I 've heard a lot of questions asked at parties but never, until Labor Day weekend, this one: "Dean, is this the finest chinois you have?" The questioner, holding a pot of hot broth, didn't like the answer ("That's all I've got.") and began looking for cheesecloth to line the conical strainer. Rochelle Reid Myers from West Virginia, known online as Malawry, wanted this broth well and truly strained.

The whole point of this party was to make food and eat it, with 100 or so other folks.

My husband and I had met exactly one of the 15 people stuffed in and around this kitchen before: Dean McCord, nom de Internet, Varmint, whose Dixie Trail home the horde had invaded.

But I felt as if I knew most of them to some extent, like Katie Loeb from Philadelphia, who sent me her recipe for limoncello liqueur. We met on an online forum called eGullet (www.egullet.org).

Its formal name is the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, and it has more than 19,000 members. Chefs, big-name food writers and anyone with opinions discuss restaurants, cooking, cocktails, baking and more. There's great food writing, discussions with chefs and online culinary instruction. The volunteer-operated organization, a nonprofit, also offers scholarships and grants.

Any members could come, and they did, from Canada, Florida, Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Jersey (bearing homegrown Jersey tomatoes) and other places. About 130 tickets to the pig picking were sold, as this was intended to raise money for eGullet as well as to have fun. But some people couldn't make it, fearing gas shortages and struggling with pump prices.

Of course, Gulf Coast residents were absent -- physically, at least. Their presence was everywhere.

After Hurricane Katrina, there was serious discussion of whether the pig picking should go on. Some wondered whether it made sense to have fun in the face of loss that became personal with the devastation of some members' lives.

But the hurricane actually made something like this seemingly trivial get-together more important. As after the Sept. 11 attacks four years ago, I realized how lucky we are to have the chance to feed our friends and laugh together over a glass of wine.

Human beings seem to require a large-scale disaster, a whomp upside the head, to remind us of this simple fact. And it's terrible how quickly we forget it.

Until that weekend, I thought community was not really possible where the relationships take place via keyboards, servers and bytes beaming through the air. And that in such a situation, the caring that's part of community must be at a distance.

But community is found in many places: in neighborhoods, at churches, through a computer or over a roasting pig.

As the 120-pound guest of honor reclined in Varmint's bathtub, soaking up a brine, the cooks took over the kitchen, peeling peaches, mixing biscuits, shredding duck and chicken for Brunswick stew, slicing squash and chopping tomatoes and okra.

Much of the food and drink was donated. I agreed to make deviled eggs -- 11 dozen of them. That's 264 stuffed halves, if you're counting.

Fortunately, with six sets of hands peeling the eggs, the deviling went quickly. I'd never made that many deviled eggs before, and like many there cooking in bulk, I abandoned recipes for the four different flavors, tossing in ingredients to taste.

Varmint's refrigerator was groaning, so the eggs were ferried to the fridge of a neighbor, Beth Yerxa (aka VaNC), who vowed to defend them from her hungry husband.

At one point, nine people were cooking at once, but the kitchen wasn't as trashed as you'd think. It helped that some were professional chefs who knew how to behave, calling "hot, behind you" when moving a large vat of stew off the stove. They managed to avoid the nonprofessionals, like me, who were dancing to the tunes on the stereo.

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