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What the Brady Bunch Taught Me about Family Dinners
ALISON CAYNE
Like many little girls of the 1970s, my first true loves came in this order: my Barbie Dream House, my Easy-Bake Oven, and The Brady Bunch. I don’t mean I liked just Bobby or Greg. I was fully into Alice, all the girls (not so much Marcia), the parents, and their floppy dog, Tiger. I watched The Brady Bunch the way some kids would eat a bowl of ice cream—I eagerly anticipated the next episode, inhaled it in rapture, and felt this hollow, homesick feeling when I knew the episode was coming to an end. The Bradys showed me how I wanted to live my life. I wanted braces. I wanted to carry my books in between my folded arms. I wanted car washes and cheerleading and family adventures. Mostly though, I wanted big family dinners around an abundant, boisterous table.
I was an only child, and a pretty lonely one at that. I have plenty of friends who loved being the only child in their family, reportedly totally satisfied with their own company and imaginations. Most of them opted to have “onlys” themselves, and still relish their time alone with their own thoughts. That was not and definitely is not the case for me. The moment the opportunity arose, I promptly had five children and built a business centered around home cooking. I even (inadvertently) found the Mike to my Carol: my new fiancé has two of his own children. We are a modern-day Brady Bunch. (We hear this a lot.) Big, floppy dog included.
Our family table has been the gossamer that has carried my family and me through illness, divorce, and now, a global pandemic.
For the most part, I have constructed the life the Bradys taught me to want. All of my life has been laser focused on creating abundant, boisterous tables, and for that I am extremely grateful. I taught myself to cook at eight years old. I started hosting dinner parties in middle school. I once made potato salad for two hundred people in the basement of a college dorm. When I had children, I could finally cook for an army daily and shout, “Dinner!” like Carol would. It was the hallmark of my Hallmark family.
But there was a hitch. My model family—and this is quite obvious to me now—was not only fictional, but it set me up for a total misunderstanding of family life, how to be a mother, what sibling interaction looks like, and how “blended families” function. (Hint: the very name is a fallacy.) Every fight my kids had for the first decade (and let’s face it, even now, dipping into my third decade of parenting) upset me. Not just because conflict makes me uncomfortable, but because it looked nothing like a Brady fight. Every dinner that ended in people storming off or plates left full, every flipped-over board game, every slammed door, all of it appeared in a split screen across my brain of Carol Brady and me. On Carol’s side: understanding, resolution, and laughter. Across my half of the screen? A big stamp of failure and hopelessness. Carol Brady never blamed herself for Marcia’s self-centeredness or Jan’s deep insecurity. She never, in all five seasons, had a breakdown. Not once.
While The Brady Bunch created a completely unattainable standard, it also gave me a panacea in family dinners. Regardless of what is happening to or within my family, despite the steely silence or open hostility, we still sit down to dinner together every night. That’s the rule. Some nights, dinner lasts three minutes before devolving; many nights we host people passing through town, or friends of friends. Most evenings we eat food that I’ve made, but sometimes we forage food out of takeout containers and serve it on paper plates. Three of my kids like to cook with me, the others prefer to do the dishes (well, “prefer” may be a bit generous).
Our family table has been the gossamer that has carried my family and me through illness, divorce, and now, a global pandemic. Cooking and eating together is the only thing that feels remotely “normal” to me, and though they may be loath to admit it, for my kids, too. When the storm is picking up speed, that dinner table is the thing that tethers us, keeping us all from being blown away. It is a quiet thread: you can only see it in a certain light, but it is there, and it is strong.
When the storm is picking up speed, that dinner table is the thing that tethers us, keeping us all from being blown away.
I imagine living in quarantine is challenging for even the most intact families. Lately I’ve been wondering how the Bradys would have handled it. I picture card games and family art projects, maybe a musical? If the Bradys had Instagram, Carol would definitely be posting theme dinners of the eight of them dressed in tie-dye or disco outfits. If they had TikTok, there’d be a viral dance routine. They’d post family outings from a beautiful budding forest or a pier somewhere with a sunset in the background.
There are, to be sure, real-life families living much like the Bradys would. I’ve seen some of their posts: family “chore” charts, picnics, and group workout sessions. I’m happy for them, I really am. But to be clear, A) I do not believe them for a second, and B) If they are for real, those are not my people, and I deeply mistrust them.
That is unfair, I know. But it is honest.
My big aha moment of the past few weeks (aside from the absolute hubris of taking anything at all for granted) is that, as it turns out, I don’t think I’d like the Bradys very much if I met them today. We are most definitely not the Bradys and that’s okay. What we are is good enough and even when it’s not, there’s something inside of all of us that is grateful for the table and optimistic that we’ll have the chance to do it all over again tomorrow. There’s some comfort in that.
Alison Cayne is the founder of Haven’s Kitchen, a cooking school, café, and storefront in New York, and the author of The Haven’s Kitchen Cooking School: Recipes and Inspiration to Build a Lifetime of Confidence in the Kitchen.
There Are No Plans to Make, So Why Not Plan Meals?
LAUREN BRAUN COSTELLO
Finding comfort in the mise en place.
