At the Table: Food and Family around the World - Ken Albala (2016)

Austria

Katerina Nussdorfer

Nina knows: however busy the day, however crazy the traffic, however crowded the shops before Christmas, a calm, unhurried, and warm setting awaits her at home in the evening—dinner with her family. That Nina is the center of this story is no surprise—it is she, after all, who will cook the meal tonight as well as most other meals for the family. The family is her husband, Oliver, and their two children, ages 10 and 2½. They live in a suburban house in the 22nd district of Vienna, and though food shopping habits in Vienna are made easy by the proliferation of supermarkets, bakeries, and fast food on every street corner, living in this part of town means having to plan ahead when it comes to groceries. The nearest supermarket is only reachable by car or public bus that departs every half hour in the evening, and most supermarkets will be closed after 7:00 p.m. and on Sundays. So for this evening, when Nina planned to make spaghetti Bolognese, she had to procure all the ingredients for the dinner ahead of time. Getting ingredients for a dinner as simple as spaghetti with sauce could still be a challenge when one has to cater to the different needs of family members: her family, though not vegetarian, rarely eats meat (they have “chili con soya,” for example, instead of chili con carne, as Nina reports), her 10-year-old daughter is the pickiest of eaters and will eat no visible carrots, onions, garlic, etc. Her toddler will not eat much in quantity. In order to make this meal in a way that it meets everyone’s needs and requirements, Nina cooks the sauce with meat bought from the butcher, which means more expensive but also better in quality and freshly minced in front of her eyes. To compensate for the lack of flavor-boosting garlic and onion, she cracks open a jar of ready-made, store-bought, supermarket-brand sauce—sugo with herbs—and adds it to the pan where the meat is already sautéing in Croatian, or more specifically Dalmatian, olive oil, the rare but still present immigrant flavor in their kitchen. That the sauce from the jar is laced with additives, modified starch, glucose syrup, acidifying agents, yeast extract, and too much sodium does not seem to be of any concern. This sauce will go over spaghetti—a special kind made of spelt flour. Spelt generally is a really popular choice in Austria, considered healthier, tastier, and preferred over plain wheat products. Nina opens the small pack of pasta. Most dry pasta in Austrian supermarkets is sold in two-pound packs unless it is a specialty or Italian brand of pasta. Nina measures the amount needed by consulting Oliver, then slides a handful of beige-grayish spaghetti out of the pack and puts it in the already boiling salted water. She doesn’t normally buy this kind of pasta, and both she and Oliver wonder out loud how it will taste and, most important, if their daughter will accept it, especially since, as Nina comments, it is rather pricey. Most likely they will continue eating regular dry pasta in the future, with occasional treats of other varieties, since price is an important factor when buying food, even for middle-class families. When it comes to shopping for food, the errands are divided, with Nina buying the ingredients when she needs to cook a particular meal and Oliver shopping for bulkier pantry staples and drinks. They normally shop in Spar and Billa and sometimes in the discount store Hofer, with the choice mainly influenced by the convenient location of the supermarkets (they go shopping by car) and by good produce and competitive prices.

Albala

A family in Austria enjoying an informal dinner of Spaghetti Bolognese. (Courtesy of Katerina Nussdorfer)

Curious about all the hustle and bustle in the kitchen, the toddler comes to see what is going on, and Nina props him up on a stool. Together they fish out a long string of spaghetti in order to test it for doneness. Not so curious is the 10-year-old girl, who sometime into the cooking process comes down from her room upstairs where she was playing computer games. She shows no interest in cooking despite being a picky eater, which means that a lot of the food choices are made around her needs. She doesn’t come down because of inviting smells and intriguing sounds coming from the kitchen or because of hunger but because she says she was bored with the game. Sometimes she doesn’t come down at all during dinner, especially if she has eaten a snack before, which for many schoolchildren means a roll with cold cuts and/or cheese and pickles (Wurstsemmel), or she will eat later on in the evening. And that is okay with her parents. Though they always try to come together at the dinner table, they don’t want to have the clock decide when to eat. Even so, the regularity and familiarity of the evening family meal carries a lot of emotional meaning for both parents involved. As Oliver reports, he grew up with his only hot meal being cooked for lunch by his grandmother and with a usual dinner of cold bread, sausages, and snacks, so this new family dinner ritual is something he has come to really appreciate and cherish, especially since he himself rarely cooks it. Nina says that they try to eat together every night, which they consider an achievement and luxury, especially since everyone eats their lunch alone, either at work, in school/kindergarten, or at home or out (Oliver is a stay-home dad at the moment), and breakfast is a rushed affair if it happens at all. Oliver’s childhood story is not so unusual, though, since most Austrians used to eat their big warm meal at lunchtime and would only have a light supper or an Abendbrot (buttered bread, cheese, and cold cuts). Things have changed a lot in the last two decades, mainly due to altered schedules and prolonged working hours that allow for no big family lunch break; the dispersion of workplaces and their distance relative to the home also means that working and oftentimes tired parents come back home only around or after 6:00 p.m. And when they are home, that much-romanticized cooked meal has to be cooked by someone!

