Dinner for 40

One of the best things about Persephone Farm is not on the farm at all. It’s just across the dirt road and it goes by the name of “Wise Acres”. That’s the name nine families chose 20 years ago when they purchased 17 acres of Indianola woods and decided to build their homes, raise their kids and live their lives over there.

Our ties are many and close. The place is full of talented musicians, artists, teachers and techies and they often share their skills with us. We, in turn, share our farm with them. There are days when we look out our farmhouse window and a flight of Wise Acres kids and their friends will suddenly appear from across the road and float through our lower pasture like butterflies. Hard to beat that for scenery.

 But our primary bond is food. Every Monday evening, Persephone Farm and Wise Acres gather at the common house across the road to share a meal. It usually works out to about 40 people, give or take a few guests, and we rotate the cooking chores each week. The result is that you never know what kind of a dinner to expect on Mondays. One week it can be Indian cuisine, then burrito night, or a cold, poached  salmon with cucumber scales and sorrel sauce.

Inevitably, a tiny bit of one-upsmanship sometimes creeps into the menu planning. When our turn to cook comes around we tend to focus on food we raise ourselves—a cauliflower gratin, strawberry rhubarb pie, spanikopita laced with our own spinach and eggs, stuff like that. And of course salad—lots of fresh-picked salad.

Food rules at Wise Acres dinners, no question about that. But what these dinners are really about is a much more subtle kind of sustenance called community. We’ll take a look at the dinner prep and results in a minute, but first let’s put some context around that word “community.”

Not so long ago, small farms were a hub of their neighborhood. They supplied the fuel, of course–the food–but they also provided the glue that often bound things into a comprehensible whole. If you wanted to explain the value of work to a child, farming made a pretty good model–labor and sweat in, strawberry-rhubarb pie out. Farms provided common reference points for everyone, from how a tractor works, to how to feed chickens, to what the weather is doing to the spinach. Barns made a pretty good community dance floor too.

Most of that is gone now, of course, even out in the far suburbs like ours. But somehow, for a little while on Monday nights, Persephone Farm and Wise Acres manage to blend some of that old community spirit back to into our lives. Sitting around a table, eating food grown across the road and prepared by your neighbors, finding the common ground of your lives, that’s what provides community that no faux Reality TV comradship can match.

So, okay, it was our turn to cook the other day and the interns were all over it. Susan Buster Thomas, our videographer for The Season, stopped in to watch the preparations in the interns’ cookhouse before the dinner. Here’s her video report:

The dinner itself starts at 6 P.M. when we all gather in a circle in the common house. The preliminaries are generally pretty simple. Anyone with an announcement or other comment or news tells the circle: there are announcements about birthdays coming up, a school play,  someone’s kid won a math award, the next high school basketball game. Then Rebecca, the head chef for this week, describes the evening menu and the interns each tell about their contribution. 

Then we eat the food we have grown and prepared together. And that is what community–or at least our community–looks like.

Persephone