Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (3 page)

I
n the winter of 1990 I was twenty-six years old, broke, and living alone in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Winter at the end of Cape Cod was a lonely proposition but since I have always been fond of being alone it was not at all a bad one. I had come to the Fine Arts Work Center as part of a fellowship program that gives ten artists and ten writers seven off-season months in which to work. We had a place to live and a stipend of $350 a month, which covered food, the phone bill, and anything else one can think of to buy when there’s very little money and no place to spend it.

I got along fine. Being broke and isolated is usually associated with hardship but it’s actually quite conducive to writing a novel. Like the scrubby little trees that grew in the sand near the ocean, I found I could thrive on neglect. Everything in the town that bustled and glimmered in the summer months had folded up its tent and left by the time I arrived in October. The fruit stands boarded over, the restaurants closed down. Only a stalwart bar or two hung on to keep the locals from going completely mad. The A&P on Shank Painter Road sold fewer goods during reduced hours for what seemed to me to be exorbitantly high prices. In short, The Season was over.

I had a very small apartment on the second floor of a house. One room was a kitchen and the other was a bedroom that was not much bigger than a twin mattress. I wrestled the bed into the kitchen so that I could call the bedroom a study, a study being the room I needed the most. As for sleeping in the kitchen, it made perfect sense to me. It was warmer in there, and in the morning I could get up and make my oatmeal and tea and take it straight back to bed.

Those seven months, long and cold and quiet, were really the first I’d ever spent completely by myself. At this tender age I had a great deal of experience being taken care of by other people, and a reasonable amount of experience taking care of someone else, but I’d never had the opportunity to see how I would fare when left completely to my own devices. When would I go to bed? Would I still be so neat? Would I drink too much or never drink at all? What would I make myself for supper?

The answer to this last one wasn’t so impressive.

It turns out that where food was concerned, I had a seemingly endless capacity for repetition. Breakfast was a fixed tableau and boredom never even entered into it. As long as I was eating alone I ate oatmeal, as Patchetts have done for generations before me. Oatmeal was actually one of the more complicated things I made for myself because it required a heating element, though in truth I have eaten bowls of uncooked oats as well, pinching them up between my fingers and thumb and nibbling while I worked. They were as pleasing to me as they would have been to any plow horse. Lunch every day consisted of a tomato sandwich with mustard. I could get two lunches out of a single tomato, three if it was a whopper. Even in February, when tomatoes were orange and vaguely translucent with the texture of a softball, I was never deterred. If I was feeling very fancy for dinner I would scramble some eggs or pour jarred red sauce over pasta, but most nights did not feel fancy at all. I ate slices of white cheese on Saltines with a dollop of salsa, then smoothly transitioned to Saltines spread with butter and jam for dessert. I would eat as many as were required to no longer be hungry and then I would stop. All food that wasn’t eaten sitting up in bed was eaten standing over the sink or sometimes in front of the refrigerator, where I looked around for things that weren’t there. Day after day, week after month, I stuck to my routines like a chorus girl in the back row. I never minded. Even all these years later, in a life that is loaded with fancy supermarkets and disposable income, a Saltine is still delicious.

Perhaps this shameful dearth of culinary sophistication could all be explained away by my lack of options at the time: funds were low, the grocery store was barren, restaurants, if I could have afforded them, were closed. If this were only a matter of what I ate when times were tight, then it would be reduced to no more than a sad chapter in an otherwise bright gastronomic history. Except I wasn’t sad, I was alone, and when I’m alone it’s impossible for me to have any standards about eating.

This isn’t because I don’t know better. Even as I was putting the salsa on the cracker I knew about food. My mother, who could live entirely off of Kraft processed cheese singles and Shredded Wheat, can also make a perfect béchamel sauce. She taught my sister and me how to loosen the skin from a chicken and slip in fresh herbs, to fill the cavity with garlic and lemons. Time after countless time, I saw her poring over Julia Child in order to reinvent Thanksgiving or have a sit-down dinner for twelve or a cocktail party for a hundred. My sister and I were taught how to follow a recipe (it’s only a matter of paying attention, like those eighth-grade reading comprehension tests) and when to leave the recipe behind and strike out on our own. In high school I excelled at home economics. I made crêpes and madeleines for French club. My first job in college was running the student bakery, getting up at five to bake a hundred cookies and several cakes before classes started. In the evenings I helped cook for dinner parties at the president’s house. I made butter knots and osso buco. I whisked up salad dressing, simmered the flan. Being plain in my twenties, I seduced the boys I liked with shrimp creole and chocolate cake. I found my share of love. In graduate school I made special soft meals for my best friend, Lucy, who had lost half her jaw to cancer as a child and was limited by what she could chew. I worked as a line cook in a fancy vegetarian restaurant and burned my wrists and thumbs on the grill. I have a piecrust recipe that takes two days to make, and all of my pies, even the blueberry, serve up flawlessly from the first slice. I have been a waitress, a hostess, and briefly, at the age of twenty-four, a well-meaning wife who followed the classic food pyramid while putting dinner on the table every night.

