Rituals and Habits: conscious choices to slow down with Anna Jones
[Series] On Slow Living #7
December 22, 2024
Be it through compulsory experimentation, familial apprenticeship, or sheer personal passion many of us learn to fire up the range, turn the dial to 350, grind seeds into spice, and make things. I’m definitely one of these folks. For me, food is more than fuel. It’s energy, pleasure, land, place, ritual, and sustenance. It’s something that cannot be separated from our humanity. Therefore it probably won’t come as a tremendous shock that I’ve prioritized and spent an ungodly amount of hours figuring out how to cook and to cook well.
I love food. Better said, I love to eat. Okay, let me be even more specific. I’m fascinated by taste. The effects of which can be either explosive or subtle, pungent or sweet yet have the power to make one pause, salivate, remember, or the most obvious, relish (or not) eating. How we experience flavor is something quite special. It is exposed during the preparation and cooking, and savored throughout consumption. Taste goes beyond our primal need for satiation. Like our other senses, it is a threshold. The bounty and magic of the earth, combined with ancestral memory and skilled hands, make food and flavor come alive.
My husband often asks me why I never pursued a career in food, as I can happily spend an afternoon fine tuning my pastry dough, or making cake, galette, stew, bread, you name it. I have worked in kitchens and bakeries while at university and a little in my twenties. Today I have no desire to work in a commercial kitchen. But I know this is not what my husband is talking about. What he sees is the spark.
More than anything, I’m just a damn fine home cook who loves to experiment. Right now, I’m going in and out writing this piece and cutting kabocha, carrots, and tofu for a winter vegetable curry. The squash is from our garden, the kefir lime leaves from my friend’s farm on Kauai, the way I prepared the basmati is how I watched Joanna make it last year. It weaves together a connected life…and one that continues with each meal. This is what I love about food, cooking, sharing, and eating. It’s this living thing.
A good meal makes an impression. I can recall the pleasure and flavor of a meal I’ve had over twenty years ago just as clearly as the one I had last month with my friend in Santa Fe. It’s like the delicious sugo my auntie would make that was near and dear to her Napoletana grandma or the memorable dishes I ate in Portugal a couple years back, infused with coriander, cinnamon, and salt. It’s that particular bowl of soup off Clay and Kearny in San Francisco’s Chinatown, or that Japanese meal while visiting my family in Maui when I was 10, or the spices and sauces which blew my mind while traveling throughout Rajasthan or Oaxaca. All of it informs my approach to cooking and amplifies my excitement to eat it. I don’t know what this says about me. Enthusiastic, interested, probably obsessed.
I did recently cook for a friend's forthcoming cookbook photo shoot and had the time of my life. It was a high that I’m sadly still coming down from, yet it reminded me just how much I enjoy the textural and ephemeral art form called cooking—It’s made and then it’s gone. So whether it’s for collaborative projects, small groups, intimate events, or my friends and family, I love the entire cooking process.
When it comes to taste and flavor, the culinary duo behind the creative act of cooking, there’s still so much more to discover and understand. Keeping them in mind is what it takes in order to transform raw ingredients into something regionally or personally distinct. Sure, food is about plants, animals, methods, and spices. But more importantly it’s about people and place and the present moment (the time when we eat). Taste and flavor tells the story of trade, culture, migration, and family. Cooking a recipe from someone is like borrowing their clothes or living in their home for a couple days. It reveals something particular: who they are, what they love, what makes them tick, how they comfort themselves for Sunday lunch or Thursday dinner.
Today I have a food writer, author, stylist, and exceptional cook Anna Jones share her reflections on living slowly. Her words and recipes inspire me. She’s a cool lady and one I’d love to share a meal with. And though we’ve yet to meet in person, I know we’d definitely have a lot of fun in the kitchen.
Thanks Anna,
Yours Erin
What does slow living mean to you?
Where I live in Hackney, East London life can feel fast. Life is busy and bustling and everyone is doing great, interesting things. There is a big forward-moving energy here—pushing, striving, hustling and doing. I get a lot from this energy and the energy of the city. I tend towards a full, frenetic life which is a choice I lean into. So I need to remind myself to slow down.
Some things anchor me and slow me down, from sitting with my kids to starting the day by lighting a candle and putting the radio on. Slow living also shows up in the choices I make around the food I eat and the things I bring into my home. I have the great privilege of being able to make choices on where I buy my food from and I try to support food grown and produced in a way that supports the livelihoods of the people who make it and the world around us. The same goes for the clothes I wear and the things I put in our home. That feels like another aspect of slow living to me.
What's one thing (action, mindset, ritual, habit, etc.) that's essential to maintain it in your day to day life?
I have two young children and time feels like it's flying by so there is not always as much time as I would like to step away from the day-to-day. But often I have to remind myself that the day-to-day is the ritual, that being a mother of young kids is the work and to lean into the beauty of the minutia of that. There will come a time when there is more space and time and I know I will crave being back in these messy wonderful days.
Often life feels so full it's hard to find any spaces but I've realized that the ritual and habit can be the most simple moments. A flannel with lavender oil on for us all to sniff deeply at bath time, a candle on our breakfast table in the winter that sets the tone for the day, laying the table very quickly to make our meals feel more of an event. Reminding myself of the beauty and preciousness of all this amongst the business and tiredness feels like the kindest and most powerful thing I can do.
How do you ensure that a little bit of wildness and or nature remains close? And do you think it's important or necessary?
I try to get outside at least once a day with my kids. On very very rainy days this does not happen but most other days we try to go outside. I am lucky to live close to a big expanse of green space and it's possible to be in the Hackney marshes and walk for a couple of hours without feeling like you are in the city. I try to do one long walk a week on my own for a bit of headspace and to take in how things outside are changing. The food I cook also brings nature in and provides my connection with the seasons and what is happening in the soil and the fields. This is so important to how I cook and roots me in the season, it feels fundamental to how I live.
P.S. have a blessed and light-filled Solstice, Christmas, and New Year! And enjoy cooking, sharing, and gathering together to eat with those you love.
Enjoy all of Anna’s delicious flavors:
Loads of delicious recipes to discover over the holidays!
She’s got a great newsletter, The Anna Jones Newsletter
