TO MY BEAUTIFUL PARENTS, RITA ELLIS HAMMER, WHO TAUGHT ME ABOUT SAFETY, AND THE LATE CY ALTMAN, WHO TAUGHT ME ABOUT FOOD. AND TO MY DEAR SUSAN, WHO TEACHES ME EVERY DAY ABOUT LOVE. PROLOGUE There is poetry in food, kindness in the act of preparing it, and peace in sharing it. There are gray areas: years ago, I''d heard about a restaurant where hundreds of samurai swords hang, point down, from the ceiling, directly over the heads of the diners while they eat. This is not kind; this is sociopathic. But in the act of preparing the most mundane grilled cheese--choosing the cheese, buttering the bread, warming the pan, pressing down the sandwich with the flat of your grandmother''s spatula so the cheese melts and the bread tightens and crackles and smooths like solid silk--lies an inherent and basic subconscious attention to detail that exists almost nowhere else in our lives, except in the small daily rituals that we all have. You squeeze your toothpaste onto your toothbrush in exactly the same manner every single morning and every single night. When you step out of the shower, you towel dry your hair before putting your makeup on.

You shave one side of your face before the other, and that''s the way you''ve done it since you were in college. Mundane though they may be, these are the rituals that make us who we are. But they don''t necessarily make us kind. The act of preparing food for ourselves, and for others, does. And the act of conviviality, of sharing it with others--Marion Cunningham called it modern tribal fire --is what makes us human, whether it is tarted up and tortured into vertical excess, or nothing more than butter spread on a piece of bread. I did not grow up in a home that valued conviviality; my mother and grandmother cooked our meals--plain but hearty, filling, sometimes delicious and sometimes immolated, they were not experimental or contrived until the mid-''70s, when my mother went on a fondue binge like the rest of middle-class America. Generally, we ate in silence drowned out by the presence of a small Zenith black-and-white television that sat, like a dinner guest, at the end of our table. While eating, we would watch Name That Tune! , my mother calling out between bites of limp, canned asparagus, "I can name it in three notes!" while my father sipped his Scotch and I picked at the flecks of onion in my meat loaf.

After I was done, I climbed down from my chair and went into my bedroom, where I turned on my own television set and watched as reality and make-believe converged. There were fake families sitting around their own fake tables, eating fake dinners: there was the Brady Bunch, with its gay father and wing-nut maid and libidinous eldest son. There was the Partridge Family, with its catatonic little sister who played the tambourine like a methadone addict, and a lead singer who looked more like a lady than his sister. There were the simpering, unsmiling Waltons, with their fake farmhouse that always looked filthy, and a commie grandfather living upstairs in the attic. "See him," my grandmother Gaga once said to me, tapping her long "Cherries in the Snow"-shellacked fingernail on the round glass television screen after barging into my room with the last potato latke. "The man was a commie, blacklisted by McCarthy." And then she slammed the door behind her. They were all convivial, casserole-passing people, even though they didn''t actually exist ; for me, the line between television family dinners and reality was blurred like a picture taken from a shaky camera, and when I saw in the news that Ellen Corby had had a stroke, all I could think of was who''s going to make biscuits for John-Boy now that Grandma can''t move her arms? One night, after a silent dinner of what was marketed as chicken roll--chicken pieces that were deboned and then mechanically compressed into a loaf shape for easy slicing--I left the table where my parents were watching Let''s Make a Deal! , went into my room, and turned on a local television station.

A Southern Prayer-a-Thon had interrupted regular broadcasting, so instead of seeing The Brady Bunch , there was a greasy, black-haired, slick-suited man marching across a stage, sobbing like a baby, and telling me that if only I''d call and offer money, that Jesus would give me whatever I wanted. I scribbled down the number with a chewed-on number-two pencil, crept across the hallway into my parents'' room, picked up the phone, and called. A male voice answered with, "Hello! Have you taken Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior?" I cupped my hand around the mouthpiece and whispered, "No, I haven''t. I''m a Jew." I could hear him light up like a pinball machine, all the way from Mississippi. "Well, do you want to?" he asked, hopefully. "Not really," I said. "Then what can I do for you?" he asked, suddenly all business.

