The long table
The flat has a stove with two working rings and an oven that runs about twenty degrees cold. For four years this was described as a limitation. Sometime last winter it quietly became the format instead, and the food got better.
The constraint forces a shape. Two rings means two hot things, maximum, and one of them is usually the thing that has to be finished at the last minute. So everything else has to be room temperature, or made the day before, or need nothing but a bowl. Once you accept that, the menu writes itself: one hot centre, four cold things around it, bread.
The arithmetic of chairs
There are four chairs. Six people means two borrowed, and borrowed chairs are always the wrong height, which turns out not to matter at all after the first twenty minutes. What does matter is table length. A table that seats six comfortably will hold a conversation for three hours. A table that seats six tightly splits into two conversations within forty minutes, every time, without fail.
We have never once regretted moving the table away from the wall. We have several times regretted adding one more person than the table could take.
The cold dishes carry the evening. A bean thing with a lot of lemon, roasted carrots that are better after a night in the fridge, something pickled and sharp to cut through everything else, and a bowl of yoghurt with garlic in it that has been the same recipe since the beginning and will not be changing.
Things learned the hard way
- Start the oven ninety minutes early. Twenty degrees cold compounds.
- Do not attempt a new recipe with guests present. This has been violated four times and gone well once.
- Someone must be responsible for bread and it should not be the person cooking.
- Wash as you go or accept the two o'clock kitchen. There is no third option, though we look for one every time.
The oven is still twenty degrees cold. A replacement has been discussed at roughly every third dinner for two years now, and the discussion has become one of the nicer parts of the evening. We are in no hurry.
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