Of Romance and Cooking
She and I learned to cook together.
We'd only been together for six months when we moved into the attic apartment of a converted Chicago brownstone. Wrigley Field was one mile north, and the elevated train stopped three doors down. Standing on our balcony, in fact, you could reach out and touch the northbound train as it whisked past.
Soon we invited my parents over for a special, home-cooked meal. She found a recipe for chicken that involved baking and then barbecuing — or was it barbecuing and then baking? — something that needed to be cooked so many different, seemingly redundant, ways that the cooking gods must be appeased by the pure ritual nature of the effort.
She would have to start cooking before I came home from work.
That night, I stepped off the train at our stop onto a platform enveloped in smoke. I heard the conductor say that they'd be holding until the disturbance ahead cleared. I saw the fire trucks in front of our apartment, and, as I ran up the stairs, I met firemen, laughing, on their way down.
She had never barbecued before. She knew it needed to be done outside — on the balcony. She also knew that lighter fluid was necessary, but she didn't know how much. She said that it looked like it was disappearing as soon she poured it on the coals — no matter how much she poured.
“Just scrape off the burnt skin,” my mother insisted. “It’s just a little blackened on the outside. It'll be delicious.”
My father gently but firmly insisted that we eat at the Italian restaurant down the block.
Before we started dating, neither of us could find our way from the cereal aisle to the butcher to the exit of a grocery store unless we dropped breadcrumbs as a trail, and we couldn’t do that because we had no clue where the breadcrumbs were shelved.
Our initial culinary failure redoubled our efforts toward success. Shopping became a safari, and I began to fall for the beauty of supermarkets: Everything there is designed to look fantastic under harsh, bright light and intense scrutiny. All the colors that exist in nature are displayed at your neighborhood Whole Foods — from shocking, greenish Argentine melons to Toulouse-Lautrec-style packaging on imported pasta. And the sappy, piped-in music is scientifically engineered to slide under your skin without being noticed, like background music to the well-made movie of your life.
Most of all, anything seems possible in a supermarket. We could decide to make Chinese food or Iberian food or some combination of the two. We could create a dessert from strawberries, wine, Nutella, lemons and cream or buy a bunch of stuff that looked cool and pretty and see what we could do with it (aesthetically-motivated cooking). We could visit any region of the world we wanted to visit and have, it seemed, anything in the world we wanted.
Eventually, she became quite a good cook. She focused. She learned what tasted good with what, in what amounts.
For a party three years later, she cooked something that words could not describe. It was… more complex than a quesadilla, not quite a burrito, and, in the end, not particularly Mexican (though closer to that than anything else). I remember people applauded.
Guests actually put the plates down, stood, and gave the food an ovation.
Meanwhile, I became “interesting” with food. Though I cooked reasonably often and occasionally well, I never learned from my experiments. I’d throw something in something else in a certain vague quantity and hope for the best.
I liked tossing spices up in the air. I liked smashing garlic with the heel of my hand. I liked ventriloquism with uncooked steaks. I only cared about creating it, not tasting it.
In retrospect, the difference makes the end of our relationship obvious and acceptable: We were headed in opposite directions. I was process; she was product.
Any kitchen has room for only one type of cook.
There are moments, though — usually when I’m alone near the cheese section and the fresh baked bread — that I wish neither of us learned to cook, that the supermarkets went on forever and had no checkout lines.
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