Practice Makes Dinner

I’ve lost a bit of myself not cooking as much as I used to, the same way I find myself off when I don’t listen to music enough. There was a pretty long stretch for the first few years when I moved to New York, when it was so hard, so isolating, so draining, that I didn’t even have my turntable set up. Cooking and listening to music ground me, I’m a little empty without them, and absence with a substantial presence, even though those two words are opposites. I suppose this is really about quality of life, but it’s not anything someone has printed on a pillow or talked about in podcast, which makes it even more important. Both can be quiet and personal, even when other people are involved.

Recently we went on vacation to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. I feel like I’m supposed to treat myself, eat out all the time, give myself a break.¹ We do, at first, this is the beach town of my youth. I like to walk around, have a drink here and there, get some ice cream, but I don’t want to sit in a restaurant, I want to be outside, ride a bike without fear of imminent death. I don’t necessarily love restaurants, I just love particular ones. The Back Porch Cafe, because it’s weird, funky, older than I am and the closest this town will get to Chez Panisse. The Henlopen City Oyster House, because beyond the oysters, wine, and local food, the chef/owner and one of the bartenders knew my dad, they worked at the Crease around the corner from his bar. They’d visit him and sneak a beer during work. Gus & Gus is the kind of old fluorescent, linoleum-coated diners where everything is fried in peanut oil, the owners work the line, even the one with the very bent back I worry about. It was opened by Greeks a long time ago. Louie’s Pizza is another Greek, he was pals with my dad. Louie still goes in to prep in the morning by himself, his grinders are made of probably the cheapest food possible from Cisco and I don’t care. Fountain birch beer over pebble ice is the nectar of the gods. Lori’s is a cafe whose palate is firmly cemented in the mid-90s, strawberries, pecans, goat cheese, balsamic, and brie are all over that menu.

She is gorgeous.

Cooking’s not a big deal, it’s August in Delaware. Right now there isn’t a real grocery store in town. My goal, after driving here, is to never go to a grocery store on route 1, because if I’m at a supermarket in a strip mall on the highway, then I am not on vacation. The best place for seafood is Copp’s, a family-run place past the highway with local seafood, some produce. The farmer’s market is full of late August classics: tomatoes, corn, peaches, zucchini, eggplant. I’m surprised and delighted by a Japanese farm, I get sudachi, a small green citrus, along with beautiful cucumbers, and shishito peppers. I have seafood and all the vegetables I need, along with a somewhat dismal pantry at home.

The most complex thing I made, ratatouille, gave us three meals.

From home I bring lemons, olive oil, parsley, a shallot, garlic, ginger, some butter. Whatever is sitting around that might turn. These things offer a little map for where to go. I brought a brief version of my work kit—chef’s knife, serrated knife, paring knife, mandolin, honing steel, and microplane. There’s not a lot to work with in the apartment refrigerator and pantry.

We go out to dinner to celebrate grocery shopping. I only have so much domestic in me. The next morning the red striped bass sits with crushed garlic and ginger, I pan fry it and serve it with blistered and pickled peppers, using harsh white vinegar and stolen packs of white sugar for pickling liquid. Squash is sautéed, cucumbers cut and dressed with sudachi. This kind of eating makes me feel like I am properly on break, taking care of myself, the casually healthy person I know is somewhere inside of me. It’s August, the easiest time of year to make something taste good. One shucked corn of cob and you’re halfway to a meal. I save the scraps and make a stock along with the shrimp shells for shrimp cocktail, served with Duke’s mayonnaise and hot dog relish, a combination stolen from Cafe Kestrel in Red Hook. The remaining shrimp becomes scampi with lemon, parsley, garlic, and shallot from home and spaghetti from the Middle Eastern store.