The fact is, I love to feed other people. I love their pleasure, their comfort, their delight in being cared for. Cooking gives me the means to make other people feel better, which in a very simple equation makes me feel better. I believe that food can be a profound means of communication, allowing me to express myself in a way that seems at times much deeper and more sincere than words. My Gruyère cheese puffs straight from the oven say
I’m glad you’re here. Sit down, relax. I’ll look after everything.

So what does it say about my self-esteem that I know perfectly well how to make a velouté and yet would choose to crack open a can of SpaghettiOs when dining alone? (I am not using the word “SpaghettiOs” as a metaphor here.) Do I not believe that I am entitled to the same level of tenderness that I extend to others? Or is it, in fact, a greater level of self-love to not put myself through the hassle of making dinner?

I think it is quite possible to be a very good cook while caring next to nothing about food. Just because you can prepare a dish doesn’t mean you necessarily have any interest in eating it. I took far more pleasure in cooking for strangers in restaurants than I ever did having to sit down with my own guests. This is not a matter of having a preference for strangers, it’s just that strangers tend not to want to eat with the help. Cooking is exhausting, and nothing kills my appetite like spending a day trimming the fat off of chicken or shredding a couple pounds of Brussels sprouts into paper-thin confetti without slicing off my fingertips. Sure, I can make a sole meunière, but it must be done over a flame that is fit to brighten up the very gates of hell. There is a split second in which to get it right, to get your side dishes on the plate, and get the plate to the table the very instant the fish is done while everything is still searing hot. I can do it, barely, but then can I eat it? My hair is slicked back with sweat, my hands tremble when I hold the fork, the smell of browned butter coats the inside of my nose. That is the moment I long to be in the shower, not at the table, and besides, it’s impossible to both eat dinner and beat up a zabaglione.

So while it is a deep and genuine pleasure to nurture those I love, it is an equal pleasure to be off the hook for that responsibility as well, to pass over food that is delicate and beautiful and complex in flavor in favor of the item that is least likely to spoil. Eating as a simple means of ending hunger is one of the great liberties of being alone, like going to the movies by yourself in the afternoon or, back in those golden days of youth, having a cigarette in the bathtub. It is a pleasure to not have to take anyone else’s tastes into account or explain why I like to drink my grapefruit juice out of the carton. Eating, after all, is a matter of taste, and taste cannot always be good taste. The very thought of maintaining high standards meal after meal is exhausting. It discounts all the peanut butter that is available in the world.

When I picked up my oldest friend, Tavia, for dinner last week we met at her father’s apartment. Kent has lived alone for more than twenty years, since his girls grew up and moved out on their own. His home is small and overflowing with the artifacts of his life, the testaments of his pleasures and personal style. “Come to dinner with us,” I said to him. Though I certainly would have enjoyed his company, I also was showing a certain amount of noblesse oblige: here he was, after all, alone. Why not be nice and bring him along?

“Oh, I couldn’t,” he said happily. “I’ve made lobster Newburg for dinner.”

He had driven downtown to get the lobster tail at the fish stand in the farmers’ market. It is no small trek. Alone, Kent did not wait around for any crumbs of company or lobster his daughters or their friends might have thrown him. Alone, Kent had seized his Wednesday night and gone ahead with his Newburg. That was his pleasure, unimaginable to me but nevertheless deeply admired. I tried to picture myself turning down a similar invitation if I had a free evening. Could I stand my ground? Could I say no, in fact I’ve opened a fresh sleeve of Saltines tonight? Probably not. Probably I would lie. And then, after the visitors had left, I would stand over the sink and eat whatever was around, whatever I needed in order to go and do the work that I love. Even now it is a picture of heaven to me, an evening spent alone and well fed in the tradition of my own low standards, pure heaven.

