Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

by Shauna Niequist

We’ve been told that cooking and baking and entertaining are specialized skills that only some people possess, and that without a culinary degree or a lifestyle brand we can’t be expected to do anything but buy prepared food. Marketing and advertising campaigns urging us to eat out or buy already prepared foods want us to think that plain old cooking is difficult and not worth learning. This trend began in the 1950s after factories that used to make ammunition had to make something else. So they started making shelf-stable food in cans and boxes, similar to what soldiers had been eating but unfamiliar to the average American family. In order to sell canned food and cake mixes, advertisers had to convince American women that cooking is too hard and troublesome for our modern world. But it wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. It takes some time to learn, to try and fail and make a mess and try again. It takes even longer to get truly comfortable, to feel at home with a knife in your hand, to read through recipes as a guideline or set of ideas, to read through and add your preferences and tastes, your history and perspective. But it’s a lovely process, with not a minute wasted. If you put in the time, the learning, the trying, the mess, and the failure, at the end you will have learned to feed yourself and the people you love, and that’s a skill for life—like tennis or piano but yummier and far less expensive.

What people are craving isn’t perfection. People aren’t longing to be impressed; they’re longing to feel like they’re home.

But if the last few years have taught me anything at all, it’s that the very things you think you need most desperately are the things that can transform you the most profoundly when you do finally decide to release them.

Memory and food are inextricably linked, of course, and that’s why, when you talk to people about food, there’s the food we say we want—fancy, sophisticated, highbrow even, and then there’s the food we really want, especially on difficult days.