For more than 8 years, my husband and I hosted a Cooking Club at our home for 10 couples. We gathered monthly to try out recipes across various themes. Whether it was rolling fresh Italian pastas, hovering over salmon on the grill on a blazing summer day, or reading a detailed recipe for some French delight we couldn’t pronounce, it was always an adventure.
We discovered exotic spice blends like berbere and curry. We learned the nuances of working with phyllo dough and puff pastry. We also tried out a whole myriad of cooking gadgets.
There was something magical about inviting people into my kitchen to prepare food and gather at the table to eat our creations and do the dishes together. Through the years, we swapped stories, celebrated births, mourned deaths, dished about parenting, dug through political topics, and grappled with our faith together.
In those years, I discovered that food was my love language. I love to gather my people in the kitchen and at my table. My favorite way to love on others is to bring them a meal when they are on bedrest or to arrange a meal list after a new baby is born.
I know I’m not alone. I’ve met other people along my life journey who share this love – not just for eating, but for connecting deeply over food.
In her new book, Taste and See: Discovering God Among Butchers, Bakers, and Fresh Food Makers, Margaret Feinberg points out that God was the original foodie. He handcrafted humanity to need food and designed a plethora of delectable options for us to choose from.
Taste and See is a culinary adventure, a food memoir, and a spiritual journey. The premise of the book is that food plays a significant role in helping us taste and see God’s goodness in our lives. This book is an invitation to the global table (with recipes included!)
Needless to say, I was quick to RSVP yes to this invitation.
Margaret presents food as not merely functional for survival, but also as a source of deep pleasure and a vehicle for building community. She unpacks how food is both sacred and symbolic, playing a prominent role in the most spiritually-significant moments throughout the Bible.
“When we gather to eat, God wants to nourish more than our bodies: he wants to nourish our souls with transcendent joy and supernatural community and divine presence,” writes Margaret. “When we feed our physical appetites in community, we open our hearts for God to feed something deeper as well.”
Taste and See is divided into 8 parts, focusing on 6 types of foods that are abundant in the Scriptures. Through Margaret’s descriptive prose, we learn about fish, figs, bread, sea salt, olives and lamb chops. I love how this book offers us a new lens to view the Bible.
Margaret takes readers from a fishing expedition on the Sea of Galilee to a fig orchard in Madera, California (which, by the way, is practically in my own backyard). She invites us to mix dough for matzo bread with a professor at Yale university and to harvest olives with a family in Croatia.
One of my favorite tidbits Margaret reveals is that the fig tree will continue to produce fruit for eighty to a hundred years after it is planted.
“That’s Christ’s vision for us,” she writes “that we will continue to yield the fruit of Christlikeness and find our satisfaction in him long after gray hairs sprout and crow’s feet nestle near our eyes.”
This is just one example of how this book takes us from the savory to the sacred.
The book concludes with an invitation to a Passover feast enjoyed at a table in the Holy Land. Margaret helps us taste each intentionally-prepared bite of the seder, the ceremonial dinner that commemorates the freeing of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery.
These words speak life to my foodie heart: “God is waiting around every table, in every pantry, in every backyard garden. You just need some fresh ingredients, some time, and a friend or two.”
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