Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (15 page)

W
hen I was a child in Nebraska, my parents had a lot of parties. Friday. Saturday. Uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbors, my father’s old friends from his job working construction, their wives and kids—thirty, forty people sometimes. They began to wander in around six or so, talking loudly, laughing, carrying coolers full of icy beer and pop. This was when my parents seemed the happiest.

Our house was about ten miles outside of town, a single-story, one-bedroom house that barely contained my family, let alone a party. The adults spread out through the rooms, drinking beer in the living room, playing cards on the porch, while the kids ran out of the house and across the yard to race through the large stubble field across the street. Set out on card tables were relish trays of radishes, green onions, slices of cheese and salami, pickled eggs, and jalapeños. The chili soup, barbecue meat, and tortillas would appear, eventually, after dark. Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Crystal Gayle on the record player. Some people dancing in the little space between the couch and the TV.

I was the type of child who would sit alone at the kitchen table during the party—reading, writing, or drawing on a notepad, which I would guard with my forearms as if it were a test and there were cheaters all around me. While the other kids yelled and chased one another outside, while smoking, conversing grownups spilled into the room off the front porch where my bed and books shared space with the washing machine and the water heater, I staked out a little corner for myself, aloof from the action. I liked to be close to other people, observing secretly without really interacting with them, and in this way I was probably very much like my mother, who preferred cooking in the kitchen to dancing in the living room. I remember her lowering her head over the mouth of the pot as if whispering it a secret.

My mother made that Midwestern truck-stop variety of chili, which could be prepared in great quantities without much precision. It required tomato juice, browned hamburger, kidney beans, and yellow onions, chopped and sautéed. Salt, pepper, cumin, and chili powder were added “to taste,” as my mother said. I loved to watch her experiment—sprinkle in a little of some spice into the pot, sample the broth, and then repeat, until it seemed correct to her. I still favor this method, though I have ruined a number of batches because of it, being too zealous with spices in the beginning, lacking my mother’s restraint.

I moved from Nebraska to Chicago for college, and stayed there for a few years after graduation. Chili was one of the first meals I cooked, perhaps because it reminded me of those large family gatherings. But if it began with nostalgia, I soon discovered that chili had several other features that made it attractive to the young bachelor. It was a simple, inexpensive recipe that didn’t require any particular organization or skill to prepare. It could be made by the gallon, and—like pizza and spaghetti—it could be eaten on a regular basis without ever really losing its appeal.

Cooking chili made me feel festive, even though I was alone in my apartment, as if I would soon be surrounded by a large group of happy people. And indeed, in time, making a big pot of chili gave me a reason to call some friends and have them over for beers. If I never managed my parents’ kind of parties, I began to gather together a few other enthusiasts. No doubt, eating chili has male-bonding elements. There’s that cowboy-on-the-range, bandito-in-his-hideout mythology lurking around it. And, of course—adding to its manly grit and ruggedness—chili can be extremely spicy.

And so spiciness,
heat,
was the first way that I varied from my mother’s basic recipe. Back in Nebraska, we grew jalapeños and cayenne in the garden, which my father, grinning, would eat raw and which my mother pickled or made into salsa or dried and crumbled—
very
sparingly—into her chili, which was mild by all but the most grandmotherly standards. Now, living on my own, I could play around with the amount of chile pepper I used. In Chicago, I discovered a whole swath of hot peppers previously unknown to me, most notably the Scotch bonnet and habañero, but also the chiltepín and rocoto and Thai chiles, all of which I auditioned over subsequent years—on a few occasions creating monstrous stews of such indescribable heat that I could choke down only a few painful, burning bites.

As I experimented with degrees of heat and my own level of endurance, I also became interested in straying beyond the standard ingredients. In this, I realize that I risk offending some fundamentalists for whom chili has an almost koanlike simplicity: a spicy chile-pepper broth with meat. Cook-off and Chili Society types even eschew beans.

I, however, have never been a purist. The best batches of chili I’ve ever made have had some unknown or incongruous element. In this way, cooking chili for me is not unlike the process of writing fiction, which requires the same openness to inspiration and possibility, as well as the same awareness that the final product may be irrecoverably different from what you’d first imagined.

