Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (9 page)

She looked at me and shook her head. “No, it definitely is not.”

“Okay,” I said wanly, voice trailing, more like a question. “But it’s still really good?”

I didn’t even convince myself. Like that, the legend was gone.

Now I no longer make the salsa rosa, not even for myself. It is retired, like Secretariat was before he died, of what I like to think were natural causes.

Salsa Rosa for One

MULTIPLY INGREDIENTS BY TWENTY FOR GROUP PREPARATION

3 tablespoons olive oil

5 cloves of garlic, sliced thin

1 small zucchini, sliced (optional)

3 roma tomatoes, chopped

1 box Pomi diced tomatoes, around 20 ounces

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

? cup
parmigiano
cheese, grated

1 box
panna
(cooking cream), about 6 ounces, or half pint heavy cream

? pound dry pasta (spaghettini, cappellini, or any long thin noodle. Do
not
try with fusilli, penne, or farfalle or you will seriously be fucked)

Salt and pepper, to taste

Heat
the olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat.

Add
the garlic and cook, stirring, until it just turns brown.

Add
the zucchini and cook, stirring, until it has a yellowish sheen.

Add
the fresh and boxed tomatoes. (Canned whole tomatoes will work too—just make sure there are some fresh ones in there.)

Lower
the heat a bit and cook until all the tomatoes start breaking down and forming a
sugo
(sauce).

Now
add
the butter, cheese, and cream, but don’t add it in all at once.

Mix
it in, so the sauce continues to cook and reduce down. You want to do at least three or four waves.

Once it’s all in, set the heat to low and cover.

Boil
your water and cook your pasta al dente. Remember, it will finish cooking once it’s out of the boiling water, so don’t leave it in too long.

After you strain the pasta,
throw
it back into the pot with a nice
pour
of extra-virgin olive oil.

Add
some salt and pepper, then
pour
the salsa rosa over the pasta.

Mix,
but not too roughly, just so it gets slithery with sauce.

Eat
it.

Run
a marathon the next day.

I
am probably the first woman from either side of my family ever to have eaten alone. My mother never spent a day or night alone under any of the roofs that sheltered her during her one hundred and one years and four months of life. Nor did her mother, who died at eighty-six. Nor did my father’s mother, who lived well into her nineties. My first experiences of eating alone came during the long years of university life at Ferrara, where I took two doctoral degrees in the sciences. I was doing it alone but I could not describe it as serious eating. I was certainly capable of becoming hungry, but when I was young, food as such was at the very bottom of my list of interests. I grabbed anything that I could dispatch quickly and that consumed as little as possible of my minuscule living allowance. It was never anything more demanding of money or time than a
panino
stuffed with mortadella.

My palate came to life when I married Victor, a man whose thoughts were more likely to turn to food than to almost anything else. In my married life, during the years that we spent in Italy and those in New York, I took many of my meals alone. When we lived in Milan, Victor was often away on location supervising the shooting of the television commercials he had created for McCann-Erickson, the advertising agency where he worked. More than a decade later, when we lived in New York, he was in Italy periodically over several years doing research for the wine book that Knopf eventually published.

Unlike my husband, who loves to dine by himself at a restaurant, if I have to be at a table for one, it has to be at home. When my husband is away, I salivate for chicken because that is the only thing he prefers not to eat. In Italy, it was an easy longing to satisfy. I would pick up a small, freshly roasted chicken at a neighborhood
rosticceria,
buy the makings of a salad—either some
misticanza
(a mixture of wild and domesticated greens) or tomatoes, a cucumber, and spring onions—and a loaf of ciabatta or other good bread. I could hardly wait to get home to enjoy my feast. The first time I tried that in the States, however, I was deeply disappointed. Before they roast a chicken in Italy, they rub it thoroughly with salt, and they put a sprig of rosemary and a clove or two of garlic in its cavity. It is simply delicious. In America, on the other hand, rotisserie chickens have next to no flavor and they are overgrown besides. Once I had discovered this, I enhanced the flavor of the chicken I took home by adding to it the missing salt, garlic, and rosemary and reheating in the oven for fifteen minutes or so. It may not be quite the real thing, but short of cooking one for myself from scratch, which is unthinkable, it is an acceptable imitation.

