Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (2 page)

I wanted someone to create this book so I could have a copy. I imagined it as a friendly presence in my kitchen for those nights when I cooked for myself. When my boyfriend suggested I put the book together, as a kind of summer job, I was surprised and resistant. It sounded like a lot of work. It sounded complicated. But eventually I was persuaded. Who could make the precise book I imagined better than me?

The more I thought about it, the more surprised I was that a book like this didn’t already exist. A quick search on Amazon turned up some books on cooking for one, but they tended toward the pragmatic; their focus was logistical and dietary, and not on the rich experience of solitary cooking and eating. I noted with a mixture of amusement and trepidation that based on my search words—“cooking for one”—the website suggested I might be interested in books on the subject of
cookery for people with mental disabilities.
I didn’t find a single book on the subject of dining alone. It started to seem as if we were talking about a phenomenon that hadn’t yet been recognized as a phenomenon. It started to seem like anthropology. Or sociology. Or something that belonged on the Discovery Channel.

The boyfriend, on a weekend trip to Ann Arbor, drove me to the library, where we pored over indexes looking for the words
one, alone, solitary, single,
etc. I wrote a proposal and found an agent, and early in the summer the project sold.

I put together a wish list of food and fiction writers and invited them to participate in the project. I asked them: Do you have a secret meal you make (or used to make) for yourself? Do you have a set of rituals for dining alone (at home or in a restaurant), or rules?

To my surprise, they responded, often enthusiastically. Some seemed as if they’d been waiting a long time to be asked.

Rosa Jurjevics, daughter of the late Laurie Colwin, responded to my invitation almost immediately, writing, in part:

All autumn essays floated into my computer’s inbox. How good it was to know that Ann Patchett used to eat oatmeal in Provincetown, like a plow horse, like generations of Patchetts before her; that Beverly Lowry and Marcella Hazan eat anchovies; that Ben Karlin makes a sauce that changed the very course of his life! Some contributors react to their parents—Dan Chaon prepares a spicier, wilder chili than his mother used to cook; Anneli Rufus, free from her mother’s rules against carbohydrates, revels in making plain, starchy meals (and, like Amanda Hesser’s friend, she wants them white). There are fantasies: Phoebe Nobles transforms for a season into the Asparagus Superhero; Jeremy Jackson sings the song of the black bean; Holly Hughes, the mother of three young children, imagines what she would cook if she could cook only for herself. Colin Harrison, drawing on decades of solitary lunches, searches for his next regular restaurant. Laura Dave’s tale of cooking not only ends in but directly causes romantic love. On the flip side, Jonathan Ames poisons himself with expired eggs, then basks in the comfort provided by the kind and bosomy waitress at his local diner. Erin Ergenbright writes from the perspective of a waitress serving a finicky solo diner and provides a recipe from the restaurant. Courtney Eldridge, not yet willing to produce the dishes her ex-husband, a chef, taught her to make, offers her mother’s salsa recipe. Jami Attenberg braves a hotel buffet at a resort before retreating to the safety of room service.

With repeated readings I was able to inhabit each essay. I walked to Ann Arbor’s Kerrytown Market to buy the ingredients for Steve Almond’s
quesaritos.
At Steve’s suggestion, I asked the fishmonger for tiger-tail shrimp to make myself seem cool. I made Jeremy Jackson’s black beans and rice and thought of Jeremy up to his arms in dried beans. I wrapped myself up in a kimono and ate Nora Ephron’s mashed potatoes, a perfect predecessor to Laura Calder’s Kippers Mash, comfort food for a queen. It’s almost impossible to make Marcella Hazan’s
tost
without thinking of how her husband calls her
mangia panini
(sandwich eater), or Paula Wolfert’s
pa amb tomàquet
without conjuring up her day of pure Mediterranean bliss, or Ben Karlin’s salsa rosa without thinking about hash and Italy. If you do as Laura Dave instructs and listen to “Atlantic City” and drink two glasses of wine while you make beef stroganoff, it will be hard not to be swept into Laura’s Manhattan, in which all things lonely and difficult become romantic, glazed with youth and hope. This book abounds with recipes, tips, idiosyncratic truths passed kitchen to kitchen, mouth to mouth.