Here are some of the things that I’ve put into chili over the years: African bird pepper, alligator jerky, artichokes, beer, beets, bourbon, carrots, celery, elk, epazote, fennel, garbanzo beans, green bell pepper, harissa, horseradish, hot dogs, Kahlúa, jicama, lavender, lobster, mango, red wine, spinach, turkey breast, vinegar, yeast, yogurt, zucchini.

When I was twenty-two, my friend B.P. and I had a quasi-mystical experience that involved the consumption of—and subsequent recovery from—several gallons of particularly potent chili.

I had spent the better part of that Friday evening and Saturday afternoon thinking about and working on this batch. The best chili needs to be created in solitude. It requires contemplative shopping and preparation, and perhaps it even requires us to exercise our ancient hunting, gathering, and foraging skills. This particular version involved some homemade spicy black-and-red-pepper deer jerky that my father had sent me for Christmas, which I chopped into pea-sized pieces. Added to the simmering tomato juice, the jerky bits softened but retained just enough of a chewy texture to be intriguing. I stirred in a mixture of chorizo and hamburger, sautéed garlic and onion, a dozen purplish chile peppers (possibly purple habañero) purchased at a local Spanish market, several heaping spoonfuls of bitter Mexican cocoa, chili powder, cumin, oregano, cilantro, sweet corn, dark kidney beans, pintos, black beans, and green bell pepper. Adding item after item, purely by inspiration, was my favorite way to make chili. As items were added, I inevitably needed more broth. Sometimes, the broth became too thin and more meat, vegetables, and beans were then required. It became a complicated cycle—and led to the production of a massive quantity of chili when I had only planned on a meal for two. By the time B.P. arrived, the fifteen-quart stockpot was almost full. The lid clattered as the pot bubbled, and the small kitchen was wafting with the smell of spices that actually made the inside of the nostrils prickle. The chili was almost ready; finally, B.P. added some kind of psilocybin-containing mushrooms.

I have no idea how the two of us managed to eat all that chili, though I have a distinct memory of B.P.’s face, set in an intensity of determination that one sometimes sees in athletes as they push themselves past their breaking point. Dewdrops of sweat glimmered on his forehead. We sat on an ancient, boatlike thrift-store davenport, our bowls resting on old-fashioned TV trays that I found amusing and delightful—relics from the kind of suburban childhood I’d never had. B.P. had been a film major, and we thought of ourselves as bohemian, intellectual. We were watching Alain Resnais’s
Last Year at Marienbad,
a French art flick, dreamily incomprehensible. A Mobius strip of murmurous Gallic dialogues competed with the noises of the city outside my apartment—sirens, hip-hop blaring from car speakers. The mushrooms kicked in. I was about as far from my mother’s kitchen in Nebraska as I was likely to get.

That particular chili might have been the best I ever made. I imagined that it was an ideal combination of meaty savoriness, chocolate/cumin sweetness, and fiery spice, and I vividly remember the hypnotic mixture of textures—the doughy texture of pinto bean set off against the firmer kidney bean, the chewy jerky bits contrasting with the soft crumbled chorizo and hamburger. All of this was imprinted distinctly in my mind—even though when we groggily woke late the next afternoon, the chili, all three gallons of it, was gone, and (of course) I have found it impossible to re-create. Perhaps, ultimately, for the best.

As the years have passed, my desire to have my head blown off has gradually waned. I’m less impressed by the pure deadly power of a hot pepper, less interested in showing off my own prowess and endurance. I haven’t turned my back on chili, but as I’ve moved further into my adult life—gotten married, had children, and so on—I do find that my relationship with it has become increasingly private.

Secretive,
my wife says, and points out that most of the time I make chili when I am spending a weekend alone at home, when she and my sons are gone for one reason or another and I can spend undisturbed hours puttering around in our big three-story suburban house, like some eccentric middle-aged man with an enormous model train set in his basement.

I like to cook in the quiet of a late Saturday afternoon, the time of the weekend when, as a kid, I would sit at the kitchen table with my notepad and colored pencils; when, as a college student, I would laze alone in my dorm room making a collage or a mix tape. There’s the same sort of hypnotic, slowed-time quality at work in stirring up some chili. Soaking the dried beans until they’re soft. Sautéing some garlic and onions. Bisecting some strange new pepper I’ve discovered at the market. Stirring together powders and dried herbs and pastes of various sorts.

