Home Cooked: A Linger-at-the-Table Family Culture

Tips to Create a Linger-at-the-Table Culture in Your Family

By Mandi Gerth

Not all of us grow up cooking with our parents. In fact, I affectionately tease my mother that she raised her children on a sparese menu of sloppy joes, chicken and wild rice, and meatloaf. She preffered eating out to eating in—so that’s what we did. Not until college did I learn to prepare my own food. I looked for recipes with minimal ingredients to save money, but I had more to learn than shopping on a budget. I had to learn to cook with ingredients that were foreign to me—like parmesan cheese that didn’t come in a gree canister.

With practiceand over time, I learned to love cooking. but home-coooked meals are not all about the cooking.

Last weekend, three of our children were home for dinner, and it took almost an hour to get around to clearing the dishes. There are days when volleyball games run late and we reheat leftovers or stop for burgers on the way home. Home-cooked meals and lingering conversation are not a nightly occurence for us, but they do happen regularly because they are a part of our family culture—a culture that was built one meal at a time.

This didn’t happen by accident. When my children were young, we began inviting a couple over from our church who lived nearby. Their nest was empty, and my frined would help me prepare pasta sauce, bake bread, or sear sausages while his wife played with our children. After dinner and bedtime stories, the adults would linger around the table with a bottle of wine and talk about anything and everything.

This practice formatively shaped our family culture. My children are now usually the first to comment, “It’s been a while since we’ve had anyone over for dinner.” My family has become a group of people who want to cook good food and talk long into the night. We became those people because of that early friendship and the habits it formed in all of us. Habits we continue to work on. Habits that have yielded manifod joy as we have used these moments at the end of dinner to discover deep truths about ourselves and our guests, our children and their friends.

Mandi Gerth lives in Dallas, TX, where she teaches and writes about classical education. For over twenty years, she and her husband have labored to build a family culture for their five children that values books, baseball, museums, home-cooked meals, and conversation about ideas. You can follow Mandi on Instagram @mrsgerthteaches or subscribe to her Substack at mrsgerthteaches.substack.com.