My friend Rachel—she of the cafeteria fear—works for a nonprofit that advocates for independent farms. She feels weird mentioning my book to her colleagues, since their organization believes in community dining. I think this concern is intriguing but ultimately beside the point. My book is by no means a
suggestion
to eat alone; even the most community minded among us must occasionally find ourselves hungry and alone in the house. There are various reasons for solitary dining, only some of them a result of loss in its numerous forms. We adjust to solitude and an increased responsibility for caring for ourselves as we grow older, as we leave home for the first time, as we move, as our circumstances change. We dine alone once or for a brief time or for a long time.

I’m interested in finding out what happens then. Do we hold to the same standards that apply to cooking for others? Usually not, it seems. I’m interested in why.

In “Making Soup in Buffalo,” Beverly Lowry writes: “The fact was, I
wanted
the same thing again and again. And so I yielded, bought the goods, took them home, cooked, ate, accompanied usually by music, preferably a public radio station that played music I liked. And I am here to tell you, the pleasure never diminished. I was happy every time.”

Every time I read those sentences, I take a big breath and let it out with a sigh. Good, I think. I’ll make the same weird meal I’ve been making all week—half a loaf of seven-grain bread sliced and slathered with tahini and honey—again tonight. It’s what I want. It’s delicious and filling.

It is my hope that some nights in your kitchen you will reach for this book and be comforted and laugh out loud with recognition—and try another recipe. These are essays to be read and reread, to be stained with gravy and wine. I’ve tried to assemble the book so it reads fluidly from beginning to end. Arranging the pieces gave me the sensation of designing the seating chart for the most wonderful dinner party in the world. The book can also be read backward, and each essay stands alone. In that way it is like a cookbook, like cooking. Of course, this anthology is by no means exhaustive; it is merely an entryway.

If you choose to give this book to yourself, to keep it in your kitchen, my hope is that it will give you some company, some inspiration, and some recipes that require no division or subtraction. I hope it will remind you that
alone
and
lonely
are not synonymous; you will have yourself—and the food you love—for company.

In conclusion, let me just say that a scoop of vanilla ice cream with a handful of walnuts (or broken pretzels) and maple syrup, served in a coffee cup, makes a perfect dessert for one person cross-legged on a couch, or, if it’s warm out, on a porch or a stoop.

As an alternative—if right now you’re rolling your eyes and thinking,
not so much with the ice cream
—allow me to recommend Fage Total 0% Greek yogurt with one teaspoon of honey mixed in. The honey does something not only to the flavor but to the texture of the yogurt, making it sublimely creamy and sweet. I like to use the teaspoon to eat the dessert out of the container. While I eat, I daydream about the dinner parties I will throw in the shimmering future, when I will serve this yogurt-and-honey creation in champagne glasses and be applauded for my culinary brilliance.

But for now, eating this in bed by myself is not merely fine, it is sweet.

F
or eight years I lived in a one-room apartment a little larger than the
Columbia Encyclopedia.
It is lucky I never met Wilt Chamberlain because if I had invited him in for coffee he would have been unable to spread his arms in my room, which was roughly seven by twenty.

I had enough space for a twin-sized bed, a very small night table, and a desk. This desk, which I use to this day, was meant for a child of, say, eleven. At the foot of my bed was a low table that would have been a coffee table in a normal apartment. In mine it served as a lamp stand, and beneath it was a basket containing my sheets and towels. Next to a small fireplace, which had an excellent draw, was a wicker armchair and an ungainly wicker footstool which often served as a table of sorts.

Instead of a kitchen, this minute apartment featured a metal counter. Underneath was a refrigerator the size of a child’s playhouse. On top was what I called the stove but which was only two electric burners—in short, a hot plate.

Many people found this place charming, at least for five minutes or so. Many thought I must be insane to live in so small a space, but I loved my apartment and found it the coziest place on earth. It was on a small street in Greenwich Village and looked out over a mews of shabby little houses, in the center courtyard of which was a catalpa tree. The ceiling was fairly high—a good thing since a low one would have made my apartment feel like the inside of a box of animal crackers.

My cupboard shelves were so narrow that I had to stand my dinner plates on end. Naturally, there being no kitchen, there was no kitchen sink. I did the dishes in a plastic pan in the bathtub and set the dish drainer over the toilet.

Of course there was no space for anything like a dining room table, something quite unnecessary as there was no dining room. When I was alone I ate at my desk, or on a tray in bed. When company came I opened a folding card table with a cigarette burn in its leatherette top. This object was stored in a slot between my countertop and my extremely small closet. Primitive as my kitchen arrangements were, I had company for dinner fairly often.

