Food and affection: Part 1

I think I'd rather kiss a guy I don't like than cook for a woman I can't stand. I found myself in this predicament earlier this year. Not the kissing a guy part, but due to family obligations I ended up preparing several meals a week for a woman who made me so uncomfortable I got nervous walking in the front door of my house.

I could talk to her, be polite, if not warm, and keep things some what civil. But serving meals to her at my table was excruciating. At an intuitive level, I've always known that cooking and serving food were intimate, but I'd never given it much thought. Now I wondered why the simple acts of cutting vegetables, stirring a pot, pouring drinks, and setting plates could fill me with such bitterness. (I'm sure the experience was no easier for her. I don't know which she disliked more: me or my cooking.)

After a few weeks of this, I couldn't make anything taste right.

Dishes I'd made for years, my fingers moving in familiar patterns of slicing, chopping and mixing, now eluded me. It would have been best to give up on any kind of real cooking and start serving hotdogs every night, except that I was also on a writing assignment for a magazine that required me to cook and eat whole foods for several months. So night after night I tried to find my rhythm in the kitchen, and night after night I failed. I over-cooked chicken, made watery salads, added too much salt or not enough. I knew it was bad when even the rice started coming out gloppy.

I've never been able to follow recipes. I love to read cookbooks, but I tend to read first, cook later. To have my head buried in a recipe with a bunch of ingredients in front of me would be like reporting a story with my nose in a book about how to craft the perfect paragraph. To tell a story you have to know your subject. You have to look, listen, feel, smell. Cooking, like writing, works best when you shift away from the general, the cliché, the stereotype – this zucchini is like every other zucchini in the world -- and notice the individual. How does the tomato feel? What does the air smell like? How does the oil look glistening in the bottom of the pan? Cooking is a dialogue between my hands and the ingredients. And I'd suddenly gone deaf.

There is no separating the act of preparing a family meal from the people who will receive it. Cooking dinner is about my daughters who love to eat with their hands and still fall out of their chairs when they get excited. It is about my son who lives for curry and pesto and sushi and can smell a cup of tea and pick out notes of cinnamon and orange. Tomatoes, still warm from the sun, are my grandmother's joy. When I toss pasta with olive oil, crushed red pepper, garlic, flat-leaf parsley and salt, I think of my husband and the way his brow will lift and his eyes will light up at one of his favorite dishes. We are a family that likes our meat close to the bone. I know this and it influences what I do in the kitchen. I don't know how to cook for people I can't feel, or know, or trust. To feed someone day in and day out is to form a connection. And when it is a connection you don't want, you can only wish for the fleeting nature of a kiss.