Someone to Cook For

Josh and I had a ritual we performed every time we moved to another New York apartment: after a take-out dinner of Thai or Chinese with a celebratory bottle of good sparkling wine, eaten sitting Indian-style on the floor, I would head to the Laundromat to wash our bedding, and he would tackle the kitchen. To me, the bed seemed a natural enough place to start, considering we’d been awake packing into the early morning hours before the move, and were desperate for a good night’s sleep. But Josh couldn’t sit still, couldn’t even think of sleeping, until the kitchen was organized and he’d found a proper place for everything in it.

I’d return from putting the sheets into the wash to find him in the kitchen wearing his giant Bose headphones, rocking out silently to a punk band and unpacking boxes at a furious pace. I’d leave him alone with his solitary mission and wander through the other rooms, unloading a box of books here, arranging a cluster of pictures and knick-knacks on some table-top, making lists of all the things we needed to buy before the apartment could become a home (hand soap, a new bookcase, a rug). I’d accomplish nothing, really, aside from making a bigger mess, while he moved through the kitchen at rapid speed and with singular purpose. A few hours later, the bed would be made and I’d be lying on top of it, leafing through a forgotten book of poems, and he’d come to get me, to take me by the hand and lead me around the kitchen to show me what he had done.

Him, opening the cabinet above the sink: “Okay. I put pint glasses and water glasses on the first shelf, coffee cups above them, and up top, the cups and saucers, because we never use them;” then his smile would wrinkle around his eyes and his cadence would pick up speed, because he knew I was going to object—“orwecouldjusttakethemtogoodwillandthen—“

“Noooooo,” I’d say. “They’re a matching set, and they’re nice to use when we have people over for dinner.”

In the next cabinet: plates and bowls and ramekins; wineglasses. Wooden spoons, spatulas and whisks in this drawer, flatware in that one. Old wooden wine cases filled with platters and serving bowls and that set of ceramic wine goblets we got when we were married, stowed on the very top of the cabinets, beside the blender. He was always doing that, because he was tall: putting things up on the highest shelf where I couldn’t reach them. And on the shelves under the butcher block, within easy reach, the All-Clad, the cast-iron, the one requisite non-stick pan with the warped bottom that he hated but that we kept around at my request, for scrambling eggs.

I insisted upon certain things: the French glass jars that held dried beans and flours, the mint-green glass butter dish from Fishs Eddy, a pale-blue Ball jar of fresh flowers on the table beside the coffee-maker. But apart from those details, the kitchen, in a strange reversal of gender roles, was his.

We were on more equal footing before he went to culinary school. In the beginning of our relationship, we fumbled through dinner together. My latent vegetarianism caused me to gag when I touched raw meat, but Josh had a strange aversion to making salad—he hated to wash and spin the lettuce, which was one of my favorite chores, most likely because it was the first kitchen task with which my mother ever charged me. But after he learned how to properly hold a knife, to brunoise and make mirepoix, to whip up mother sauces and truss a chicken and cook fish en papillote, my meager skills were a little less necessary. I was still in charge of all greens—lettuce or kale or collards— of rinsing and washing and spinning them dry; and Josh was in charge of everything else. I found my place in the kitchen to be a comfortable perch where I could sip my wine and watch all the activity, and came to think of myself less as a cook and more as a consultant. I had a good palate, and I wasn’t afraid to give my input. “More salt,” was my most common directive, or “more acid,” or “What do you think would happen if you added chilies? Or pimenton?” Or, “Absolutely not. No curry.”

It was in this way that I came to be a good cook who didn’t really cook much of anything, and even if I did, he prepped it all for me. If you enjoy cooking, being partner to someone who does it for a living can be frustrating at times, because on some level you’re always forced either to defer to their expertise, or to turn a discussion about the best way to hard-boil an egg into some sort of enormous power struggle. (“Ashley, they come out better if you get the water boiling and then drop them in.” “But Josh, Alice—because in our kitchen we were on a first-name basis with Alice Waters—says to cover them with cool water and then bring it to the boil, and time it from there.” “Show me,” he’d say. “Show me where she says that.”).