Beds in my house are always made and meals are always planned, just as the sun rises and sets and a single sock gets lost each week in the dryer. The scanning of my cupboard and calendar, the conversation I have with myself as mother, chef, organizer in chief, and friend of the farmers’ market, is my process. Dinner—and now breakfast and lunch, too, thank you very much COVID-19!—must be plotted out in advance.
What works for me stems both from my personality and profession. I’m a habitual planner who thrives when things are in order. I’m also a natural curator and editor. I like this here and that over there. Order is simultaneously my metronome and my horizon, both a process and an objective, like pilaf or risotto. No wonder I decided to take the leap and become a professional cook nearly two decades ago. What better way to plan, create, curate, edit, repeat, revise, and perfect (or at least attempt to perfect). Cooking is entirely about preparedness—mise en place—the endeavor to execute with the efficiency and proficiency that comes as a result of meticulous planning.
Order is simultaneously my metronome and my horizon, both a process and an objective, like pilaf or risotto.
Mise en place literally means “put in place” in French, but it might as well mean “take time to save time.” Wash, peel, cut, measure, and select before you begin the cooking process. Set out each measured ingredient—and each tool—ready to play its part. Every recipe begins with the mise en place—two cups of chopped onions, three tablespoons olive oil—so that you know what you need to have ready to begin cooking, to execute the enumerated instructions. Think of meal planning as the mise en place you need to outline not only what you’ll be eating but also what you’ll need to procure.
Even as a professional cook, I did not always see the value of routine meal planning. Once I had children, I found the pursuit empowering. Control! Ah, delicious, seductive control. Planning my sons’ meals gave me the power to shape and direct not only their days and weeks, but also their lifelong well-being and habits. I could hit a lot of targets and check a lot of boxes with one task. I find that meal planning functions that way: In one fell swoop I can know what I will be eating, what I will be buying (and thus where I need to do the shopping), and ultimately what I will b
e doing each day, to a degree. I can control only so much, but it’s more than a little satisfying to have control at least over all of that.
I remember reading somewhere that in France parents are provided with a monthly menu from the school district that lists both what the children will be served at school each day and a helpful suggestion of what a healthy dinner could be for the corresponding evening. As I remember it, the article read something like this: “If lunch is ratatouille and cabillaud, we recommend perhaps a dinner of buttered noodles and courgettes.” Mais bien sûr and mon dieu all in one. Also, voilà!
That’s it! That is the key to planning meals for the family. I looked at it like a math equation: Balance + Variety = Attainable Success.
If school is serving chicken fingers with steamed carrots and rice, then I feel good about a smoothie and muffin for breakfast because lunch features a substantial protein. Dinner, then, can be some fish-and-vegetable dish (roasted, broiled, or sautéed but definitely not fried since that happened at lunch) or pasta and a salad.
As for the future, it is no longer possible to plan more than one week at a time. We are now living in uncharted territory . . .
Once I approached each day’s meal planning with that mindset, the whole week took shape with varied and balanced menus. It wasn’t just about the ingredients, but the cooking methods and global flavor profiles, too. My process became an internal dialogue, a conversation I have with myself. “I need a fish here, and a beef there. A ravioli would be perfect Tuesday. The farmers’ market is Thursday, so I definitely want to do something with kale and kabocha squash on Friday night. Sunday I can make blintzes because it’s leftovers for lunch, and then it’s dim sum out for dinner.” Planning days into the future helps me to reclaim pockets of time in the present.
As for the future, it is no longer possible to plan more than one week at a time. We are now living in uncharted territory, collectively, in isolation from one another yet miraculously connected through technology. Meal planning is a way to give these chaotic times a sense of structure. It’s also a way to commune within our homes and with one another over social media. I’ve been sharing my meal planning daily on my Instagram feed (@itslaurenofcourse), which has spurred creativity and fostered community, two things that are presently feeding me as much as the food itself. In a world where the safety and health of our loved ones is more fragile than ever and the simple pleasures of quotidian life have been curtailed, planning your next meal might just be the perfect balm.
Lauren Braun Costello is a cooking instructor, food stylist, and author of multiple books, including The Competent Cook: Essential Tools, Techniques, and Recipes for the Modern At-Home Cook and Notes on Cooking.
Food Can Hurt
RENE DENFELD
Before even the age of memory, I knew that food hurt.
We were very poor. My mother drank and forgot to buy food. I’ll never forget the taste of the stale saltines I found in the back of otherwise empty cupboards. I must have been very hungry. Each pebble of salt magnified, like the ocean in my mouth.
School lunches were my favorite part of the day: the square of gluey pizza, dotted with fake white cheese. Watery corn. Tuna casserole. Hunger makes you love everything you eat, and then poverty stamps it with shame.
My brother Dennis loved fried bologna. We cut the edges with scissors and fried it quickly, in hot fat. The edges burned and crisped, and we made sandwiches with white bread and the hot grease. Those little Banquet potpies were the greatest treats. By the time I was nine, my mother quit drinking, but we were still poor. By then I had become a connoisseur of the finest generic macaroni and cheese. (It was the now-defunct Western Family brand.)