Ratatouille is both a star and a viable companion for a meal, I like it hot, warm, room temperature, cold, a perfect use for late summer produce. Rockfish, another local fish, joins the ratatouille, along with the rest of Japanese cucumbers, mandolined, tossed in salt, then folded into a vinegar cream mixture. The next morning, the ratatouille is perfect with eggs, the following day, tossed with bowtie pasta.

There will be no turned seafood on my watch. I don’t cook enough of it at home, although I wish I did, and I can’t help but wonder when my vacation life will evolve into my real life, when I swim and ride bikes and cook and eat seafood.

In her essay “Against Delivery,” Devin Pope writes

In an ideal world, I would cook two meals a day. Yes, even if I was a millionaire living in a villa on the French Riviera, I would preside over the kitchen until old age forced me to retire to a comfortable chair nearby.

She goes on to discuss the later delivery of our lives, the same breakfast every day from Starbucks, all the money spent on Instacart, so much DoorDash-

Rather than envy them, I feel they’re being cheated out of something valuable.

Fifteen years ago, I was a plus one at the press table for a James Beard House dinner, accompanying my writer friend who knew the visiting chef from California. A free dinner in February with food from the west coast when I maybe made $11 or $12 an hour. I said yes. The James Beard House is in Greenwich Village, a charming brownstone with a challenging, small kitchen for the kind of events they put on. The dining room is Beard’s old library and bedroom. His bathroom is completely covered in mirrors. That alone is worth the train trip.

A late arrival to our table was a woman who worked for a start-up, she shared how generally every evening she ordered the same thing from the same place on seamless on her car ride home so it could meet her at the door. I’ve never forgotten that, probably because it depresses me. I’m not judging the repetition, I love a uniform, I’ll eat the same meal every day for months. When I had a three train commute to a restaurant in Manhattan, I had seasons of the same song, for a while it was “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel, then “Moonlight Mile” by the Stones, for a spell “Killing Me Softly” by Roberta Flack, all beautiful songs that try to maintain an embryonic state before work. I once listened to Neil Young’s “Helpless” for the entire Megabus from the west side of Manhattan to Owings Mill, Maryland, a very grey time of year. I sat in the front on the second decker.

I don’t believe every meal needs to be epic because life is so short, sometimes I believe some meals need to be somewhat underwhelming and stabilizing because this same life can be so fucking long. Yet the same meal from the same place on the same method home rubbed me the wrong way, especially being told this at the James Beard House. Her pursuit of a completely automated life, to be so efficient, tells me that she doesn’t consider that kind of human interaction to be of anything of import.

An omen of things to come. We have lost a lot for this kind of behavior. We continue to erase and convenience away things that make us people. I hated it because I love restaurants, but I hate the business, and that is all about the business.

We don’t order in that often at home. I always want to make it worth it, the delivery fee and all the other charges, so this path of least resistance becomes something a little more stately, at least in price, rarely in quality. Usually it’s just easier to rummage through the kitchen and figure it out. My kingdom for a pantry, even a half-ass one, and the condiment door of the fridge.

I have come to understand that cooking is a practice, a conversation with myself about what I have to use, the time I have, and who it is for. I look at cooking as problem solving, this is what I have, how do I get to a meal. The cooks and writers I like are languid, sumptuous, their food, their writing, feels like stretching, something fortifying, something inviting.² They treat it as such, a practice that requires flavor rather than fanfare, a process seeking to be both more creative and pragmatic, a combination I find compelling in the kitchen.

1. I don’t have children to cook for, I understand that changes things.

2. I do love a scolder, and Elizabeth David is a guiding light. From French Provincial Cooking:

And since we are on the subject of frying fat, perhaps this is the place for me to beg once more of English housewives to abolish that sinister bowl of mixed fats, improperly filtered and therefore full of little specks of frizzled food and other impurities, which lurks in so many larders and refrigerators. To use these mixed fats for frying or for basting the joint is to spoil your dish from the start, for more often than not they are stale and sour, and naturally impart this horrible taste to the gravy, as well as to the meat or poultry which has been cooked in them.