Nina, luckily for her family, is that someone, and tonight she will treat her husband and children to spelt spaghetti with store-bought sauce Bolognese and a salad to accompany it all. For this dinner, she chose Napa cabbage that she bought in the local supermarket. She picked it based on two factors: locality and seasonality. The other salads on offer, she says, came from Italy or Spain, and this deterred her from buying them because of the carbon footprint but mainly because they would probably be full of chemicals and taste like nothing as well. Nina insists that salad be present at their table, and regardless of the kind, it is always seasoned with a simple oil and vinegar lemon dressing, but she uses various oils and vinegars to achieve different tastes, though one oil—the homemade Dalmatian olive oil—seems to prevail. For tonight’s salad she chose the Dalmatian olive oil and mixed it with a vinegar infused with rosemary and mixed herbs.

The one cooking task that the children and husband help with takes place while Nina is finishing up the sauce and the pasta. The children help Oliver cut the salad and place it in a large plastic salad bowl. The seasoning, however, is still left to Nina. The children do not normally help with preparing the food, Nina says, and they, the parents, do not insist on involving them in the process. For them, it is more important that the family comes together that one time a day, around the dinner table, in an act of commensality in which the focus is not only on the food but just as much on the social aspect of communicating, sharing the daily events, and providing a nurturing familial atmosphere for the children.

Nina takes special pride in the fact that she tries to cook every day, and while one could argue that very little and quite simple cooking takes place for this particular dinner, one could also see how easily that cooking might be replaced by other available shortcuts, such as ready-made meat sauces, microwavable pasta dinners, etc. Austrian households as a rule do not have microwave ovens, and it is not unusual for households to not have an electric kettle or a toaster; the latter is especially seen as a specialty item. Since Austrian bread is among the best in the world, bakeries are an essential part of Austrians’ daily food habits, and sliced, bagged supermarket toast bread is considered a special bread item rather than an everyday staple. Nina herself cooks her meal on a glass-ceramic stove top that has a fitted oven underneath as well. While it is true that this particular meal does not take longer than half an hour to prepare, perhaps because some shortcuts are used—ready-made sauce instead of vegetables and herbs that would take somewhat longer to prep (chop, cut, fry)—there is still cooking being done and the bulk of it by Nina too. On days when she comes back from work especially tired or doesn’t feel well—she works part-time 25 hours a week but also helps her sister’s newly opened business—the family simply eats what is in the fridge, sandwiches, cold cuts, leftovers, or snacks. Nina doesn’t mind that all the cooking falls on her; in fact, she insists that she enjoys doing it and finds it calming after a long day away from the home. They very rarely order food to be delivered, though they used to order more (mainly pizza) when they lived together in the inner city and had no kids. Oliver hardly ever cooks; still, there is a current shift in gender roles when it comes to the house and kitchen chores of young Austrian families, with more and more men cooking not only sporadically and for fun but also on a steady basis, helping or sometimes even replacing the woman’s traditional role in the kitchen. Whether this is a trend and to what extent family background, upbringing, and social class influence these practices is still open to research. When it comes to Nina’s kitchen, she is the one who reigns there, but Oliver does make up for not cooking by taking over the clearing of the table and loading the dishwasher and before that for setting it as well.

Stove-Top Range

It was not until the proliferation of cast-iron ovens in the 19th century that cooking on a stove top became common in households. These were replaced with gas and electricity, but we now take for granted that one cooks facing the stove. In wealthy households, the size and complexity of the stove became a mark of social status, and often a so- called trophy kitchen would be outfitted with a Viking range or Aga cooker but rarely if ever actually used. Interestingly, the kitchen became more important as a site for entertaining or a performative space for men than a place for the daily routine of cooking.

For this Oliver engages the children, and they help him bring the plates and set the table. No special attention is given to the rules for setting the table—everything is rather relaxed and easygoing. The dishware is chosen specially for the occasion—they always eat pasta in these spaghetti bowls. There is no tablecloth, but there are paper napkins. The cutlery is set in such a way that the spoons are on the left and the knives and forks are together on the right. This is done by Oliver at the very beginning, shortly after Nina starts cooking and way before the children help set the rest of the table. The dishware and cutlery are ordinary and are also not viewed as special or valuable, though they are somewhat special in function (spaghetti bowls). There are knives set on the table, and though not traditionally used for eating spaghetti, they are later on used to cut up the pasta in smaller pieces. There is a heavy accent on convenience, and the fact that there is a family sit-down cooked meal is cherished above all, with the other details kept at a bare minimum in order to make things easier for Nina and simpler for everyone else. There is a always something decorative on the table that Nina adds from behind the stove, and this time one can notice two votive candles in star-shaped holders and a tiny Christmas tree, which is season appropriate, it being the beginning of December and Advent, though both parents agree that religion itself plays no role whatsoever in the family’s eating practices. There is no special dress; everyone is in their daily clothes, and the toddler is in his tights. There is no music. The TV is off this time, but sometimes it does stay on in the background.

