The Weekly Screed (#769)

The universal kitchen table
by David Benjamin

“Out of the kitchen, to stew is to fret, to worry, to agitate. In the kitchen, however, to stew is to have great expectations”
                                                — Molly O’Neill

PARIS — In another life, with another wife, my in-laws were Ralph and Edie, who lived above a store in Jamaica Plain, in a neighborhood — just up the street from the notorious Bromley-Heath housing project — that the Times nowadays would euphemize as “gritty, “ or maybe “sketchy.” You went to sleep there — if you kept a window open — to a concert of drunken outcry, breaking glass and the odd, distant gunshot (or backfire, cherry bomb, who knew?).

With four kids in various states of high-decibel metamorphosis and no time for housekeeping, Ralph and Edie’s place had the feel of a bivouac for transient combatants just behind the lines of an endless, low-scale war that no man, recalling the words of Tim Buckley, could find. Hanging out there took some getting used to, especially with the occasional roar that emanated from Louie’s room.

Louie was Edie’s dad, an ancient shut-in — scrawny, disheveled, hard-of-hearing and cantankerous, a fearsome figure who inspired no fear because Edie’s kids were tough as nails and ironic about Louie’s ravings. He was this family’s version of the crazy aunt in the attic.

At Ralph and Edie’s, one learned to tiptoe through the chaos, the inert bodies — kids, their friends, total strangers — strewn among the strewn shoes, unfolded laundry and empty containers — toward the kitchen, a brightly lit oasis where the grownups gathered, Ralph and Edie, Uncle Richie and Aunt Mary, Mrs. Cody from down the street, anyone else who happened by. This was a stationary but a moveable company. The kitchen was no more orderly than the rest of the second-floor sprawl, but its rude bounty was dependable. It was where troubles were aired, problems parsed, reality explained and sighed over, and a ray of hope — occasionally — shone briefly before fading into resignation. All this happened in an air of rough congeniality, thanks to Edie’s boundless love and Ralph’s air of priestly forgiveness.

The table was too big. It took up most of the kitchen. It was scratched, scarred and always a little greasy. When food appeared — this happened steadily without much regard to the concept of mealtime — things had to be moved among the table’s clutter — ketchup, mustard, mayo, bottles, books, toys and playing cards, dirty dishes, hats, gloves, pants, mail, the Globe, the Herald-American or the Phoenix — to make room for clean plates, cups and silverware. But room was made. And over victuals — Edie’s meat, potatoes and boiled-to-death vegetables or Ralph’s vast platter of chicken wings in sticky orange sauce — the world would circulate around the table, plucked, picked at, poked and examined in terms both simple and profound. Here was a kitchen table, a platform bounteous and boisterous, in the great tradition of the kitchen table.

I thought of Edie’s kitchen here last week. My latest wife, Hotlips, and I fled the Paris downpour into a favorite haunt, Le Roi du Pot Au Feu. Immediately, we understood that our reservation had been unnecessary. Here was not so much a restaurant as an oversized kitchen with a few partitions and better hygiene than Edie ever managed in her whole life. Here was a place that could be transplanted, lock, stockpot and wine barrel, to the semi-mean streets of Jamaica Plain. Our host was Ralphlike, easily warm but not effusive, quickly getting us off our feet and into a corner with a red checkered tablecloth and the wine already uncorked and waiting — which he poured almost as quickly as I looked at the bottle.

No wine list, no menu. Our host said, “Le pot au feu?” We said, “Bien sur,” and that was that. Quickly appeared a bowl of clear soup and soon after, the pot au feu, a boiled beef dinner piled with leeks, potatoes, carrots and turnips, accompanied by a chunk of shankbone, its marrow (os a moelle) intact. There is no three-dog-night meal in Paris homier than Le Roi’s beef stew. It provides comfort true to Ralph and Edie’s kitchen, complete with the gentle ministrations of a host who seems to have known us since we were kids off the street dragged upstairs by Patty, or Lisa or little Ralph. The kitchen-table feel of the joint only gets cozier as we listen to the staff arguing over our heads and a shifting cast of characters passes through, nudging us, ignoring us while glancing at us in casual measurement — as we do them.

And then Louie arrives — not the muppet grouch from upstairs in J.P. This grandfather, pronounced “Louie” but spelled “Louis,” is entirely French, quiet and decorous — only similar in age and frailty.

Our hostess has to help him to the table across from us. His skin is papery, his hair wispy. He sighs heavily as he sits, the exertion of his journey visible in the vein that throbs on his temple. He whispers his order, soup simply and os a moelle, three chunks of shankbone with hot marrow and toasted bread, a calorie explosion that poses no danger of adding an ounce to his scant and willowy frame.

He is dressed beautifully, in a dark suit of vintage provenance, immaculately laundered, freshly pressed and buttoned down. His tie is plain and dark against a white shirt, with cufflinks. He’s a Parisian of the old school. He has never worn this suit with a colored shirt — not even a subtle pinstripe — in his life. Nor will he ever. He has never set foot on the street with a scuffed shoe, or a naked breast-pocket.

We observe him askance, cautious not to intrude. We fall a little bit in love, because Louis carries us back to an elegant epoch when even a beef-stew dinner — in a menuless bistro with nameless wine and the din of curse and clatter from the plongeurs in the kitchen — required a suit-and-tie, an air of genial dignity and a handshake from an avuncular maitre d’ in a soiled apron.

Across the aisle from this stubbornly proper grand-père, we toast the wife whom he has unwillingly outlived and feel at home with him and with our host and hostess, the Ralph and Edie of rue Vignon. And we settle a little deeper into the kitchen table that makes the world go ‘round.