Food Memoirs, Three

I know no nicer tribute to those early boys than to say they left me with new tastes and recipes. God knows what I would have eaten without them.

When G. visited, that first year of grad school, he taught me to make homemade salsa. It had never occurred to me to do so. The batch was watery the next day, the juice having leached all night from the little squared tomatoes, the whole island of salsa surrounded by a pale pink moat, lightly thick, like syrup. I ate it anyway, gingerly, with thin white processed tortilla chips. Even then the horrific waste of home made food, which can change and become inedible quickly though it was sharp and piquant at the start, invoked my guilt.

In a later visit, G. would facilitate my first experience with bulk pulses. He was looking for a certain kind of soap; I told him the hippy-store most likely to have it. He found the soap – a severe, pepperminty, natural-prized kind – and also purchased lentils in a bulk bag. This, too, had never occurred to me.

What was the recipe? I don’t remember at all. Just that there were rice, and lentils, and he insisted to season it with a few drops of picante sauce. This is how he ate his soy burgers, too… carefully arranged, precisely flavored.

We lunched in a Mexican restaurant down the street, with wicker chickens on each table filled with packets of sugar, and when G. said tomatillo to the waiter, he rolled the lls. Then he would tell me over lunch about, for instance, a trip to New Orleans, where the girl he went with suddenly tried to turn him over to the police. When dessert came, G. insisted. “Have the mango sticky rice,” he decreed. And we did: and if you don’t already know, mango sticky rice is the best desert, a bit like a rich peaches and cream oatmeal, with slippery sweet mango and firm little grains of rice bathed in coconut and salted up with tiny sesame seeds.

Another more utilitarian approach to food preparation came from my friend Joe, who visited exactly once. It was Joe, a concert clarinetist, who taught me that a banana eaten before a performance suppressed nerves.

Joe’s innovation was chicken and rice. This was a practical variation on a dish I already loved; my grandmother used to make it special Sundays, in a pressurized pot with a little spitting blow-hole on the top that screamed out and rattled when the dish was hot. This chicken and rice was cooked all together in such a way that the chicken was falling-apart pink and grey succulent, and the rice was glutinous with chicken grease. It was delicious. Joe’s recipe was not like this one; it’s just that he reminded me one could adapt and cook these dishes for oneself. I believe that Joe’s chicken was a slab of breast, microwaved with butter and one particular pallid dried green herb I can’t remember now. The rice, was it just made on the stove?

It left a legacy; that fall, still trying to live within the confines of my pitiful stipend, I scouted the meat department each trip to the grocery store. When boneless chicken breasts were on sale, I bought as many packets of them as I dared, then brought them home and divvied them up into plastic bags and put them in the freezer.

Occasionally I suspected the sale was due to the meat being near its deadline, its color turning dark and its odor ghoulish. I was always squeamish about meats gone off, one of the reasons why it was so easy to give up meat when I eventually did so. But when chicken was $3 off/ pound, how could I resist? I bravely peeled the pieces apart with my fingers. Uncooked chicken, I was interested to discover, had a translucent quality, especially when it was not unfresh. Then I would wash the tips of my fingers over and over, like a compulsive. I have always thought of that chicken since, when I think of my own muscles.

My vegetarian roommate must have been disgusted, but she was coming off a phase of eating nothing but lettuce with ketchup and then throwing it up in the toilet, so her disgust meant little to me. Indeed, it probably gratified me. I was angry and small, and my chicken dishes were cheap and were for me a form of fight against the system. It shows how young I was that I thought my roommate was a part of the system, but it is true she had hurt me by rejecting a key element of my writing style and my friendship and I probably wanted to wound her, with chicken.

Another disgusting thing we did in early grad school was to drink gallons and gallons of coffee, but it was always Maxwell House or whatever was cheapest in 3 pound tins at the grocery store. We drank so much horrible, cheap coffee that we constantly smelled of it; it came out our pores and scented our pee. Each of us would occasionally come home from the grocery with a salad, piled with spinach and kidney beans and baby corn and artichokes and blue cheese and orange slices and sunflower seeds and grapes, and eat the massive pile out of its Styrofoam clamshell with relish. We called these salads “I have scurvy.”

One spring break we went to the seashore, if you can call a windy Rhode Island beach on the brink of a snowstorm the seashore. We met up with our college friends, now scattered like a pocket of pebbles. They had a recipe for Corn Chowder, which was the first involved soup I’d ever helped to make from scratch. It’s not that involved, but I was used to soup out of a can. This involved chopping potatoes, and building up the broth ourselves, with stock, a bay leaf, onion... It was cooking. My boyfriend and I wrote down the recipe, and made it ourselves in his little Brooklyn apartment for months after, whenever we were together there. The kitchen was a good place for us and it nourished our relationship as well as us.

By the time Jeff visited, I lived alone with my cat and ate mostly garden burgers and takeout burritos. We went together to the Indian restaurant, my very first time. He showed me what to order, made me try his. The rice came in a sort of loaf, with one pea and one chop of carrot as an accent. The food came in brown bowls and the sauce was heavy and sweet in an unfamiliar way, and though I liked it, I didn't immediately love it. At home later, he got out his guitar because he wanted to sing for me. The songs were good, better than I had feared, because he was my first boyfriend and we had spent a lot of time in cars parked off country roads, listening to the Cure and talking and not making out, and his life was so strange and sad that I wanted him to succeed. I worried his voice would not be robust but it was. Then he made me listen to a song about me. Later, Elliott Smith’s posthumous album would come out, and on it would be a song with the same name, but it was not the same song, though certain similarities obtain.

Although I liked the music, I was embarrassed as I always am at too much attention trained on me, though I yearn for it, and somehow or another we never spoke again, even though we had previously talked so much that 6, 8 hour phone calls were not rare. Mostly we had talked about how dysfunctional our relationships with lovers were, and I suppose the end of our long talks meant we had become well adjusted.