HOW TO UNIFY THE COUNTRY: START IN THE KITCHEN
It’s Thanksgiving Day, 2025, in the U.S. We’re out in the country at a friend’s hunting camp and it’s a chilly but beautiful day. Our little Boykin Spaniel is running around, ecstatic with boundless joy of being with her people and enjoying being free in the woods.
On a more serious note, there’s been a great deal of disparity here in the U.S. Alarmingly, some people have said that violence against those with whom they disagree is acceptable!
One of my books came out in 2023, and since it’s been released I have come to realize something.
That is, people unify over food.
My 23rd book is my only cookbook. I began writing it in 1979, sitting in my ancestors’ kitchens and writing down how they made their favorite dishes. If there was a story to go with the recipe, I wrote that down, too.
Forty-six years later, the cookbook, AROUND OUR SOUTHERN TABLE, was published (in 2023).
What was unexpected about its existence was what happened at the first family reunion after the cookbook’s release.
My people didn’t talk politics, debate about divisive current events, or anything else that would have caused conflicts.
They talked about the dishes in the cookbook and our relatives who had made them, from great-grandmother’s Welsh scones to Aunt Joann’s heath bars to my great-uncle’s barbecue sauce, we talked food, memories and our people.
And everybody there bought a cookbook, memories behind those hard covers.
This is a way to bring your family together! Make a family cookbook, kind of like what I did.
It will be something special and memorable, and your people will be the better for it.
