“It was a hugely energetic night, filled with the wonder of this gentle genetic modification that the entire dining room believed it was experiencing.”
Chickpeas in a dusting of red paprika. Coconut milk simmering yellow with turmeric. Spices the color of pulverized sunset. Swirls of dough and cinnamon rising in an enameled pot. Rich olive oil on top of yeasted bubbles. Matcha as green as new gingko leaves. Uneven balls of mozzarella in milky brine. Fibrous ends of a knob of ginger after cutting. Rainbow sprinkles cutting through thick vanilla batter.
I have been cooking. You, I am sure, have also been cooking. There is very little else to do and so I turn my kitchen into the place where I can go spend long hours making something and look at a screen very little. I am most excited when I can follow the recipe from my actual Bon Appetit magazine, let the pages get splotchy with oil and dusted with cornstarch.
I say that there is very little else to do, but there are actually many things to do. I am a creative person and the mind is an expansive place for thinking and making, our home is dirty, long-term rental dirty, in a way that I could spend all quarantine cleaning and still not be done, I will need a job when this is over and could spend the days writing cover letters and fixing my resume, I have a bookshelf of unread books. The never ending runway of time is not the only thing that makes me cook.
I teach a food writing class at the University of Virginia, the school where I have just received my MFA. All year we read pieces about making food, eating it, showing love and culture and tradition through it. We think about the ways the industry of food shapes our ideas of it. We eat macrons and smell cut garlic in class. We write about our senses and sensations. We write about food and family, why MSG is wrongfully, racially, maligned and the way salt used to be so valuable it was how the Roman soldiers got paid. But we hadn’t thought about food this way: as salve.
When quarantine started and food became the one thing I could control, I thought back to earlier this year, when I had been so anxious and depressed I seldom wanted to leave the house. During that time, all I wanted to do was take walks and watch The Great British Baking Show. For a few months that was the only media I could really stomach. I left a screening of Waves in such a panic that I had to lay on the ground of the theatre lobby until I could see straight again, my heart raced and raced while watching No Country for Old Men in our living room, I cried during almost the entirety of Brokeback Mountain, but I found The Great British Baking Show soothing, like calm background noise for a brain that refused to shut off. I was never hungry those days and watching them make British puddings and biscuits elicited no desire in me to eat. It was something else, something I couldn’t exactly define at the time.
My first foray back into being the social creature I was used to being was through hosting a bake-off party. I spent two days making tea-flavored shortbread cookies and arranging them to look like tea-bags. The first time I made the recipe I doubled the butter accidentally and the green matcha cookies were soft to the touch. In the oven they crumbled, strangely, into shortbread confetti. While most problems during those days of depressions felt like riddles I was trying to solve with only half a brain, this one was clear, solvable. What I liked about it was that I could understand it. I could fix it. I could just make the dough again, following the instructions correctly this time, and I would have buttery discs of cookie.
As I came back to life, thanks in no small part to my (then new) boyfriend and my roommates, the same ones I am now quarantined with, I began to think about why that show had been such a balm. I realized it was not just the way British voices sound melodic to me, or the fact that there was no real prize so the contestants liked, only, to praise and support each other, it was this: there were rules, there were steps to follow, there were clear things that could go wrong and right. If you put the fruit and the sugar in the saucepan and followed the instructions, you would make jam. At a time when everything in my life and mind felt like it had been unstuck from reality and I could not make sense of what had gone wrong, exactly, in a past relationship or what, exactly, I was supposed to do now that I had finished a thesis project and was left in a writing lurch so long it began to feel like not a lurch but a new way of life, that kind of clarity of instruction and finished product was like a glimmering oasis.
It is the same now. Though depression, anxiety, a break-up and a looming future post-grad are real, they are nothing compared to the current Coronavirus outbreak. But, still, I find myself turning to the same thing: food, and more specifically, recipes. It makes me feel in control to put a brown glass container of still alive yeast, a carton of white eggs, waiting in their cradles, and a bunch of still wet cilantro into my fridge. It is order, it is planning, it is the one kind of wealth I can count on these days that feel so unsure. I have said that I experience coronavirus quarantine much the same way I experience depression or grief. The best I have come up with to explain the way those things manifest in me is to say that they are the weather. As in, the thing that hangs over everything else. The sky, the ambient environment, the thing you can shelter from but cannot escape. You can forget for a while that is a rainy day, but you will still get wet if you walk outside. Just as in depression or grief, you can laugh or enjoy yourself, but you will still get wet if you walk outside.
In a recent Zoom class, I asked my students what they were doing to stay grounded and sane. After a pause, one of my students said he was meditating more, trying to keep himself in the moment. That, I have begun to think, is a version of what cooking is and what writing is. There is an immediacy about cooking. If you do not watch the peas as they unfreeze and brighten in the pan, they will become soggy and burned. The caramel will move from perfectly browned with wisps of smoke emerging to burned and hardened in moments. You must pay attention. I teach my students that the key to good writing is noticing. We spend much of the beginning of the semester describing the world of food that they’ve experienced. Do not say it is delicious, I write in the margins of their papers, say it is salty, smoky, cloyingly sweet. Think about the actual thing you are experiencing when you eat it. Pause.
When I pay attention to the moments of my day, things begin to seem sustainable, good even. For example, today the sun is out and the sky is bright blue with just one cloud in it and when I got home from B’s house this morning, I toasted a scone for breakfast and let a pool of butter leak into it. I took a walk with my roommate to mail cards to our mothers, put a stamp with an iris on it onto the pink envelope. Last night, B and I walked around the neighborhood after eating a dinner of focaccia bread and ricotta gnocchi that I’d made, feeling full and nourished for a moment.
That nourishment is, I think, the other reason why I have grown enamored of making new things, of cooking elaborate dinners or layered cakes. I have so few people I can see. I have two roommates and one boyfriend. I want them to be happy, I want them to be taken care of. Every morning I read the news and another thing seems tragic and spun out of control. I am lucky; we are all healthy. But in me is the primal desire to take care of my own. I do not do that through uncooked vegetables and fruits, steamed beans and spinach, but through the things that comfort: earl grey flecked yogurt cake and spicy bowls of chili, pillowy pasta and bread speckled with salt.
I think of my students, writing of their mothers cooking Korean seafood soup for them on their birthdays or their grandmothers rolling out pierogis for them. I think of their first essays, which are personal essays that are almost always a sort of love letter to something from their recently-departed childhoods. They are reminders of just how much food is care.
My time teaching at the university is now over and for the time being my anxiety is not heart-stopping, my depression is not all-encompassing, myself and my loved ones are healthy. This week I am planning on making a taco dinner for my roommates and my boyfriend. When I think about peeling the lid off of a can of adobo chiles or mixing together flower and fat for tortillas, or delicately removing the husks from a pound of tomatillos, I feel calm. If nothing else is known, I can know that one day this week I will be able to follow a list of steps that will allow me to put before my friends, those people that I love, something to feed them. Tortillas pocked with brown spots from heat. Thinly sliced red onion turned pink in vinegar. Charred onions blended with red beans. Shreds of adobo chicken like red threads of spice. Queso fresco, salty and crumbled. It is not a lot, but it is something.
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