I adore chicken, but I cannot have it several days running. On the first day, when it is warm, I will have the dark meat, and for the second time around, I will have the breast cold, sliced thin, and moistened with a few drops of very good olive oil. After that,
basta,
enough! We are not accustomed to eating the same thing in succession and we usually do not keep leftovers. If what I have cooked exceeds our appetite, our friends are always willing to relieve us of anything we don’t finish. On the exceedingly rare occasions that there are leftovers, I transform them into something different, as I have described in my cookbooks.

The prospect of eating alone will sometimes make me lose interest in food, and when that happens I must turn to the one thing whose aroma and flavor can powerfully jog my appetite: anchovies. I always have very good quality anchovies in my kitchen, which I use in various pasta sauces, or in the Piedmontese vegetable dip
bagna caôda,
or for providing subliminal excitement deeply embedded in the juices of a veal roast. But nothing matches the thrilling intensity of an anchovy fillet laid over a slice of grilled bread slathered with sweet butter. It is blues-chasing flavor so direct that it feels as though you are mainlining it. For that purpose, you need first-rate anchovy fillets packed in olive oil that do not just taste of salt. The best are the extra-large fillets packed by Ortiz, which are not cheap. Another good packer is Agostino Recca from Sicily.

When I am alone, I cringe at the thought of cooking, which I may do only if I have exhausted every other plausible option. The preserved seafoods of the Mediterranean, whether packed in olive oil like anchovies, tuna, or sardines, or dried like
bottarga,
the preserved roe of mullets or tuna, all of them always at hand in my cupboard, deliver many agreeable alternatives to actual cooking.
Ventresca,
tuna’s succulent belly, is another of my favorites. I could eat it right from the can, but I don’t because I love it in a salad. If I have some cooked cannellini or
borlotti
beans in the refrigerator, I warm them up with some of the liquid they have been cooked in, then drain them and add them to a can of
ventresca
together with several thin slices of raw onion. I toss it with a few drops of vinegar, lots of olive oil, and lots of black pepper. If I don’t have the beans, I substitute a very ripe tomato, peeled and cut into chunks. If I do not feel too lazy to wash the food processor afterward, I might purée the tuna with capers, cornichons, and unsalted butter, which I then spread on grilled bread. Or I may not have anything with it at all, eating it as an open sandwich with buttered bread. Buttered bread or, even better, a buttered English muffin toasted dark, is what I like to eat with sardines that still have their skins and bones. I do not buy feeble-tasting boneless, skinless sardines.

If I feel like being extravagant, I might have Sardinian
bottarga,
the pressed and dried roe of mullets netted on that island’s western coast, preparing it as they do in Sardinia. After removing the roe’s membrane, I slice it paper thin and sandwich it between two shards of buttered cracker bread. Even better would be to use Sardinia’s own sheet-music bread,
carta musica,
which I have made myself at those infrequent times when I have had a lot of energy to burn. It is a huge amount of work, but I make a lot of it and it keeps for months. It is also available online, imported from Sardinia. Tuna
bottarga,
which comes from Sicily, is much sharper. After slicing it as thin as I can, I toss it with shredded Belgian endive, seasoning it with lemon juice and olive oil.

My husband calls me
mangia panini,
sandwich eater, because I will eat almost anything that is enclosed between two slices of bread. When I am in Italy, one of my favorite snacks is a sandwich Italians call
tost.
It is a grilled cheese sandwich whose ideal components are fontina cheese and cooked Parma ham. The cafés make it in a special toaster with a folding, vertical grill that lifts up and out. I make it for myself often because I find the combination of very crisp hot bread and superior melting cheese surpassingly comforting and fully satiating. It has to be carefully done with the right ingredients, otherwise it can turn out to be a stodgy piece of work.

