That Dish Is for a Family

Tonight we are making a small pot of pork and hominy stew, and the toppings are half the dish and they are not optional.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Brown half a pound of pork shoulder, cut into pieces, in oil in a pot until it has color on all sides. Add half a chopped onion and cook it for five minutes, then two cloves of chopped garlic and a big spoon of any chili powder for a minute. Add four cups of water or broth, a good amount of salt, and let it go on the lowest heat for an hour and a half with the lid ajar, until the pork is completely tender and cooked all the way through. Add a can of drained hominy and cook twenty minutes more. Then the part that matters: put out small bowls of shredded cabbage, sliced radish, chopped onion, dried oregano and lime wedges, and let people build their own bowl. It feeds three, it costs a few dollars, and the second day is better than the first.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the pork.

It is the dish you will not make.

There is one. Everybody has one. It is the thing your mother made, or your grandmother, and it is the food that means the most to you of anything in the world, and you have not cooked it since the house went quiet.

And the reason is not that it is difficult, and it is not that the ingredients are hard to get. The reason is that in your head that dish belongs to a full table. It comes with noise attached. It is a dish for a crowd, and there is no crowd, and so making it would be a kind of performance of something that is not there.

So you eat other things. And the one dish that would actually taste like home sits on a shelf in your mind, marked not for me.

The verse where God changes somebody's name

There is a line in Isaiah that is about naming, and about what a person gets called.

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the LORD delighteth in thee. (Isaiah 62:4, King James Version)

Look at what is being corrected. Not a circumstance. A name. The place had been called Desolate, which is to say empty, and the correction is a renaming rather than a repopulation.

And the reason given is the last clause, which is the whole verse: the Lord delights in thee. The name changes because of how He feels about the place, not because of how many people are standing in it.

You are not living in a house heaven calls empty, and God has never once named a place by the number of people inside it. Isaiah 62:4 corrects a name rather than a census, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen where a man cooks alone.

You have not been reclassified by anybody who matters, and heaven has never once revised its opinion of a household because the count changed. It is written that thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the pork is browning.

The dish is not the crowd

Now let me separate two things that have been stuck together for a while.

The dish and the crowd are not the same thing. They arrived together for thirty years, so it is entirely understandable that they feel like one object. But they are two.

The crowd was the people. The dish is a technique, a smell, a set of flavors, and a memory of a kitchen. And the second one is entirely portable and does not require the first one to exist.

You are not disqualified from the food you love, and a household of one has never once been the wrong size for a good dish. Isaiah 62:4 corrects a name rather than a number and gives God's own delight as the reason, and the Holy Spirit is the one who changes that name over a kitchen.

What has happened is that grief attached itself to a recipe, which grief does, because grief attaches itself to whatever it can reach. And then the recipe became a thing that would hurt to make, so it stopped being made, and the loss quietly took a second thing on top of the first.

A dish for a crowd is not a verdict on who is allowed to eat it.

You are not being kept out of anything, and God has never once reserved a good thing for a certain number of people. The passage renames a place and gives delight as the reason rather than fullness, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a recipe from a room.

You have already lost the people, and losing the dish as well was never part of it. Isaiah 62 has God insisting on a new name over a place that everybody else had written off, and the Holy Spirit is the one who insists on the same thing over a kitchen.

Make it small and put the bowls out anyway

Here is the practical part, and there is one piece of it that will feel silly and is the whole point.

Make the small version. Half a pound of pork rather than three, one can of hominy, and everything else scaled down. It works perfectly and it takes exactly the same amount of attention.

And then put the toppings out in bowls. Cabbage, radish, onion, oregano, lime. All of them, in separate small bowls, on the table, for one person.

You are entitled to the whole of it, and God has never once handed out a partial version of a good thing. The Spirit of God is not quiet about this: Isaiah 62 names a place beloved rather than empty, and He is saying it over a table laid for one tonight.

That is the part that will feel ridiculous. Do it anyway. Because the bowls are not decoration, they are the dish. Building your own bowl is what that food is, and skipping it because there is nobody to pass them to is exactly the mechanism by which a person loses a dish they love.

Pass the bowls to yourself. That is not a sad sentence, whatever it sounds like written down.

You are entitled to the whole of it, and God has never once handed out a partial version of a good thing to a household of one. Isaiah 62:4 gives delight as the reason for a name rather than any count of people, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes five small bowls on a table for one person an honest thing.