My sister had a baby. A little bug, a baby pie, a snuggle butt who’s recently acquired a double chin and is the light of (and drag on, let’s be real) Sharon’s life. Seven weeks old and we are all hulking moons orbiting this itty bitty sun. I adore seeing my sister so happy, so nuzzled up with Jack and their baby in a bubble of love and sore nipples squirting pee broke free from the swaddle delirium.
And that was it, in the end. Not takeout fatigue, nor looming hypertension, nor my dwindling bank account, that got me back in the game. After three years of eating like a zombie bachelor, some part of my brain I’d wondered whether I’d ever access again woke up, and I found myself able to cook.
Every week for the last five Jacky and I have managed to deliver a cooked meal, often with sides, to Sharon and Jack. I think about the meals, shop for the best groceries I can, cook, and then–the trickiest part–deliver them, often hot, to Chinatown. Ina Garten’s meatloaf, Samin Nosrat’s buttermilk-brined roast chicken, Lidey Heuck’s fennel, kale, and cannellini beans, my own weird pizza pasta, an Alice Waters cornbread using chicken drippings to line the skillet. I’ve cooked more in the last two months than in the previous three years.
It was mystifying. I remembered that cooking was a thing that brought me pleasure, that cookbooks could reliably yield inspiration and motivation to try something new. But since 2021 I’ve passed by my laden shelves, at home and then work, as if a force field kept me away. And even when I worked out why I resisted the kitchen I couldn’t figure out what it’d take for me to ever summon the desire to return.
For a few years, just before my cooking strike, I was the primary caretaker in my little two-person household. My relationship seemed to demand and then Covid helped enforce a fastidious domesticity I rarely chafed against. Slipped right in, stepped right up. I took a day or two off to help D through top surgery recovery and then we never recalibrated after. I’d commute to work, get groceries or a roast duck in Chinatown after, then come home and cook. We ate well, I was creative with leftovers. Whatever we didn’t eat that first day became duck fried rice the next, or duck jook on the third. I was proud to love and care for someone who needed me. We were all so scared. I’d never gone so long without seeing my family–Sharon didn’t live in New York yet–and of course constructing a Brooklyn haven gave me something to focus on aside from how much I missed my nieces, or how much I worried about my parents.
And then D and I fell apart. A schism that seems now, in hindsight, to have been forming even from our first date, became abruptly apparent. We cleaved like a massive rock sheering away from a mountain after the glaciers had melted away. D moved out. My job at the pencil shop ended. And I stopped cooking.
Enough chips and salsa, or popcorn, or triscuits and hummus, can be a meal, is what I learned. If I made instant ramen but threw in a handful of spinach from a clamshell container it’d be a whole meal. Cereal and milk with a banana sliced in need not be limited to breakfast. The best everyday Thai takeout to my place is Jintana Thai, but for fancy occasions I could justify an order from Thai Farmhouse Kitchen. (Every other week occasioned a fancy meal, in the end.) My sister would drop off bao, Jack’s delicious cha siu or beef rendang, her gourmet baked goods, which sustained me. In recent months I’d hover close to Kyle or Chris eating their re-heated homemade stews or pastas or soups at work and say: huh, what have you got there? It never occurred to me I would do the same for myself. I kept wondering, knowing well enough I couldn’t force a healing that was on its own timeline, but still unable to find my cooking refusal anything but inscrutable. Heartbreak looks different on everyone, doesn’t it.
Jacky and I are doing something different. The rhythm of our home life is disjointed because of her frequent travel, and dominated more by Alby the big baby cat (a whole ‘nother post) than any other pursuit. Jacky is the family cook. Or, at least, has been–but what are roles for if not renegotiation, I try to remind myself. And cooking, it turns out, is just one way we make a home.
But right now it’s time to get back to the kitchen. Crust has been resting for two hours. I’ve a pie to bake.