How do I welcome you to a place that no longer exists?
In one way, easily enough: I could invite you over to my home, and, in one of the brown pottery bowls Ned made, ladle you up some Cuban Black Bean Soup, with a small scoop of white rice on the bottom, plus some chopped red onion on top. And there you are — even though Dairy Hollow House, the inn on which this book is centered, is no more.
But that soup definitely exists, reincarnating whenever I or anyone else fixes it. It’s the same one I’ve been making for forty-five years. It’s the one Elsie Freund taught me. The one I have made, served, enjoyed and been complimented on in Arkansas, New York, Vermont, and Washington, DC, among other places. It’s the one I served at the brunch following my wedding to Ned back in October 1977. The one Mark Graff and I recently (we’re talking March 2021) served at the first small, cautious, very celebratory dinner party— just two guests and us — we held after an isolated year in quarantime.
Nothing, I think, is more timeless than a recipe.