I have thought about the apparent contradiction that someone who has dedicated most of her working life to cooking should be so reluctant, when she eats alone, to cook for herself. The explanation is that I consider cooking to be an act of love. I do enjoy the craft of cooking, of course, otherwise I would not have done so much of it, but that is a very small part of the pleasure it brings me. What I love is to cook for someone. To put a freshly made meal on the table, even if it is something very plain and simple, as long as it tastes good and is not a ready-to-heat something bought at the store, is a sincere expression of affection, it is an act of binding intimacy directed at whoever has a welcome place in your heart. And while other passions in your life may, at some point, begin to bank their fires, the shared happiness of good homemade food can last as long as we do.

Il Tost

(GRILLED CHEESE AND HAM SANDWICH, ITALIAN STYLE)

YIELD: TWO
TOST

Like many other Italian preparations, this appears to be so simple as to be almost banal. Banal is a bore, but simple can be sublime. To cross the line from the former to the latter you must be uncompromising about the ingredients. Packaged, sliced supermarket cheese won’t do the trick. Nor will water-packed supermarket ham. Insist on flavorful imported cheese and sliced-to-order cooked ham, preferably Parma ham and preferably with some fat on it. Do it right and you may become as addicted to
tost
as most Italians are.

The bread used for
tost
in Italy is called
pane a cassetta,
which corresponds to very thin, sliced packaged white bread. I usually make it with Pepperidge Farm’s Very Thin Sliced White, but I have also used the same brand’s Very Thin Wheat, which I have grown fond of.

Four thin, square slices white bread

11/2 tablespoons butter

2 ounces imported Italian Fontina cheese, or aged Swiss or Gruyère cheese sliced thin, or slivers of Parmigian-Reggiano cheese

Two slices cooked, unsmoked ham, preferably imported cooked Parma ham, but not prosciutto

A baking dish

1. Turn on the oven to 500° F.
   
2. Butter each slice of bread on one side only.
   
3. Cover the buttered side of each of two slices with cheese and top with one slice of ham.
   
4. Cover with the remaining slice of bread, buttered side facing in.
   
5. Place in the baking dish without overlapping.
   
6. Bake in the preheated oven for 5 minutes. If after 5 minutes the bread is not yet fully browned, bake for an additional minute.
   
7. Serve hot, cutting the
   tost
   diagonally in half if desired.
   

I
n the early 1960s I lived in Manhattan for five years, with a new husband, Glenn, who worked for the National Cotton Council, which was based in Memphis. The Cotton Council was staffed almost entirely with born Southerners who had more than happily moved away from home, north to the city. One of them, Charlotte Norman, had grown up and lived most of her life in southern Louisiana—Abbeville and then New Orleans—where food preparation was and is, of course, a very big deal. In her family, her father, called Boy, had been the cook; her mother, Thelma, was a schoolteacher who did other things. After her husband died, Thelma had to ask where the oven broiler was.

Boy Norman traveled. But whenever he was at home, he and Charlotte and her sister Toni cooked the evening meal together. No shortcuts. They cooked by the standards set in their culture and their community, which were exceedingly high. Stirring the roux took as long as it took, and somebody had to stand over the pot stirring it until the flour-oil mix turned the proper grocery-sack brown. Usually, they didn’t eat until nine or ten o’clock.

Charlotte lived alone in Manhattan, and it was she who taught me to respect and prepare food. I grew up in Mississippi. My mother, who was from Arkansas, had been a fairly adventurous cook herself—often making us curries and egg foo yong instead of the usual fried chicken and greens—but Charlotte’s relationship to food went far beyond ingredients.

One Saturday afternoon when I went over to her apartment, I found her in her tiny kitchen, finishing up a Louisiana dish—might have been gumbo or étouffée, perhaps a batch of roux—and ladling it into small plastic containers for freezing.

Was she planning a dinner?

No, she said. They were for herself, so that when she came home from work she wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

You cook for yourself? I asked. At twenty-two, I was more than a little sassy. I had never lived alone in my life.

