dinner for one is the place where (oh go on, call it ‘the table at which’; you know you want to) recipes, paintings, photographs, tales — of, on, about, with, containing, alongside— ingredients, kitchen encounters (confidential or otherwise … vale, Tony), meals, memories of culinary experiences, recountings of memorable noms (remembrances of lost thyme), gather.
Not so much as a mélange: there is no mixing here (we’re not making a fecking salad). But where our tales, photographs, paintings, recipes, are in-conversation with each other.
For eating is always an eating-with, even when you are alone: each dish, and every meal, contains within it, a multitude of stories. Journeys, travels, histories, images, stains, marks-made, remarks, remarques, notes, music, tones, rhythms, improvisations … all waiting to be told, heard, seen, felt, touched, tasted.
And, each time we eat, we are eating not just in but as communion— a coming-together (right now … ) that transcends the profane (over me … ).
As Italo Calvino reminds us, each time we chew, there is an « extraction of vital juices », after which a « process of ingestion and digestion leaves its imprint », as in « every amorous relationship ». Much like how « a kiss », as Georges Bataille never lets us forget, « is the beginning of cannibalism ». (Oh, Gregory Peck … *turns away shyly*, exit stage left, chased by a bear)
To eat … to touch … to kiss … to know (ooooo you, is to love love love you … ).
Where what we ingest shapes us, takes us on turns, slants us, forms us, makes us, becomes us. Where tears in the batter of a wedding cake not only causes us to cry, tears us up, maybe even tears us apart, but that at that moment of ingestion, of chewing, of eating, we— momentarily — become rivulets flowing down a cheek.
Métamorphose involontaire.
Come dine with us! (nom nom nom)
I love the gesture in which recipes, which are, in a sense, already written in verse become playful poems; and poems, in turn, become recipes for sparkling encounters with tasting and eating, with reading and thinking. And, can I just say: I fell in love with your totalitarian broccoli head on the spot! It is hard to keep the coffee in the mug or the broccoli on the plate when such hilarious figures show up for dinner! And Sara Chong’s paintings — with their empathic brushstrokes and her painterly wisdom — serve as a most-illuminating reminder of what paintings can do that no other media can. How well her palpable, “fleshy” brushstrokes fit together with the flesh of the text! What a great accomplishment to have opened up a space — for thinking, for reading, for tasting — in which desserts and matters of truth, soups and questions of love, start communicating — and have so many beautiful things to say to one another. It is absolutely strange, and it is absolutely delightful, and it makes for a most wonderful adventure.
A meal so lovingly prepared you wish and wonder if its words, too, are edible. If ‘abandonment is a form of freedom’ then time is at once precise and indefinite — like the memory of sherry buzzing on your tongue. And if food is love, and love is food, simple ingredients just won’t do — you need the magic of Jeremy Fernando’s language and Sara Chong’s paintings alongside a slab of butter and a goblet of gin. This body of work tastes like a stiff Irish coffee on a cold Sunday morning — goes down easy, and you don’t know you need it until you’re knocked out.
Rollicking good fun!
Excellent— sound above sense every time!
‘were it that easy’ & ‘dinner for one’ © Jeremy Fernando
Paintings © Sara Chong
Photographs © Jeremy Fernando
Recipes © Sara Chong & Jeremy Fernando