But it can also have its perks. I did love to cook, at the heart of it, but I hated chopping things. And after Josh went to culinary school, I really never had to slice or chop another thing. I could choose something to cook, and do the shopping, and bring everything home, and while we spent half an hour sipping a cold drink and chatting, Josh would be like Edward Scissor-hands at the cutting board, and I’d wash up behind him as he went, and then everything was laid out on the butcher block in little bowls like you see on all the cooking shows on the Food Network. Then I’d cook the dinner, and usually he’d clean up. He never minded doing the dishes, which I loathed almost as much as chopping. I loved him for that.

But the biggest, most obvious benefit was that, during these years when we were broke—from the kind of broke where our friend Kelly moved into our junior one-bedroom in Chelsea to help us pay the rent, to the kind of broke where we could afford the parlor floor of a brownstone in Carroll Gardens but not much else—our kitchen became my favorite place in all of New York City to have dinner. And it wasn’t just, that, given what we could afford to spend on a typical evening out, we could eat better at home for less money than we could in a restaurant. It was that cooking was something he mostly did for me, and it was in this way that I felt most loved.

But I realized, also, that this was the way in which I was most needy, and I made up my mind to be more independent in the kitchen. Two weeks before he confessed he didn’t want to be married, I made Curly Kale and Potato soup with chorizo from Alice Water’s The Art of Simple Food, undoubtedly my favorite cookbook. I sliced the onions and cooked them slowly in the same pan from which I’d removed the browned chorizo. I scrubbed and sliced the potatoes and added them to the pan with the onions, threw in the washed and chopped kale, added chicken stock, salt, olive oil, and let it simmer all afternoon. It was a Sunday in early February, and Josh had a bad cold, and after the soup was on the stove I walked to the market and bought a few bags of oranges, and peeled them all and juiced them, and stocked the refrigerator with fresh-squeezed orange juice for him to drink. He watched TV, and lay in bed reading, and when the soup was ready, our friends Meryl and Chris joined us for dinner.

I remember that Sunday vividly because it was the first of the last of our days together. In hindsight, I see more clearly that he had begun to pull away from me toward a different life, but I had absolutely no notion of it at the time. He was grumpy, but that was understandable; he had a cold. He seemed anxious and agitated, but we were slated to leave the City three weeks later to move home to North Carolina, and there was a lot to be done. None of this phased me. Even then, only one thing seemed off, and even that I dismissed without difficulty. It was the look in his eyes— a bored, restless look, tinged, vaguely, by quiet rage. The kind of look you see on the face of a child who is trapped in time-out while all the other kids get to go out into the world and play. Which, as it turns out, is exactly how he was feeling. The metaphor is made even more apt by a metaphor he himself made later, in his case against our marriage, that he had hidden for years behind my apron strings, and I had mothered him, and he needed to be on his own to grow up. And like the petulant child he was, he got his way.

When we split up and I returned to the apartment in Brooklyn to gather my things and move them to Maine, the kitchen was the only room I left virtually intact. I took the flea-market table, the one that was homemade and not very sturdy but was perfect as a sideboard, and two 50s-era metal stools. But aside from those and my collection of juice glasses; the French terrines; the mint green butter dish; the blue Ball jar; the pale pink Depression-glass pitcher— I left everything as it was. I could barely stomach being in the kitchen— Lauren did all the packing in there—let alone the idea of ever again eating anything he’d touched. The room that had once been the happiest one in our home was now the one that felt most like a tomb.

I started working on this piece during my time in Maine, about this time last year, after Emily had moved from Rockland to Boston and I was living alone by myself for the first time in my life. I wrote:

My kitchen now—because for the first time in my life it is my kitchen—is spare in the most pitiful way. On a good day, the cabinets are stocked with cartons of chicken broth, two large cans of whole peeled tomatoes, with noodles and crackers. I have what I need to make egg-ribbon soup, or an omelet. In the refrigerator are a couple types of cheese from the Co-Op, a gallon of organic whole milk, plenty of Kate’s of Maine butter, Primo eggs, some kind of greens, and beer, or a bottle of wine. There is a loaf of bread in the freezer. On a bad day, I might be out of all but milk and eggs. And on the worst kind of day, I’ll awake to the realization that I don’t even have milk to warm for my coffee.