Later, homeless as a young teen, the rare times I had money—often from panhandling, sometimes from worse—I would gorge. Dozens of dry powdery donuts from the corner store. Packs of cold hot dogs. I often wept as I ate. When life is cracking you open, your hunger bleeds.
A fellow homeless kid turned me on to his favorite poverty meal: a sleeve of Ritz crackers, dipped in a tub of Crisco. We ate uncooked ramen noodles from the packets, crushed with the seasoning packets added, shaking them into our mouths. We were never full.
If you’ve ever wondered why homeless people can be malnourished and yet overweight, this is why. I was pudgy on the streets, and yet had open sores on my legs from malnutrition. I moved slowly, like I was in a dream.
Before even the age of memory, I knew that food hurt.
It was food that rescued me. When I was sixteen I was able to get a work permit, and McDonald’s hired me. I washed up in the bathroom before work. I was proud of the rusty-purple uniform. Besides working, the best part was the free daily meal. We got to choose between a Quarter Pounder or chicken nuggets. I always chose the Quarter Pounder. After months of starvation-level nutrients, I could feel that protein hit my veins. The open sores on my legs healed. I gained energy.
With the income from that job I was able to do what is near impossible anymore: I got a cheap apartment. From there it was a hard but rewarding climb out of poverty to where I am now. My history helps me understand my clients from my justice work, my kids from foster care, and has been the inspiration behind several novels.
I still have mixed and sometimes angry feelings around food. I shop at our local Grocery Outlet because I am a single foster mom on a budget. I hear people sneeringly call it Gross Outlet, as if affordable but perfectly decent food is inherently gross. As if being poor is gross.
Food has been weaponized. We shame mothers for not feeding their kids whatever the popular diet of the moment is, heedless of cost or time. The more women need to work, the more time we demand they spend in the kitchen. I am often contacted by aspiring women authors asking how to fit writing into their parenting schedules. Give up being super mom, I tell them. You don’t have to cook dinner every night.
You can almost hear the gasping.
I’m not surprised so many people feel so empty, in such times. We are looking to food for what it cannot do—make us moral, virtuous people. But what makes us moral people is not feeding ourselves. It is feeding others.
If we truly cared about what people ate, we would stop judging and start providing. We would stop the shame game.
When life is cracking you open, your hunger bleeds.
When I am feeling sad, or missing my brother, I hunger for fried bologna. I want to cook it in a pan puddled with grease, taking care to cut the edges first. I want to sandwich it between slices of cheap white bread. I want to cry when I eat, knowing the history of people is a history of food, and how we have found ways to make even this act unbearable.
Rene Denfeld is the bestselling author of The Child Finder and The Butterfly Girl.
It Was Never about the Dough
SONALI DEV
When I perfected my roti, it meant I was finally ready to become a wife.
One of my earliest memories is the smell of fresh rotis roasting in my family’s kitchen. Nothing compares to the scent of grain dough as it cooks on an open flame. It’s like earth and fire condensed into an aroma that hits your hunger centers just so. If you’ve smelled baking bread, you know what I mean—now just add to it a hint of embers.
Growing up, I loved watching my mother knead the dough, form it into balls, then roll it into perfect flat circles. She did it every single day. My aunts, my grandmothers—they all did.
As a toddler, when I watched my mother go through her daily ritual, she would hand me a ball of dough to play with. She did this with my children, too. Like me, they’d mold the pliable dough with with the glee of mad scientists. As a young girl, I’d stand by her with my toy-sized rolling pin and mirror her actions. By the time I was a teenager I knew how to knead the dough. I would often make it too sticky and my mother would show me how to add flour to fix it.
I don’t remember when my oddly shaped early attempts turned into perfect circles, but at some point my mother began to look on with pride—I even made my father clap th
e first time I placed a perfect hot one on his plate. What I do remember is that somehow knowing how to do that—to turn flour into bread—equated to my being ready to be a wife.
Somewhere along the way the skill got tangled up in being a nurturer and a woman, and then it started to feel like I’d been cheated.
I’m not from a particularly traditional family, and the patriarchy usually hung around the outskirts of our home; my parents tried to keep it out, even as it pushed in from the world outside. Had I hated being in the kitchen, I don’t think my mother would have insisted I learn. Then again maybe I was lured in, seduced by her skill, by the accolades she won at mealtimes. Somewhere along the way the skill got tangled up in being a nurturer and a woman, and then it started to feel like I’d been cheated. The pointed praise of fathers, the casual bragging of mothers. My girlfriends and female cousins were expected to be at least passable at cooking, while the only thing the boys were expected to be passable at was eating, and—wait for it—praising how very fabulous we girls were at it. One of my cousins was once even praised for praising my lovely rotis!
Truth is, they were lovely. Somehow I was already a good girl by virtue of them. All I could do was try not to dwell on it.
And then I got married. At my first mealtime with my husband’s extended family, one of his brothers-in-law declared that my mother-in-law could now relax, since she had a helper. “Isn’t it lovely!” said everyone, especially everyone with a Y-chromosome, as they sat there benevolently rejoicing in my mother-in-law’s impending freedom from a labor not one of them had ever helped her with.