When I was a child, our house was always open. My elementary school kissed the living room window, and I would peek in at breaks to see if we had visitors. When I would see heads popping up, I would count down the minutes to get home. I don’t know why a shy girl like me liked guests, but a living room full of people and food is associated in my mind with something happy that also has a plate of sweets that I am allowed to eat from.
It may be that my obsession with hosting started when I was a baby, my parents would put me in a playpen near the living room when their friends would come over, and I would hear them laughing, happy and snacking. Snacking is seen as something happy for me. As they say, what is captured in your memory in the first year of life will accompany you later.
The years passed and we grew up and also moved. In the years when everyone began to build their career and family life, the hospitality stopped. Here and there guests came on holidays, special occasions and birthdays, but not on a daily basis, not even weekly.
In recent years I hardly get to host a mass of people, maybe a friend or two for wine and snacks that remind me of joy. The small apartments in Tel Aviv moved the focus of our social gathering to a friend’s house, a house that is bigger than all of us, and her living room allows 20 people to watch the World Cup.
It might sound extreme, but for once I feel like taking the burden of the holiday upon myself. What is a nightmare for other people, is a fun challenge for me. If someone hacks into my computer and takes a look at the many virtual shopping baskets waiting for me on various websites, they will find lots of home decor items, special tools and serving suggestions for hosts, which I keep to myself. Maybe one day, when I have a huge living room and a proper wine fridge, I can open a home mini-restaurant or a lounge bar.
Those who have known me from a young age, understand how absurd what I am saying now, because everything domestic grounded, related to the kitchen or cooking or organization and hospitality, was light years away from me. Other people do it better than me, I always said. My big dream as a child was to live in a hotel, and to this day I sometimes fantasize that I live on the 18th floor of a hotel with a window overlooking the sea and attached cleaning and laundry services.
When a good friend once saw me drinking coffee from a disposable cup at home, he said that maybe I have a problem with long-term commitments, even though I’ve always lived in my apartments for more than a decade, and held jobs for a long time. Or as someone else told me: you like stability in practice but freedom in your head. Of course, the story with the coffee is over, and I have long since purchased glass cups that are my greatest pride. And also the story of transience in the hotel is starting to make me crack the desires that I thought were the best for me. Why be all the time temporary and not permanent? Honestly, I don’t have an answer.
In my first apartment in the city I didn’t have a kitchen. “Who needs this?”, I said to my parents, and for nine years I heated ready-made food on a small plate that sat on a chair by the door. I fell in love with the current apartment because there was a kitchen where you could cook like grown-ups.
I suppose that living and working alongside restaurateurs and people who deal with food and wine has influenced me in recent years. I recently spoke with a veteran chef who no longer actively cooks. He, who couldn’t get rid of the food love bug, told me “I only get excited when I talk about flavors”, and immediately invited me to his kitchen. Every time we meet, he makes an effort to arrange for me the so-called “perfect bite”, also inspired by a simple photo buffet placed on a plastic table.
I suddenly realized how much passion there is in the relationship between love and food, hosting and organizing a sensory experience that does good for someone else, even if it comes in the form of a small bite in which there are seemingly unrelated ingredients that make it whole. This is an art. In Judaism there is a mitzvot of hospitality. In the current time, when fear, despair, nerves, stress and hatred are common and increasing, I can understand this. One of the things that can provide peace and comfort is good food with friends.
We eat in any situation. Even when we are angry, even when we are in love, even when we are tense and when we celebrate. So maybe we need a chef prime minister, a parliament of sommeliers, and people who have a past in hospitality as a basic condition in the law for entering politics.