Nathan Williams - The Kinfolk Table: Recipes for Small Gatherings

Nathan Williams
with Rebecca Parker Payne

Photographs by Parker Fitzgerald and Leo Patrone

NEW YORK

Nathan: Since I was in high school, Ive noticed a disconnect between both home cooking and entertaining and the ways my friends get together to share a meal. Home cooking sounds serious, even stodgy, and entertaining has a formal and frilly ring to it. Neither term describes what, in college, were quiet evenings spent making lasagne with a couple of close friends to jazz playing in the background. We gathered in a small apartment and cooked meals at least every other day, but we werent pressing table linens, printing name cards, or brushing up on dining etiquette. We often used paper plates and stuck with the same fork for dessert that we had used for the main course, buttering baguettes with a paring knife so we would have fewer dishes to wash. Our formula for those evenings was to cook, eat, and talk. Nothing else was necessary.

So what can we call this tradition that has become such a valued part of our lives? Its not just hanging out, which describes something careless and unintentional, and were not having dinner parties, a phrase that brings to mind events that are far too rigid, planned, and controlled to define the way we nourish ourselves. The idea for the magazine Kinfolk was born in the course of trying to describe those evenings spent with friends when the hours pass effortlessly, conversation flows naturally, cooking is participatory, and the evening ends with a satisfying sense of accomplishment. The fledgling Kinfolk had two goals: to offer an alternative idea of entertainingcasual, intentional, meaningfuland to make that kind of entertaining feel more natural and accessible to a younger crowd like my friends and me.

Our first objective has been to peel off the fluff and commercial layers that complicate entertaining. Next we have tried to put the social reasons for inviting friends into our homesthe relationships, traditions, community, and conversationsin the foreground and let the superficial details like fancy recipes and table decorations recede into the background. In retrospect, we didnt start the magazine as a strategic plan to fill a commercial void in the market. Frankly, Kinfolk was much more self-serving; we simply wanted a magazine that we ourselves would be excited to pick up, a magazine that would resonate with us and our casual way of entertaining. Today Kinfolk is a consistent source of active, meaningful things to do for both our team and our readers, and the concept continues to grow with the quarterly print magazine, daily online stories, and in-person workshops, dinners, and events held around the world.

Each of those channels serves its own purpose. The quarterly print issues explore traditions and the reasons we gather together with in-depth essays and photo series. Our website is more focused on practical stories, with tips and tutorials teaching readers how to do things on their own. The event series provides settings for learning hands-on skills and meeting like-minded people in the different cities where readers live. These projects complement one another in offering ideas for things to cook, make, and do while promoting the deeper purpose of helping to build communities around ourselves.

This book applies the casual approach to entertaining depicted in our magazine to cooking and recipes. My hope is that it will find a place on cookbook shelves like my own, which are filled not just with classics and celebrity-chef volumes but also with the tattered, stained, spiral-bound little collections of family or neighborhood recipes put out by cooks I know and trust. Despite their humble appearance, these are the books that pack a punch with their recipes, and thats why they are my favorites. This book represents an effort to take the same communal neighborhood approach by welcoming you into the homes of our Kinfolk team, along with a diverse group of friends, family, contributing writers, artists, and other makers.

In each home we visited, the people living there reinforced my belief that entertaining has many more shapes and forms than what that term often brings to mind. It can be the most elaborate and boisterous thing in the world, and it can also be quiet, personal, and low-key, a meditative ritual we enjoy on our own. It can be planned, structured, and executed wonderfully, but it can also be last-minute, spontaneous, a team effort, and wonderfully imperfect.

In the following pages youll meet people with different vocations and avocations, from coffee connoisseur to food editor, interior designer to ceramicist, caterer to florist, as well as bakers, musicians, painters, photographers, food bloggers, fashion designers, restaurateurs, farmers, writers, coffee roasters, and even my sweet retired grandmother. They live on their own, as couples, and as families and represent the full adult life span in their ages. Each person was asked to contribute because he or she lives a life consistent with the simplicity we try to promote in our magazine, embodying a balanced, intentional way of living and a genuine appreciation of food and hosting friends in their homes. I visited their homes for this book in an effort to capture a glimpse of what I think makes them each remarkable, and in these homes I observed the passion with which they embrace the Kinfolk spirit. often drives out from Portland to the Oregon coast on the weekends to collect fresh mussels before the sun rises, preparing them later for potluck dinners.

I cant help being excited to introduce you to all the people in this book because they seem to understand that good food and community are just as important as the careers in which they work, that the rituals and traditions that bring us together are essential to balanced lives. The people in these pages personify the fact that theres something to be said for slowing down, sitting back, and breathing deeply. In fact, Im convinced that the creativity and success they all enjoy in their work is at least in part the result of a grounding focus on these humble things. To some, the hobbies they find most fulfilling have actually become sustainable careers. In Oregon, for example, , after years of dreaming up nature installations and flower arrangements, decided to set up shop and launch her own floral business in Salt Lake City.

From people like these three, who espouse a humble, down-to-earth way of entertaining that emphasizes nothing more than togetherness, you can expect to learn how a meal can be much more fulfilling when its preparation involves the friends who plan to sit down at the table. We all enjoy helping out, and the personal investment of contributing to a meal, even just tossing the salad, usually helps us enjoy the food even more. Then there are the rituals that cement a family, whether its a couple or a clan of six. For , it entails passing on the tradition of smrrebrd, the beloved open-face Danish sandwiches, by making them with her young son, Saxo, almost every day.