"You said that if I offered some money, then Jesus would give me what I want." "That''s right," he replied. "Do you have money to send us?" "I do. About six dollars." "And what do you want Jesus to help you with?" "I want a big family and a big table where everyone sits down together, like the Waltons"--I thought for a minute--"but without the commie grandfather. And I want everyone to be happy." The man cleared his throat and promised to send me an envelope for the cash. "You have a good night and God bless," he said before he hung up.

I lusted after conviviality, and was drawn like a moth to the modern tribal fire; I yearned for the poetry that food writes. But I was also lured to the kitchen, to the standing there and the cooking and the serving and the feeding, because, I was certain, it would bring magic and happiness. Everything begins and ends for me in front of my stove, and if D-Day were to strike me down where I stood, where I stood would likely be right there , in my kitchen. Ultimately, I found the poetry, and even the fire. But until I shared my kitchen with Susan, I hadn''t found the peace. CHAPTER 1 Bread and Cheese In my family, we tend to overdo. Like throwbacks from another time and another era, we blanket the commonplace with a heavy cloak of formality; we struggle to elevate the mundane to the extraordinary, the simple to the dazzling. Even if it isn''t.

Especially. One Sunday morning in my tiny midtown studio apartment, I brought in a bag of still-warm pumpernickel bagels, smoked salmon, and weighty containers of thick, scallion cream cheese for two college friends who were lying on an air mattress in the middle of my living room floor, sleeping off a Hendrick''s Gin hangover from a party the night before. I told my Aunt Sylvia later that day that I had "hosted a brunch." It wasn''t exactly a lie. Once, Aunt Sylvia--a comely, Ava Gardner lookalike now pushing ninety-three--had waited for her fifteen-year-old granddaughter to return from a neighborhood party, unaccountably attended by a group of leather-jacketed hooligans carrying travel bongs in their knapsacks. "Did any of the nice young gentlemen ask you to dance?" she asked her granddaughter the next morning. "Yes, Grandma," Rebecca answered, rolling her eyes, "they did. Right after they threw up on my shoes.

" In my family, nice is perfectly fine. But fancy is always much better, and what we seem, genetically, to aspire to. My cousin Eleanor once cooked Thanksgiving dinner out of The French Laundry Cookbook , stopping just short of Thomas Keller''s Oysters and Pearls because she didn''t have time to make a sabayon of pearl tapioca before the guests showed up. That same year, Susan made her Thanksgiving recipes from a cookbook that her mother assembled, chapter by chapter, in 1959, with S&H Green Stamps. It involved a green bean casserole with the little crispy fried onions on top. During holidays, my family likes to dress up in outfits, like one might for an early-twentieth-century costume party involving handheld masks on sticks, formal bowing, and games of chance. Instead of picking out plain, normal clothes to wear to family functions--a skirt, a favorite sweater, maybe a brooch--we generally like to assemble in well-considered, thematic get-ups that, barring an abrupt conversion to Presbyterianism, we might not otherwise ever be seen in at any other time of year, like bright-red corduroy trousers and plaid sport coats, or hacking jackets with elbow patches that imply we will be running with the hounds just as soon as sherry hour is over. Susan''s family also dresses up in outfits, which usually include velvet pants bought at a church rummage sale in 1968, and spangle-embellished slip-ons acquired during the G.

Fox after-Christmas sale, right before the store went out of business in 1982. Everyone always looks very nice . In my family, we aim for the swank and the rococo, as if this way of living offers some sort of inherent security and protection from the plebian, the dangerous, and the more unpredictable parts of life. * * * On the Thanksgiving before I met Susan, my cousins and I were dressed in Scottish tweeds and tartans, cashmere and velvet, each of us straining our voices to be heard over the din and past the array of drained bottles of Sinskey Pinot Noir and Sonoma-Cutrer Russian River Chardonnay so oaky and rich that it poured like thick maple syrup on pancakes. The hyperextended, French Provincial table had been opened up using every available leaf; there were twenty of us, growing louder and more emphatic with every cut-crystal goblet of wine drunk. Being an eavesdropper at one of our dinners would have been like watching a master weaver at a treadle loom--the c.