The meal is served and eaten on the dinner table, which is between the open-plan kitchen and the living room/seating area, and all meals, unless they are snacks in front of the TV/computer, are eaten there. In summer the room opens to the garden with huge French windows and makes it feel like al fresco dining. Nina plants a lot of herbs and vegetables in the garden, and these are an important part of their meals as well. There is a cozy feeling in the dining area because of the nearby cooking island and bar that displays fruit, various bottles, tea boxes, and other food and family items, and the lighting is kept soft and low.

Once everything is cooked, the sauce is brought to the table in the pot in which it was cooked, and the pasta is served in a big ceramic bowl, part of the spaghetti set. There is a plate in front of everyone. Almost immediately everyone helps themselves, though Oliver puts the spaghetti in the children’s bowls, especially since the toddler, who sits in a high chair, cannot reach very far. The salad is served in a large plastic bowl, but no additional salad bowls are used—everyone eats directly from the salad bowl, which is only the parents actually. There is also a freshly opened chunk of Parmesan cheese placed on the table on a small plate with a large four-sided grater next to it, and everyone grates their own cheese. There is a lot of reaching for the cheese but little passing; there are no (austere) table manners, neither observed nor implied, and none have been taught to the children. The only serving is done by Oliver not because of hierarchy but because of convenience, and the passing is only of the cheese and grater. It is difficult to see how much the manners would change if the occasion was more formal, but the assumption is that these would only superficially change, with perhaps more thank-yous and more polite, contained manners. But at this very dinner—which, according to both Nina and Oliver, is how they usually eat—there is no order or hierarchy; everyone eats when and as much as they want, which for both children means very little. The daughter is done in 5 minutes. She mainly picks at the food and then, without asking to be excused, leaves the table and disappears upstairs, while the toddler doesn’t linger much longer either. Within 15 minutes it is only the parents left at the table. The atmosphere is exceptionally informal, and there are no taboo topics—mostly, the daily events around school, kindergarten, work, and family are discussed without any particular order or attention.

Interestingly enough, there are no drinks during the meal, not even tap water, and it is only after the kids have left that Oliver gets up to bring soda, an herbal Austrian drink, of a generic supermarket brand. Ordinary water tumblers are used. The drinks are served after the meal so that the children avoid having them, because, Oliver says, the drinks are high in sugar and not good for them, but they do not want to bring any attention to this in front of them. During the rest of the meal, which goes on for another 10 minutes, Oliver gets up and already starts clearing the table while Nina is still seated eating. She decided that she will have some more salad later on in the evening and tells Oliver to take it away. He does some small chores in the kitchen, goes to his study for a while, and then comes back and sits down. They continue talking for another half hour, while one or the other occasionally gets up to clear a remaining plate or napkin from the table. The table is not cleaned in any particular way. The leftovers are simply put aside to be had later on or the day after. About 20 minutes after the meal, Oliver rummages in the cupboards, unwraps an already open milk chocolate bar (big 300-gram supermarket brand), and eats a few pieces. He doesn’t offer any to Nina, who in the meantime has gotten her iron supplement and, after stirring some into a tall glass of water, sips it through a straw while sitting down and chatting away. Oliver, in the meantime, has started eating blanched almonds with a spoon, directly from the bag. It almost appears as if there is a metadinner taking place, a less structured but a more focused and intimate one whereby the relationship between man and woman and the comfort of familiar food is stripped of social expectations and norms, all the while remaining entirely and even charmingly human.

Dinner is done, and tomorrow, regardless of what the day throws at every one of them, in the evening they will all come together around the table, where Nina will treat them to yet another cooked meal with the hope that years from now even if they don’t remember exactly what they had to eat that very night, they will remember that they had it together, as a family.

Quick Spaghetti Bolognese

Serves 4 people

⅔ pound minced beef

⅔ pound spaghetti (spelt)

1 jar of sugo (tomato sauce) with herbs

olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

1.Start by heating some olive oil in which to fry/sauté the minced beef. Cook for about 20 minutes or until the meat is cooked.

2.Add the sugo sauce, stir in, season to taste, cook for another 5 minutes, and remove from heat.

3.Serve over spaghetti, already cooked in salted boiling water.