On Saturday (November 6) Kathryn Tsandikos sat at one end of a table chatting with visitors and signing copies of Two Up and a Bag of Chips!, her history of George’s Coney Island restaurant. She was within arm’s reach of a pile of boxes of four-inch snack pies. These were Table Talk pies.

This made sense for the very well-attended session at the TidePool BookStore. The pies came courtesy of Harry Kokkinis, husband of Kathryn and president of the pie-making enterprise.

The name on the boxes (“Table Talk”) fit the occasion.

Kathryn spent lots of time talking at that table. She lingered with each patron who asked her to sign a copy of her 144-page history of George’s Coney Island. Talk included relatives, neighborhoods, restaurant booths, and more. I imagine she gracefully dodged a few attempts to wheedle the “secret-sauce” recipe from her.

While watching the signing/talking, I asked Harry about the origins of the Table Talk name. I assumed it might have been inspired by the 500-year-old collection of sayings attributed to Martin Luther–Table Talk. (In German, it’s Tischreden. The reden verb seems suggests a conversation is going on, as compared to other talk-and-speak verbs such as sprechen or sagen. Maybe Table Chat would be better?)

But I was wrong. There is no connection between the two Table Talks of Worcester and Wittenberg.

Harry said the name goes back to the 1920s when Theodore Tonna and Angelo Cotsidas cooked up the company. They wanted a name based on Tonna’s initials, “T.T.” We did not speculate too much on the double-T names that the founders might have rejected. Tasty Treats? Tempting Tarts? Terrific Turnovers? Tonna and Cotsidas made a Top-Tier choice.

It certainly felt right on Saturday afternoon. “Table Talk” evokes the togetherness and conviviality that many of us may have felt has been missing or minimized during this pandemic. We enjoyed seeing the table-talking going on right before us,

Still, the conversation got me going back to Luther’s Table Talk (which can be bought through TidePool!)
Most of the collection includes Luther’s utterances while relaxing with various companions around the dinner table at the Luthers’ home, Lutherhaus. One scholar summed up the typical guests as “…exiled clergymen, escaped nuns, government officials, visitors from abroad, and colleagues of Luther in the university who frequently stopped in….”).

Luther’s sharing, based on shorthand notes and best-guess memories of some attentive attendees provide some great insight into Luther and his times. Some sharing are long, others short. Here are a couple of samples:

One snippet that might raise an eyebrow or two: “One shouldn’t whip children too hard.”

Another is clearly timeless and relevant: “A lie is like a snowball. The longer it is rolled on the ground the larger it becomes.”

Not surprisingly, food, comes up occasionally during the sessions with Luther. One of the participants, Johannes Mathesius (1504-1565), left this description: “We used to call his conversation the condiments of the meal because we preferred it to all spices and dainty food.”

It’s no disrespect to say that I think the four-inch pies and Coney Island hot dogs fell into the category of “spices and dainty food” on Saturday. Kathryn provided the condiments.