More often than not, by the time I’m finished I’ll have once again made far too much for one person. More often than not, my wife and sons will come home from their weekend away and discover rows and rows of quart containers in the basement freezer, stacked and labeled and stored away, just like my parents used to do. I’ve chosen a much milder, more secluded middle age than they did. But I’m stocked up and ready, which I guess is yet another thing that I secretly take pleasure in. If hordes of people ever do show up at my door, I’ll be prepared to feed them.

Dan Chaon’s Chili (Version #116)

1 cup dried dark kidney beans

1 cup dried pinto beans

2 pounds ground chuck

2 pounds hot breakfast sausage, bulk

4 jalapeño peppers, minced with seeds

4 poblano peppers, whole, seeded

1 large yellow onion, chopped

1 head garlic, chopped

46 ounces Spicy Hot V8 or other vegetable juice

2 cups beef broth

5 tablespoons standard dark chili powder

1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder

2 tablespoons cumin

1 teaspoon ground black pepper

2 teaspoons sugar

1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

2 teaspoons chopped oregano leaves

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

1 large red bell pepper, chopped and seeded

1 large tomato, chopped

2 teaspoons all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons cornmeal

2 tablespoons warm water

1. Prepare beans according to package, soaking them overnight. Drain and reserve beans.
   
2. Brown the hamburger and sausage. Pour off the grease; set aside the meat.
   
3. Sauté the jalapeño and poblano peppers, onions, and garlic until onion is translucent, about 7 minutes.
   
4. Mix beef stock with vegetable juice and all spices. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat.
   
5. Add the beef, sautéed vegetables, and beans. Lower the heat. Simmer on low for about two hours, stirring occasionally.
   
6. After the chili has cooked for about 13/4 hours, add bell pepper and tomato.
   
7. Stir together flour and cornmeal; add warm water. Mix well. Stir into the chili and cook, covered, for another 20 minutes.
   

S
he was
so
angry.

She grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me up against the wall, in the foyer just inside our front door. I’d just come in. The back of my head banged against the wall with its green-gold wallpaper textured to look like bamboo. Two balsa-wood masks swung on the nails that moored them. My mother’s face was inches from mine, her thumbnails digging half-moons into my skin through the thin fabric of my T-shirt.

I don’t know which T-shirt. Only that because this was happening in Los Angeles, in summer, it had to be a T-shirt. I had worn it to go and see my friend Laurel, who lived across the street. Laurel was having company,
other
company, her
other
best friend from the
other
town where her family lived before moving to L.A.—so when I heard their car pull up after returning from the airport, I rushed over and met this Tamara, already eleven, with her wavy blond bangs, under the false-orchid tree that shed purple blossoms shaped like sailboats.

But after half an hour or so I caught them exchanging looks that meant
Get her out of here
!

The masks went
clack-clack
on the wall. My mother drew closer as if we were going to kiss, which of course we were not. She sniffed—making a sharp sound like scraping cement.

What did you eat?

Digging her sandaled heel into the hardwood floor.
What did you eat?

Nothing.
I said it way back in my throat, like a ventriloquist, so that as little air as possible escaped my mouth. But
sniff sniff
—pepper. Nitrites. Smoke and vinegar.

She always said liars are worse than thieves. She said it then.

Her thumbnails, ow.

Her eyes raced down my face, my front, as if it were made of clear glass and she could see inside. She knew.

Hot dog.

It was always worst when she growled like that. Like God. She pronounced it her own way:
doh-wug.

Over at Laurel’s, there had been this box of hot dogs her family had bought at Der Wienerschnitzel on the way home from the airport, where they picked up Tamara. They were like that, picking up fast food, throwing banana-split parties, ordering pizzas on whims. And her mother had lifted plump cylinders out to all of us:
Who wants a mustard dog? Who wants a kraut dog?
And I should have said no thanks as usual. I should have said
I have to go.
But that would have meant going. Leaving Laurel here to play Barbies with Tamara. And I was not going to go until they forced me out. Which they did, like ten minutes later, but not before that mustard dog.

Heat rose in waves off Mom’s face.

My dad passed us en route to the kitchen, carrying a wrench:
What’s going on?

She poked the soft spots right above my collarbone for emphasis.
She went. Across the street. And ate a hot dog.

But
doh-wug
made it sound nastier, like something that waggles and gleams.

