarella and slim ribbons of basil, garlicky pasta and crusty bread and lots of cheeses, a plummy pinot noir and maybe a really dirty martini, because you might as well go big on your last night on earth. There would be dark chocolate sea salted toffee and a bowl of fat blackberries, and wed stay at the table for hours and hours, laughing and telling stories and reaching for one more bite, one more bite, one more bite.

Whats becoming clearer and clearer to me is that the most sacred moments, the ones in which I feel Gods presence most profoundly, when I feel the goodness of the world most arrestingly, take place at the table. The particular alchemy of celebration and food, of connecting people and serving what Ive made with my own hands, comes together as more than the sum of their parts. I love the sounds and smells and textures of life at the table, hands passing bowls and forks clinking against plates and bread being torn and the rhythm and energy of feeding and being fed.

I love to talk about food and cooking and entertaining. I want to hear about how other people do it, and about the surprising and significant things that happen when people gather around the table. Many of the books Ive read and loved most dearly have been about food and gatherings at the table. My best moments have been spent in the kitchen, and many of the most deeply spiritual moments of the last year have taken place at the table.