M
ost beans are lowly, of course, but it seems to me that the pinto, the lentil, and the black bean are the lowliest of them all, and all the more charming because of it. Sometimes I picture these three beans holding hands and chiming together, “We’re lowly! We’re of the earth! We’re beans for the people!” And sometimes, when I envision this trio, the black-eyed pea waddles into view and says, “Whaddabout me, guys?” And the pinto, the lentil, and the black bean say, “Hiya, black-eyed pea! Get in here! We didn’t forget you!” Then they all sing some kind of bean song.

Lowliness, in my book, is a virtue, and therefore by telling you about my dream of the lowly beans I am simply revealing to you my favorite beans. And of all the beans I have loved in my lifetime—and there have been many—no bean stands above the black bean. The black bean reigns supreme. The black bean has the key to my heart. The black bean and me go way back.

Now, I should be clear here what I’m actually talking about. I’m not talking about dried black beans, glorious as they are. I mean, they’re beautiful and cheap, and every time I see the big bin of them in the bulk aisle of my food co-op, I have to resist the urge to plunge my arms in up to my elbows. If I could, I would like to swim in a sea of dried black beans. But no, it’s not dried black beans that I’m in love with. I’m in love with the canned ones. True, some people will say that using canned beans is cheating—like buying canned applesauce instead of making your own—and I understand that point of view. But to get dried black beans tender, in my experience, you have to boil them for approximately six days. You know what I say to that? Give me the can opener. Because inside that lovely little can o’ beans are not only beans that are already cooked, but beans that are sitting in a bunch of their own gravy. Bingo! That’s the good stuff.

I first met black beans in college. It was the early nineties, and things were looking up for black beans. In those days, I was flirting a lot with both vegetarianism and vegetarians, and black beans and rice was basically
the
standard meal that vegetarians on campus were making. My friend Sarah, who lived in a co-op dorm where the students did the cooking (just think of the amount of beans they went through there), showed me the very clever and unbeatable trick of stirring shredded cheese into the hot rice just before it was served with the beans. I still use this trick to this day, even though it does make a bit of a mess for whoever washes the rice pot. The mess is worth it, though.

By my senior year of college, I was cooking for myself, and black beans and rice was my favorite meal because it was fast, easy, cheap, and satisfying. I owned exactly one cookbook at that time,
The Moosewood Cookbook,
and it had a lot of credibility with me because it featured a knockout recipe called Brazilian Black Bean Soup.

I also relied on black beans throughout graduate school. I think that it was then that I started sometimes serving the beans with cornbread instead of rice—pouring the hot beans over the cornbread. This way of using cornbread was clearly something that was part of my Missouri heritage. It also, I realized, made for a fantastically complete dinner because cornbread, when topped with apple butter or just butter and honey, was a superb dessert.

Those were the early years of my black bean love. To be honest, a lot of the memories have faded somewhat, and many are gone completely. But all of the memories—the clear ones, the muddled ones, and the lost ones—are good. It was the courtship phase of my relationship with black beans. It was a golden time. It will dwell in my heart forever.

In the late nineties, at the alarming age of twenty-five, I returned to teach English at my alma mater. When I got the job, I was living in Missouri, and the logistics of looking for an apartment in upstate New York were awkward. Just when it seemed as if I would have to fly out there just to find an apartment, the office of faculty housing called me and told me that they had one opening. But it was a very small apartment, they explained, and it shared some kind of common entrance hallway with another apartment. Sounded fine to me, and the price—about two hundred a month—was so insanely low I had to take it. Plus, it was just across the street from campus.

My dad and I loaded his pickup truck and my car with my furniture and books and trekked east in late August. When we entered the new apartment, we liked the first room—a square little room that was about the size of a junior’s dorm room—and we wondered what the second room would be like. We opened the door to the second room only to discover that it wasn’t a second room. It was a closet. So the next day Dad headed home to Missouri with my sofa and a few other things still in the back of the pickup. They hadn’t fit in the apartment.

That first semester of teaching, it quickly became clear that I didn’t fit into the system. A few years ago, I’d been a student here, and happily so. But now I was too old and too square to socialize with the students. (Plus, it was kinda against the rules.) Likewise, I was too young and not boring enough to socialize with the professors. In addition, walking around campus was like walking through a landscape filled with ghosts, because though the place was the same—there was the window of my freshman room, there was my old girlfriend’s apartment, there was the chair in the library I had fallen asleep in so many times—the people were different. All my friends were gone, excepting a couple of professors.

So, outside of the classroom I spent my time alone. I would scurry home before dark. My apartment was
cozy,
that’s for sure. My mom had made curtains for the big bank of windows, and I would close the curtains, and turn on the radio to an AM station that played songs from fifty years earlier, and then I would start cooking dinner. I had no television. Cooking was my entertainment.