She had this rule, and it was: never eat at other people’s houses. No matter what they said. No matter what they did. No matter what they offered, decline. Either tell them the truth—
Sorry, not allowed
—or depending on who they were, come up with a lie.
I have a stomachache. I’m allergic to frosting. I’m not hungry,
though this last one was difficult because I was hungry all the time. My mother served three meals a day, real meals with meat, but between them I was racked with a wild, aching hunger, though Mom said
You’re not hungry, you’re just bored.

No, I’m hungry.

I know you. You’re bored.

At home she served no snacks. Nor could I sneak them from the fridge—she could hear footsteps on the kitchen lino from the far end of the house, even with Merv Griffin on TV interviewing psychic mediums and acrobats. She would hear fingers riffling through the sock drawer where my father hoarded candy: giant Hershey bars, boxes of Dots, pound bags of chocolate Santas or marshmallow peanuts that he was allowed to eat but I was not.

Anyway, this rule. She said I shouldn’t eat what others offered because if I did, they would think I was starving, that I wasn’t being fed enough at home. If I ate what they gave me they would have a chance to observe my manners and remark on them. If I ate what they gave me they would laugh behind my back—after I left, they would point at my empty plate or soiled napkin and snicker to one another:
What a hog
!

And most of all, the main thing was that eating other people’s food would make me fat.

Mom was watching my weight. I was thin in a flat, unremarkable way, but she watched me in my school clothes and play clothes, in my swimsuits and the giant mirrors at the mall. She checked on me in the bathtub on the pretense of asking whether or not I had a towel.

She watched, because life is so cruel. She watched, because my three best friends were overweight and what if I became like them? Like proselytizers, how could they resist? Either in innocence, because they loved their fudge and Cheez-Its and wanted to share this joy—or in contrivance, loathing their own weight and seeing my flat bottom as a mockery. A taunt. They thrust corn-chip bags at me like maracas,
cha-cha-cha.
They snatched boxes of Jell-O off the shelf, saying
Let’s suck the powder straight out of the box with straws.

She knew.

Mom was once fat herself, as a big-city schoolgirl whom the other kids called Four-by-Four and Blubberjug and Tub. She knew. Back in those days—see her in pictures, seersucker and taffeta stretched tight as sausage casings, scowling at the lens as if its glass could laugh.

Not that she was still big or anything. A life-threatening illness at age thirty sheared her down to a size ten and there she stayed. But by God she must watch me. Anything might inflate me at any moment, one French fry or jellybean too many. For those hours when she was not there to see: the rule.

My friends scoffed at the rule. Their parents scoffed.
Honey, that’s silly!
My friend Karen’s mom was Japanese. She called my mom and put on a fake accent, saying
Plea-zu can she su-tay heah for lunch. Ho-su-pitality is the Jah-panese way.
No luck. Another day, my friend Michelle’s dad—he was drunk—called my mom demanding that she let me share his daughter’s Ritz crackers.
So you’re kosher, so what?
he boomed.
It’s not like they’re pork rinds.

No, but they were crackers, and crackers were the worst food of all. Crackers, cookies, bread, cake. I mean, all food was treacherous just because it was edible, but my mother had special theories about starches being the most treacherous of all. Eating a hot dog across the street was bad enough—and she was in a redcheeked rage from it, though really it was all from love—but she would not have jammed her thumbnails into my shirt if it had been just a frankfurter without a bun. I almost could have talked my way out of it, said it was a new Der Wienerschnitzel product, a special sales promotion: the new bunless low-calorie dog. I should have said so outright, but by the time I thought it up, it was too late, would have been obviously a lie, because buns made so much difference that if there wasn’t one, then by God that’s the first thing you would mention. She sometimes forgave me, hours later, for eating fried chicken. Fish sticks. Even ice cream. But not ice cream in
cones.
Never chicken with
biscuits.
My mother was an Atkins dieter before there was an Atkins diet, back when Dr. Robert Atkins was a plain old cardiologist who recommended vitamins. She said that even sugar was better than starch because sugar was a source of
quick energy,
which bodies could
burn off
if they played hard. Rolls, on the other hand, or spaghetti, were sneaky. They turned into glue when you chewed them and they slid inside you and adhered. Layer on layer—stuck.