Charlotte has this look, a straight-on gaze of exhausted befuddlement, the slightly scornful gaze of one who stands in wonderment at the other person’s rank unknowing.

Why wouldn’t I cook for myself? she said.

That was more than forty years ago. I can see her at that moment, as precisely today as if she said it last Saturday.

Charlotte and I cooked many, many meals together. Usually, nobody from the Cotton Council went back to the South for holidays. We couldn’t afford the plane fare, or we just didn’t want to go. During one Christmas season, Charlotte and I issued written invitations to a black-tie five-course meal in my apartment. Using instructions from a
Gourmet
magazine, Charlotte boned a chicken, keeping the shape of the chicken intact so that the carver could slice straight through white meat and dark, breast to rump. On another occasion we made Diana Kennedy’s mole de pollo, down to grinding spices and hot peppers in a
molcajete.
The preparation took all day and was not a success. We used the wrong kind of chocolate, didn’t grind the peppers enough, drank too much tequila and missed a step—who knows? The dish was a flop. Exhausted by the time we got to the table, we dumped the chocolate chicken and went out to eat.

In time, once life has kicked us around a bit, sassiness cools. Since that Saturday in Charlotte’s kitchen, I have lived in many places, sometimes alone, and have cooked many meals for myself, in small and large kitchens—some of them in furnished digs, outfitted with the cheapest, most basic kind of cookware. I would not say that I recall Charlotte’s pointed question—which wasn’t really a question—
every
time I cook and eat alone, but often as I sit quite happily alone at some table in some new town, I do.

Over the years I’ve settled on a few basic beliefs, one of which is that whatever we do for pleasure, we should try to do, or learn to do, and practice on occasion, in solitude. A kind of test to gauge our skills and see how deep the passion lies and to find out what it is we truly like, to discover—minus other tastes and preferences—what specifically gives us pleasure. We all have our eccentricities. Alone, we indulge.

And so, the solitary cook fixes her meal. She eats, enjoying what she’s made however she likes, whether eating salad with her hands (as I like to do) or mopping up the last bit of sauce with bread or even—childlike—fingers. For many it’s eating that is the hard part. What to look at or listen to. When to stop, how much to save.

So many details to attend to.

In my judgment, those who cook for themselves generally fall into two groups: the ones who, like Charlotte, prepare ahead and those who, like me, cook for the night, the moment, the one occasion. In the times I have lived alone and fed myself, I have routinely stuck to certain dishes, cooking them over and over again, until in memory, the place and the dish merge and become a single event. I never planned to do this—say, to fix only baked potatoes with a green of some kind, cooked or raw, in a particular kitchen in a certain town—but I could not seem to stop. Repetition became a ritual. When shopping for the night, I would stand in a market trying to convince myself to make something different tonight, not to buy the same one-third-pound slab of salmon, the same prewashed spinach, boned chicken breast, or plum tomatoes I bought the day before.

There was nothing I could do. The fact was, I
wanted
the same thing again and again. And so I yielded, bought the goods, took them home, cooked, and 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.

In the 1990s I lived in Missoula, Montana, for a few years. When I first went there, I was alone and lived in a very small furnished place, part of a big house near the university where I had a job as a visiting writer. The kitchen was probably the smallest I’d ever cooked in, and there was no dining room, just a table pushed against the wall, big enough for three if they weren’t tall.

I was heavily into anchovies in those days. I fixed Guiliano Bugialli’s pasta with tomatoes and anchovies, his orecchiete with anchovies and parsley, his whole cauliflower with anchovy sauce. On the burners, I blistered bell peppers to peel and eat with olive oil and anchovies, and sometimes prepared a dish of my own devising: roasted sliced eggplant and peppers, with anchovies, garlic, oregano, and olive oil. There was a very fine Italian market in Missoula, the Broadway Market, owned and run by Alfredo and Ann Cipolato. Cipolato—who often sang opera for us as we shopped—regularly stocked big cans of salt-packed anchovies, which I regularly purchased and used. I also bought wine and pasta there and probably drank a lot of the wine alone, because whenever I’m in Missoula I always drink a lot of wine and have a lot of fun.