I moved in one cool summer day when I was twenty-three. That night I made dinner for two college friends who were known as the Alices since they were both named Alice and were best friends. I remember our meal in detail. A young man had given me a fondue pot as a moving-in present. These implements, whose real function was to sit unused on a top shelf collecting furry coats of dust, were commonly given as wedding and housewarming presents in the sixties and are still available at garage sales of the eighties. They were made of stainless steel and sat on a three-legged base at the bottom of which was a ring to hold a can of Sterno. Along with the pot came four long-handled forks, two of which I have to this day. (They are extremely useful for spearing string beans and for piercing things that have fallen onto the floor of your oven.) The fellow who gave it to me was fond of a place called Le Chalet Suisse, where I had once enjoyed beef fondue. I felt it would be nice to replicate this dish for my friends.

I served three sauces, two of which I made: one was tomato based and the other was a kind of vinaigrette. The third was béarnaise in a jar from the local delicatessen. I bought sirloin from the butcher and cubed it myself. When my two friends came, I lit the can of Sterno and we waited for the oil to heat.

While we waited we ate up all the bread and butter. One of the Alices began to eat the béarnaise sauce with a spoon. The other Alice suggested we go out for dinner. Once in a while we would dip a steak cube into the oil to see what happened. At first we pulled out oil-covered steak. After a while, the steak turned faintly gray. Finally, I turned one of my burners on high and put the pot on the burner to get it started. Thereafter we watched with interest as our steak cubes sizzled madly and turned into little lumps of rubbery coal. Finally, I sautéed the remaining steak in a frying pan. We dumped the sauces on top and gobbled everything up. Then we went to the local bar for hamburgers and French fries.

It took me a while to get the hang of two burners. Meanwhile, my mother gave me a toaster oven, thinking this would ensure me a proper breakfast. My breakfast, however, was bacon and egg on a buttered roll from an underground cafeteria at the Madison Avenue side of the Lexington Avenue stop of the E train. My toaster oven was put to far more interesting use.

I began with toasted cheese, that staple of starving people who live in garrets. Toasted cheese is still one of my favorite foods and I brought home all sorts of cheese to toast. Then, after six months of the same dinner, I turned to lamb chops. A number of fat fires transpired, none serious enough to call the fire department. I then noticed after a while that my toaster oven was beginning to emit a funny burnt rubber smell when I plugged it in. This, I felt, was not a good sign and so I put it out on the street. With the departure of my toaster oven, I was thrown back, so to speak, on my two burners.

Two-burner cooking is somewhat limiting, although I was constantly reading or being read to about amazing stove-top feats: people who rigged up gizmos on the order of a potato baker and baked bread in it, or a thing that suspended live coals over a pot so the tops of things could be browned, but I was not brave enough to try these innovations.

Instead, I learned how to make soup. I ate countless pots of lentil, white bean and black bean soup. I tried neck bones and ham hocks and veal marrow bones and bacon rinds. I made thousands of omelets and pans of my mother’s special tomatoes and eggs. I made stewed chicken and vegetable stew. I made bowls of pickled cabbage—green cabbage, dark sesame oil, salt, ginger and lemon juice. If people came over in the afternoon, I made cucumber sandwiches with anchovy butter.

I would invite a friend or friends for Saturday night. Three people could fit comfortably in my house, but not four, although one famous evening I actually had a tiny dance party in my flat, much to the inconvenience of my downstairs neighbor, a fierce old Belgian who spent the afternoon in the courtyard garden entertaining his lady friends. At night he generally pounded on his ceiling with a broom handle to get me to turn my music down. My upstairs neighbor, on the other hand, was a Muncie, Indiana, Socialist with a limp. I was often madly in love with him, and sometimes he with me, but in between he returned my affections by stomping around his apartment on his gimpy leg—the result of a motorcycle accident—and playing the saxophone out the window.

On Saturday mornings I would walk to the Flavor Cup or Porto Rico Importing coffee store to get my coffee. Often it was freshly roasted and the beans were still warm. Coffee was my nectar and my ambrosia: I was very careful about it. I decanted my beans into glass and kept them in the fridge, and I ground them in little batches in my grinder.

I wandered down Bleecker Street, where there were still a couple of pushcarts left, to buy vegetables and salad greens. I went to the butcher, then bought the newspaper and a couple of magazines. Finally I went home, made a cup of coffee and stretched out on my bed (which, when made and pillowed, doubled as a couch), and I spent the rest of the morning in total indolence before cooking all afternoon.