The other thing about the apartment was that it was bisected by a long entry hall that led to another apartment. On one side of the hall was my bedroom, with its own door, of course. On the other side of the hallway were my galley kitchen and bathroom. There was no door between the kitchen and hallway, and so whenever I was cooking dinner, I was standing just a few feet from the hallway, and invariably Mary Lou—a short librarian more than twice my age, with an unfortunate librarian haircut and a deeply held conviction that synthetic fabrics were evil—would come in, smell my dinner in progress, comment on how great it smelled, then shuffle into her apartment. She would then shuffle back out to walk her dog, shuffle back in a few minutes later, basically repeat how good my dinner smelled, and then disappear into her apartment for the evening. In other words, my cooking was a public affair. Many days, these interactions with Mary Lou about the aromas of my cooking were the only words anyone spoke to me all day.

What does a person cook for himself when dining alone every day? Lots of soup. Pasta. At least a few times a month I would make something new out of
The Moosewood Cookbook,
something nice. A treat. But truth be told, the best treat of all was a pot of hot black beans and fresh cornbread.

Maybe my
human
college friends weren’t here anymore, but I’d also met black beans in college, and they were still with me. My friends, the beans. As for cornbread, well, cornbread and I went even farther back—to the edge of memory, to family meals, to my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents. So here, on my plate, I had a small assemblage of friends who knew me well. That was enough, for those two years I lived there. Beans and me and cornbread. That was just enough.

I remember once I was working late in my office, grading papers or maybe just playing Snood on the computer. It was in the autumn, I think, and I printed something out on the network and then went into the English Department office to retrieve the printout and there was my pal Dean, who’d been one of my professors just four years ago, but who was now my colleague. We chatted briefly and then he said why didn’t we go and grab some dinner together?

It was a perfectly reasonable request. I liked Dean, and he had always been kind to me. (The summer between my junior and senior years of college he let me store several boxes of my belongings in his garage, for example.) But the problem was that I had retreated so far into myself—shielding myself from the ghosts and memories of this place—that I had become reliant upon the comfort of rituals and plans. I had already decided that I was going to have black beans and cornbread for dinner, and I had already picked out the can of beans—hours ago—and put it on my kitchen counter as a reminder. And I now found myself wanting, more than anything, to go home to enjoy my simple meal by myself. I stammered something about how I already had plans for dinner—even awkwardly mentioned the can of beans I had already picked out—and, bless him, Dean saw that he had hit upon a nerve and he told me that it was no problem at all and that we would have dinner another time. I agreed.

What does an introvert do when he’s left alone? He stays alone.

At the end of my second year, I told the department I didn’t want to teach a third year, and I started thinking of where I could move and be a writer full time. I got a house-sitting gig for the summer. It was a huge rambling farmhouse at the edge of campus, a full hundred and fifty years old, and it contained just me and a cat named Lydia. I was excited about not teaching anymore, and about getting away from this place, and about summer, so I drew up a long list of things to do—picking berries, hiking, visiting a certain used bookstore that was in a barn, etc.—and then I promptly spent most of the summer doing nothing but sitting around the house, taking daily bike rides out on the college’s farm—the only local landscape that reminded me of the Midwest—and cooking dinner for myself every night.

In the middle of the summer, my friend Laura visited me. She and I had been best friends in college, and for two years of graduate school we were a couple, and now we were just friends again. We spent part of our visit walking around campus and revisiting our haunts and talking about our friends. And that was good, being with someone who remembered the same ghosts that I did, someone who reminded me that they weren’t ghosts at all, of course, but real people who had simply scattered—mostly to Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Then, later in the day, back at my house, I asked Laura what she wanted me to cook for dinner. She had lived with me for two years, after all, and knew the kinds of things I was best at cooking. And she said, without a moment’s hesitation, “Beans and cornbread.”

Black Beans for One

Is it soup or just beans? Neither and both, I suppose. Serve it hot, over split cornbread or with rice. For extra goodness, stir shredded cheese into the hot rice before serving.

MAKES TWO SERVINGS
(tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s lunch)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 small onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

115-ounce can black beans

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

In a medium saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat, then add the onion and garlic. Cook them, stirring frequently, until they’ve started to brown. Add the beans and their liquid, stir, and lower the heat.

Simmer the beans, partially covered, stirring occasionally, until the liquid thickens a bit and is smooth—about 20 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. At this point, the beans can be served immediately or removed from the heat, covered, and kept warm for up to 15 minutes.