Weekend Cooking is a weekly feature hosted by Beth Fish Reads, linking up food-related posts. Click here for links to this week’s Weekend Cooking posts on Beth Fish Reads and other blogs.
Am I the only one who had never heard of Kinfolk Magazine? Out of Portland, Oregon, it was started by three college graduates as a creative outlet. What started a few years ago as a digital/print monthly publication for the millennial generation about living simply and mindfully, has blossomed into a book – The Kinfolk Table, and a brand – Ouur – for clothing and other products.
If you, too, are unfamiliar with the Kinfolk phenomenon, the magazine was recently written up in a snide article in The New York Times titled “Better Homes and Hipsters.” As a young person way back in the 80s, I found the idea of a back-to-the-earth lifestyle very appealing (more in concept than in actuality, as it turned out), so I don’t feel like sneering at anyone – however young and privileged – who wants to try to live a meaningful life, even in a digital age.
So The Kinfolk Table is a gorgeously designed book centered around meal preparation, food traditions, and sharing meals with family and friends. The book is composed of airy, white space; lovely photography of attractive, interesting people, living quarters, kitchens, and nature; profiles of singles, couples, and families living in a variety of ways; and recipes – a lot of them – all indexed at the end.
The recipes range from the complex to the very simple – such as the one for Morning Melon, quoted here in its entirety:
Morning Melon
1 homegrown cantaloupe or muskmelon
Full-fat yogurt
HoneyOn a warm summer morning, pick a melon from your garden, halve it, and scoop out the seeds. Fill it with yogurt (granola, too, if you like) and then drizzle honey over the whole deal. Sit in the sun and eat it with a spoon.
Can’t you just taste that melon?
There are regional sections in The Kinfolk Table (areas that the authors focused on) – Brooklyn, New York; Copenhagen, Denmark; The English Countryside; and Portland, Oregon – and also a section called The Wandering Table. Examples of more complex recipes include Grilled Salmon with Romesco Sauce and Fennel Crudites (from the Copenhagen section) and Pot Roast Shoulder of Veal with Tuna Sauce (English Countryside section). The whole book, including the recipes, is very readable, and is also great for just dipping into here and there. Like a lifestyle magazine, it portrays people experiencing life’s best moments, making some readers wistful and others resentful and annoyed.
The Kinfolk Table is such a heavy, expensively designed book that I’d hesitate to use it in the kitchen as a cookbook. (Maybe that’s just me?) When I made the Citrus Lentil Salad – a recipe from the introduction by authors Nathan & Katie Williams – I left the book (from the library) in a different room and went back and forth to avoid spilling on it.
The recipe for the Citrus Lentil Salad is available here in a guest post by the author for Powells Books in Portland, Oregon.
Here’s the ending of the authors’ introduction to The Kinfolk Table. If it strikes you as naive and/or pretentious, The Kinfolk Table may not be the book for you!
“In each home we visited, the people living there reinforced my belief that ‘entertaining’ has many more shapes and forms than what that term often brings to mind. It can be the most elaborate and boisterous thing in the world, and it can also be quiet, personal, and low-key, a meditative ritual we enjoy on our own. It can be planned, structured, and executed wonderfully, but it can also be last-minute, spontaneous, a team effort, and wonderfully imperfect.
Entertaining looks different for each of us, but as long as we’re cooking and inviting people into our homes with a genuine interest in connecting, conversing, and eating together, then the way we do these things becomes insignificant and ultimately comes naturally. A burned dish or a missing serving piece becomes trivial. The humble soup or homely bread becomes a feast. It all seems quite simple.”
Want more? Here’s a link to a recent interview with author Nathan Williams.
Happy Weekend Cooking!
The Kinfolk Table
Williams, Nathan
Artisan, 2014
9781579655327
368 pp.
$35.00, US
Disclosure: I borrowed this book from my public library.
Other opinions:
Cookbook of the Day
101 Cookbooks
a
“Better Homes and Hipsters” – too funny. This book sounds so appealing and I found a copy available through inter-library loan. I’m #2 on the list. Hurray!
There are some chefs in my area that do dinners based on the Kinfolk ideals. I haven’t attended any, but the pictures of the events just make your mouth water. What a lovely book and a lovely way to live.
I read this book a few months ago and couldn’t really give it a rating. Like you said, it felt more like a design book. I can’t see myself using it in the kitchen. While it’s a beautiful book, I hated that the people featured weren’t a diverse mix even though the recipes were taken from all around the world. 🙁
I love the concept of this! Perhaps I never moved past the 70s. LOL. I’ve never heard of Kinfolk Magazine before, but I plan to see if my library has the book.
Oh, I am definitely on the lookout for that book now – it looks and sounds exactly like the kind of book that I would love. And, yes, I can just imagine how good that melon tastes.
The book looks interesting — I’d never heard of the magazine. Thanks for featuring it — I’ll check to see if the library has it.
The book has some, but very little, racial/ethnic diversity, which is a real drawback that I should have pointed out in the review. Also, the parts of the world that are featured are drawn from the Kinfolk editors’ personal heritage and food traditions, so the international sections don’t really help correct the lack of diversity, at all!
I, too, have never heard of this! I like the principle in theory, but I think it would be incredibly difficult to live on a daily basis in practice…especially with a busy job or young children. I didn’t think the section from the Author’s Intro was pretentious, but I did think the “homegrown” stipulation in the melon recipe was. Not everyone has the time or money to maintain a garden with fresh melons! The recipe; however, sounds delicious and I love its simplicity!
I found the site randomly a while ago, but where you had to subscribe for some articles I forgot about it. I love the idea of a cookbook/foodie book from them even if I’m not sure I’d get it, if it’s hard to use in the kitchen, but it does sound lovely all the same. That said, I agree with Sarah above about the intro and melon stipulation.