I’ve done a pretty good job of staving off the worst days, but the bad ones are frequent enough. On those days, I stare blankly into the fridge, then drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes, and the first thing I eat is family meal at Primo at 4 o’clock. It isn’t that I’m not hungry; there is just something about being alone that makes me lose my appetite. Which is probably why even when I do get a ride to the Co-Op or to Hannaford to stock up, I’m at a loss as to what to buy. I often wish I’d really learned how to cook. Not that I can’t cook, I can certainly manage, but really cook, the way he did. But even oftener, I wish I had someone to cook for.

In comparison to my kitchen now, in the little one-bedroom apartment whose large wide windows make it feel somehow urban even though it’s situated in sleepy downtown Manteo, the kitchen in Maine was stocked as well as the local grocery. I moved into this apartment—the first place I’ve lived alone by choice—just a week before we opened The Brine and Bottle. I look forward to the day I finally have time to pick up my glasses and plates and bowls, the French glass jars and the mint-green butter dish, which are all still at Lauren’s. I look forward to the day when the blue Ball jar will once again hold flowers. I look forward to cooking a meal there, maybe sometime this winter, when I can wrangle two days off in a row.

For now, I’m content in the kitchen at The Brine and Bottle, which will always be more Andrew’s than mine—the way the bar, perhaps, is mine more than his—but he’s willing to share it with me just the same. I’ve spent my whole working life tip-toeing around professional kitchens I had no claim to, and it took me a few weeks to get used to the idea that I was welcome there, but not much longer than that to realize it’s a place I want to be. I’ve gotten a little bolder about tying on an apron, and have graduated from peeling peanuts to actually helping make the deviled eggs. I brought The Art of Simple Food to the restaurant, and on Saturday evening I commandeered the stove to make a batch of Tomato Sauce with Benton’s Bacon and Onion, a head start on the lasagna I’d planned to make for Andrew’s birthday on Sunday. I’m determined to pick up where I left off a year and a half ago—to learn to be more confident in the kitchen; and maybe, along the way, to finally really learn to cook.

Knowing that his birthday was approaching, I asked Andrew last week if he had any comfort foods, besides General Tso’s chicken from Top China, or Chilli- cheese corn dog nuggets from Poor Richards, that he might like to eat. What I was trying to figure out is what I might be able to make him for his birthday. Which is tricky, as the intimidation factor involved in making Birthday Dinner for someone who cooks for a living is compounded by the fact that the Andrew doesn’t like cake.

“I don’t really have any foods like that anymore,” he said. We were standing in the kitchen at The B&B’s three-compartment sink, washing dishes together.

“None?” I asked.

He paused for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and said in his straightforward drawl, “I appreciate anything, as long as I don’t have to make it.”

“I know,” I said, nodding my head. “I know how that is.”

It is one of the greatest things we have in common.

The following recipe is an adaptation of the combination of two recipes from the aforementioned The Art of Simple Food. One of the best things about this cookbook is that Alice gives options for variations at the end of each recipe, and the result is always something new entirely. The bacon we use at The Brine and Bottle is from Allan Benton in Madisonville, Tennessee, and it’s this bacon that provides the sauce’s salty, smoky undertone. It’s crazy good bacon; I don’t refer to him as “The High Priest of Pork” for nothing.

Tomato Sauce with Benton’s Bacon and Onion

2 large yellow onions, chopped

10 cloves garlic, crushed and chopped coarse

4 large cans whole Italian tomatoes, hand-crushed, with juice

2 slices Benton’s slab bacon, cut into 1/4 inch pieces

2 tbs olive oil

small can (or tube) tomato paste

salt and pepper, to taste

Add 2 tbs olive oil to a pan, and heat over medium flame.

Add bacon to pan. (It is beyond gluttonous to cook this bacon in olive oil, but do it anyway. Trust me.)

Once bacon begins to brown, remove from pan with tongs, leaving bacon drippings in pan.

Add onions and garlic to bacon drippings in pan, and cook slowly until onions become translucent. Take care not to burn garlic.

Add 2/3 cup dry white wine and reduce over medium heat until almost all liquid has evaporated.

Stir in crushed tomatoes.

Season with salt and pepper as you go.

Bring entire contents to a low simmer, and allow sauce to reduce and thicken. When liquid has reduced by 1/2, add tomato paste and stir.

Then add browned bacon back to sauce.

Or if you’re like me, go ahead and add it back right after you bring the tomatoes to a simmer; otherwise, you’ll eat it all without meaning to, or knowing how it happened. A Bacon Blackout, if you will.