One Saturday I decided to impress a youth whose mother, a Frenchwoman, had taught him how to cook. A recipe for pot roast with dill presented itself to me and I was not old or wise enough to realize that dill is not something you really want with your pot roast. An older and wiser cook would also have known that a rump steak needs to be baked in the oven for a long time and does not fare well on top of the stove. The result was a tough, gray wedge with the texture of a dense sponge. To pay me back and show off, this person invited me to his gloomy apartment, where we ate jellied veal and a strange pallid ring that quivered and glowed with a faintly purplish light. This, he told me, was a cold almond shape.

The greatest meal cooked on those two burners came after a night of monumental sickness. I had gone to a party and disgraced myself. The next morning I woke feeling worse than I had ever felt in my life. After two large glasses of seltzer and lime juice, two aspirins and a morning-long nap, I began to feel better. I spent the afternoon dozing and reading Elizabeth David’s
Italian Food.
By early evening I was out of my mind with hunger but feeling too weak to do anything about it. Suddenly, the doorbell rang and there was my friend from work. She brought with her four veal scallops, a little bottle of French olive oil, a bunch of arugula, two pears and a Boursault cheese, and a loaf of bread from Zito’s bakery on Bleecker Street. I would have wept tears of gratitude but I was too hungry.

We got out the card table and set it, and washed the arugula in the bathtub. Then we sautéed the veal with a little lemon, mixed the salad dressing and sat down to one of the most delicious meals I have ever had.

Then, having regained my faculties, I felt I ought to invite the couple at whose house I had behaved so badly. They were English. The husband had been my boss. Now they were going back to England and this was my chance to say good-bye.

At the time I had three party dishes: Chicken with sesame seeds and broccoli. Chicken in an orange-flavored cream sauce. Chicken with paprika and Brussels sprouts. But the wife, who was not my greatest fan, could not abide chicken and suggested, through her husband, that she would like pasta. Spaghetti alla Carbonara was intimated and I picked right up on it.

Spaghetti is a snap to cook, but it is a lot snappier if you have a kitchen. I of course did not. It is very simple to drain the spaghetti into a colander in your kitchen sink, dump it into a hot dish and sauce it at once. Since I had no kitchen sink, I had to put the colander in my bathtub; my bathroom sink was too small to accommodate it. At this time my bathroom was quite a drafty place, since a few weeks before a part of the ceiling over the bath had fallen into the tub, and now as I took my showers, I could gaze at exposed beams. Therefore the spaghetti, by the time the sauce hit it, had become somewhat gluey. The combination of clammy pasta and cream sauce was not a success. The look on the wife’s face said clearly: “You mean you dragged me all the way downtown to sit in an apartment the size of a place mat for
this
?”

When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove-top cook’s strongest ally. I fried it and stewed it, and ate it crisp and sludgy, hot and cold. It was cheap and filling and was delicious in all manner of strange combinations. If any was left over I ate it cold the next day on bread.

Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.

I looked forward to nights alone. I would stop to buy my eggplant and some red peppers. At home I would fling off my coat, switch on the burner under my teakettle, slice up the eggplant, and make myself a cup of coffee. I could do all this without moving a step. When the eggplant was getting crisp, I turned down the fire and added garlic, tamari sauce, lemon juice and some shredded red peppers. While this stewed, I drank my coffee and watched the local news. Then I uncovered the eggplant, cooked it down and ate it at my desk out of an old Meissen dish, with my feet up on my wicker footrest as I watched the national news.

I ate eggplant constantly: with garlic and honey, eggplant with spaghetti, eggplant with fried onions and Chinese plum sauce.

Since many of my friends did not want to share these strange dishes with me, I figured out a dish for company. Fried eggplant rounds made into a kind of sandwich of pot cheese, chopped scallions, fermented black beans and muenster cheese. This, with a salad and a loaf of bread, made a meal. Dessert was
always
brought in. Afterwards I collected all the pots and pans and silverware and threw everything into my pan of soapy water in the bathtub and that was my dinner party.

Now I have a kitchen with a four-burner stove, and a real fridge. I have a pantry and a kitchen sink and a dining room table. But when my husband is at a business meeting and my little daughter is asleep, I often find myself alone in the kitchen with an eggplant, a clove of garlic and my old pot without the handle about to make a weird dish of eggplant to eat out of the Meissen soup plate at my desk.