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By Root 620 0

words (the tastes, too) recalling us to an oak forest in Sonoma, to a pine burn in the Sierra Nevada, to the stinky salt flats of San Francisco Bay, to slippery boulders along the Pacific coast, and to a backyard in Berkeley. The stories, like the food that fed them, cast lines of relation to all these places and the creatures living (and dying) in them, drawing them all together on this table, on these plates, in what to me began to feel a little like a ceremony. And there’s a sense in which the meal had become just that, a thanksgiving or a secular seder, for every item on our plates pointed somewhere else, almost sacramentally, telling a little story about nature or community or even the sacred, for mystery was very often the theme. Such storied food can feed us both body and soul, the threads of narrative knitting us together as a group, and knitting the group into the larger fabric of the given world.

I don’t want to make too much of it; it was just a meal, after all. A very tasty meal, too, I don’t mind saying, though I don’t doubt that all the words and memories and stories in which the meal had marinated gave it much of its savor, and that a guest who spoke no English might not have enjoyed it half as much. The wild pig was delicious both ways, with a nutty sweetness to it that tasted nothing like store-bought pork, though I noticed that when the platter went around for seconds, the tender slices of braised leg went faster than the pink slabs of the roast. The sauce for the leg I’d reduced from the braising liquid was almost joltingly rich and earthy, powerfully reminiscent of the forest. So were the morels and butter (or perhaps I should say butter and morels), which had a deep, smoky, almost meaty flavor. My self-criticisms were that I could have done a better job cleaning the grit from the morels, and that the galette was a shade overcooked—though the cherries themselves detonated little bursts of summer on the tongue, and no one seemed to have any trouble polishing it off.

Angelo reserved his most enthusiastic praise for my bread, which I’ll admit did have a perfect crust, an airy crumb, and a very distinctive (though not at all sour) flavor—the specific flavor, I guess, of the neighborhood yeasts. It occurred to me that the making of this meal, by acquainting me with these particular people, landscapes, and species, had succeeded in attaching me to Northern California, its nature and its culture both, as nothing I’d done before or since. Eating’s not a bad way to get to know a place.

There comes a moment in the course of a dinner party when, with any luck, you realize everything’s going to be okay. The food and the company having sailed past the shoals of awkwardness or disaster, and the host can allow himself at last to slip into the warm currents of the evening and actually begin to enjoy himself. For me that moment came just around the time that the platter of wild pig made its second circuit of the table and found so many eager takers. I was enjoying myself now, the words and the food in equal measure, and that’s when I realized that this was, at least for me, the perfect meal, though it wasn’t until some time later that I began to understand what that meant.

Was the perfect meal the one you made all by yourself? Not necessarily; certainly this one wasn’t that. Though I had spent the day in the kitchen (a good part of the week as well), and I had made most everything from scratch and paid scarcely a dime for all the ingredients, it had taken many hands to bring this meal to the table. The fact that just about all of those hands were at the table was the more rare and important thing, as was the fact that every single story about the food on that table could be told in the first person.

I prized, too, the almost perfect transparency of this meal, the brevity and simplicity of the food chain that linked it to the wider world. Scarcely an ingredient in it had ever worn a label or bar code or price tag, and yet I knew almost everything there was to know about its provenance and its price. I knew and could