Bread was never served with meals at our house, and at restaurants we shunned the rolls or Saltines that came free: we ate huge quantities of meat and salad, even bowls of ice cream for dessert, even with slabs of Dream Whip. We had cereal or bagels now and then for breakfast, but a nimbus of sin and foreboding hung over them.
Someday you’ll pay for this!
In my school lunches I got beef sticks, or hot soup in Thermoses, and sometimes sandwiches but on a special thin brown “dietetic” bread. I straddled the bench eating my sandwich, its dietetic bread framing six slices of bologna, piled half an inch high, as Laurel laughed, eating a Ding Dong, white cream spurting through the gap between her teeth.

When I went away to college in another town, my residence card gave me access to a dining commons three times a day, where buffet meals were served. Mom was worried, and rightly so. But I did not rebel. Tray after tray of fresh bread and lasagna and German chocolate cake lined the stainless-steel rack that gleamed into the distance like a runway. Other freshmen grew fat. I forked lettuce into my mouth, thick with Thousand Island dressing, nibbled bunless patties, and poured so much Sweet’n Low into iced tea that it tasted of deodorant, or zinc.

After two years in the dorm, I shared an apartment with friends. I worked at a frozen-yogurt shop, so my junior and senior years were fueled almost entirely on frozen yogurt—plain or with cashews. One night at the frozen-yogurt shop I met a classics major with hair the color of pennies. I gave him a free cone, not that night, of course, but the next, and the next and the next.

We were in Europe together after graduation, drifting hand in hand for months through Viking theme parks and wallpaper museums and chapels constructed of human bones. Of course, I was still eating my same way, ordering steaks and half-chickens and saucissons, shunning the baskets of bread, rolls, and pastries that came with meals and gleamed in bakeshop windows. Brioches and croissants. German seeded spirals served with tiny tubs of liverwurst. Golden Austrian crowns awaiting jam. Dark Dutch gingerbread, oil-jeweled Spanish churros shaped like wands: under the dry blue sky he dipped his in hot chocolate, pudding-thick.
I’m not hungry,
I said. Ten thousand bakeries where he chose tarts and loaves and puffs: and then one day…

I still wonder what it was about
that day.
It was not a birthday or a holiday, just a plain Wednesday or Sunday. We were in Delphi, that Greek hill-city where ancient sibyls used to read the future in smoke that rose up swirling between their feet from cracks in the soil. That midmorning he took his time in the bakery, eyeing its racks of honey-soaked baklava and syrupy shredded-wheat nests cradling nuts. But no. Handing the clerk his few coins, he chose two raisin rolls. Plain. Round. The slick brown of saddles.

Try one,
he said when we were outside, on a bench in the clattery street with its view of the slopes whose pine and juniper mixed with the traffic perfume. He held it out to me on his freckled hand.

Ha ha,
I said,
no.

Try it,
he said, biting the other one.

What was it? The black coffee we’d been drinking all morning from tiny cups? The proximity of sibyls? The fact that I was farther from home than ever before? Almost without thinking—
almost
but not quite: I felt a flash, a reconnaissance, as you feel at reunions—I took the roll and ate it. Just—pulled off one tuft after another and put them into my mouth till it was finished. That stretchy softness, warm to the teeth, black fruit off mountain vines popping like music.

More than twenty years have passed since that roll. I kept the guy, but otherwise I’ve never looked back. After that trip I found out that I’ve always been hypoglycemic. My blood cannot produce enough of its own sugar, and aches for it. This is why I’ve always gotten so hungry between meals, that pounding demented hunger. My blood screams
please please please mainline complex carbohydrates,
with their linked sugar molecules like strings of beads regulating the glucose, drop by drop, to calm me.
Moron, give me that,
it says—it said for all those years, but I cursed it. All those uneaten Cheez-Its spilled on the ground, wasted bliss. But no longer.

I crave starch. I eat it. Pastries, French fries, and bread produce a kind of euphoria, a floaty sparkly electrical charge. I eat sponge cake. Noodles. Toast.

And the plainer the better, those thick butterless slices, barely toasted, those noodles tossed only with cottage cheese. I am like an alcoholic drinking straight shots. My copper-haired guy laughs at my enthusiasm. I like these foods more than he ever did, in the same way that converts are the most devout daveners in the shul.

He likes spicy dishes. Salty dishes, soupy dishes, crunchy dishes. He likes mixed dishes in which the starch is dotted or even overwhelmed with other items. When we are eating together sometimes we go my way but sometimes we have to go his.