I wouldn't say that I married my husband for his family's Chicken & Dumplings recipe -- but I made darned sure to get my paws on a heaping helping within a couple hours of our saying "I do." As long as we'd been together, Douglas had waxed rhapsodic about Saturdays spent in his beloved Memama's kitchen in Plymouth, North Carolina; his mother and grandmother side-by-side rolling wide strips of shortening dough as a freshly-stewed chicken cooled on the countertop. His eyes would mist and voice hush as he described, in loving detail, the silken dumplings drenched in meaty, butter-rich broth. Tantalized, I'd suggest that we could attempt to recreate the dish in our own kitchens, but he'd demur -- it's too complicated, and no one ever wrote the recipe down, and Memama had passed on back in 1991, and his own mother (now in her 80s) probably hadn't made it in years, and so on. There were a million reasons why not, until he asked me to marry him.
Early in our planning, we made a pact to have all of the details of our wedding be reflective of the things that made us, well, us. One of the many things that unites us is our deep passion for food -- we make an event out of the preparation and sharing of it. It's a means of warm, intimate, daily connection that didn't just come from out of the blue -- it was nurtured by our families.
So, without explaining why, I asked my dad for his Hungarian goulash recipe, and
Reader, if I could have married him right there and then in that warm, lovely, friend and food-filled kitchen, I would have.
Now, nine months into our marriage, our guests still speak rapturously of that dish -- how it's simultaneously luxurious and homespun, rich, but not heavy, and just simply soul-satisfying. It is comfort food in every sense of the term, and now I want to share this part of my family with yours.
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