A communal kitchen and a long dining table

on feeding and being fed

For the last month, in a wildly lucky turn of events, I’ve been ensconced on a former croft in the highlands with eight other writers. We are from Scotland, England, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, the UAE, Ukraine—with varying writing projects and different expectations of the Scottish ‘summer’ weather. We have been given the rare gift of time and space to write and think; our meals are prepared for us, our bedsheets changed, our glasses filled. Our hands have been freed up so our brains can concoct things. It has been a kind of heaven.

In the daytime, the Moniack Mhor kitchen always has one member of staff toiling away on our behalf. Breakfast is provided but up to us; lunch is freshly cooked and laid out; if evening meals are not served, as they are on Mondays, they’re prepped so all the work required fits within half an hour and mostly involves putting something in the oven and getting deserts out of the fridge. There have never been fewer than two cakes available at any time; biscuits and oatcakes and fruit and snacks and home made tablet and scones are always there for the grabbing. Somewhere there is a fire being built. Somewhere, food is being brought in or delivered.

I’ve been on month-long residencies before, some where you are responsible for all your own eating and some where all your food is prepared for you. For me, the latter is usually the most challenging; cooking is one of my joys, a way to calm my head, to show love to both myself and others. Without access to a kitchen I go a bit mad, and not being able to decide what I want to eat becomes cloying. I like the having the option to spend two hours making myself a ridiculous breakfast or to stand in a kitchen in my comfies eating Nutella off a spoon and staring into the middle distance. I brought a bag of Braeburn apples and a sultry, dark peanut butter jar here and hid them in my bedroom, just in case I needed them. Everyone has their feeding foibles and I have more than a few.

The last month has been the perfect midpoint between being forced to cook and not being allowed to: our food is all provided for us, but the kitchen is the heart of the building, open to anyone with people in and out all day, and if there are ingredients or foods we want, they will be instantly ordered. We can cook if we so choose. We can help the official chefs. We can request things or make them ourselves. Everyone is required to do the short prep of the evening meal at least once a week. At the weekends, we can take on the responsibility of cooking for everyone. And every night we clean up after ourselves, working in teams to feed the industrial dishwasher and leave the kitchen decent.

If sitting down to eat together is a particular intimacy, sharing a kitchen is even moreso. At home, my dining table is in my kitchen because cooking and feeding is key to closeness, for me; if I can’t make you a lush dinner while you complain about your job or your partner or the state of the world, are we even friends? If you won’t let me stand over you while you cleave an egg I’ve just poached for you to see how the yolk is, how well do we really know each other? I often think of M.F.K Fisher and her bold opinions on who you share food with; in Serve it Forth, she says that,

Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.

I have been in situations before where dinner is eaten in a kind of restrained near silence (or actual silence, as was the case on a Buddhist retreat in my 20s), the food a perfunctory exercise in not starving to death. I find this miserable in a very dramatic way; it gives me intense ennui when people can’t enjoy their food. I still think about my ex’s parents, who told me they only eat to stay alive. Imagine spending a month eating all your meals next to such people?

What intense luck, then, to have found myself, night after night, at a long dining table next to a fire with eight or more people who take pleasure in not only the ridiculous treasure of being catered for, but in the decadent nature of the food put in front of them. People who will get second or third helpings of the main course before attempting a pudding; who will top your glass up before it is empty.

In this, our last week of the residency, the quiet politeness of the first week has given way to shared breakfasts and morning teas, to midnight snacks and hot drinks before bed, to drams of whisky standing by the sink. Everyone knows now that I am a terrible coffee snob who bought a second Aeropress just for the purpose of residencies and will get beans delivered. It’s become clear who requires a sausage sandwich at 11:30 am even though lunch is at 1. Our particular standards of kitchen hygiene have been throughly tested. By this point, we have all regressed: we have started to request our particular comfort dishes; a tiramisu, sausages and mash, the lemon polenta cake to which we have all become addicted. In the short hours between meals we mill about the kitchen opening lids and fridges like teenage children home from university, grazing on things leftover and being made, being completely indulged by the incredible staff.

But alongside this we have read to each other, and shared, and critiqued each other’s work. We have learned from and inspired each other, and disagreed, and talked things out. But most of all, we have written. Being catered for has given us all space to work, and satisfied a different type of hunger.

I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.

- M.F.K Fisher, The Gastronomical Me