Mornings in Missoula, I made coffee and watched out the window. On sunny days students walked to class in beach attire even though the temperature was still in the thirties. Before I went to teach my class, I worked on a novel,
The Track of Real Desires,
the entire plot of which is based around a dinner party. I finished a draft of the book there.

Alone, I fed my appetite for anchovies. And fed it. Never sated, never bored.

In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, some years later, on another visiting-writer gig, I was living alone while in residence with a man I’d been with for some time, an actor, who was British but had a green card. By then, each of us had disappeared into a life apart but we didn’t know it yet and hadn’t parted. He slept late; I got up early. I loved those hours and sometimes went down to the quite large, if woefully equipped, kitchen, and made myself a batch of whole-wheat banana or apple pancakes, from scratch, with maple syrup. How happy I was during those minutes alone, reading the newspaper, with the radio playing softly beside me. I would cook myself two pancakes and vow no more, then scrape the rest of the batter out and cook another. How I love maple syrup! When the actor went back to England to visit family and I was truly alone in Tuscaloosa, for supper I cooked eggs, usually a frittata, with whatever vegetables I had on hand. Or pancakes. Sometimes oatmeal.

Breakfast starts the day; maybe by eating breakfast food at all hours, I was hoping to affect a new one, I don’t know. When my Alabama gig was finished, the actor returned to London and I went to Wimberley, Texas, and then Austin, where I lived alone for fifteen months.

Sometimes we find home, even for a temporary stay, and settle in. Old friends and family lived in Austin and I settled in there, in a boxlike little house not far from the university. Closer still was the magnificent Central Market, where I could choose daily from at least eleven kinds of sweet peppers and thirteen varieties of store-prepared sausage. In Austin I dabbled and experimented in the kitchen, but always came back to what I loved at that time: high-protein smoothies in the morning, pasta at night. It was about then that I began a fixation on salad, I think because by that time, you could buy it prewashed. At Central Market I could choose among many combinations: romaine, baby romaine, red baby romaine, mesclun, baby spinach, radicchio mix, mache mix…heaven.

I settled on penne rigate as my pasta of choice, usually topped with a fresh plum tomato sauce and sometimes with tuna or a combination of eggplant, peppers, and anchovies, as in Missoula.

As for the smoothie, I was down on milk in those days, for no other reason than temporary dislike and intolerance. This has passed, but back then I stuck to apple juice and kept sliced frozen bananas in the freezer for taste and froth, adding whatever other fruits were offered by Central Market, and a big scoop of vanilla protein powder.

I had put my stuff in storage, and so in Austin I used borrowed furniture and kitchenware. Somebody gave me a cheap microwave, something I’d never owned. I used it a lot, warming up last night’s pasta. I usually ate to one of the great KUT radio shows, Paul Ray, Phil Music, or Larry Monroe.

I felt like they were there with me.

This is a tale about food, music, and love. By then, I was seeing another man. He showed up from time to time and after I moved to D.C. from Austin, he was still in my life but making a habit of not showing up anymore. When I ate alone I tried not to think of him but it was hard. By then, I’d bought a George Foreman grill, which became my cooker of choice. I’d buy a slab of tuna or salmon or a boneless chicken breast, season it a little, then slam it between the plates. I called it “Georging,” as in, I just Georged some salmon. I seasoned the tuna with garlic and rosemary; the salmon with ginger and garlic; the chicken breasts with a lemony mustard marinade. Salad, bread. WPFW played great jazz, Caribbean, reggae, rhythm and blues. I had a Sam’s Club combination TV and VCR machine with a ten-inch screen. Sometimes I had raspberry sorbet and vanilla frozen yogurt for dessert.

Eating alone at home with music felt a lot less lonely than eating out in a café or at a bar.

My apartment in D.C. was in the trees. In the spring, when dogwoods bloomed, I felt like I was living in a snow world.

That summer I went to Marfa, Texas, for almost three months. There, in a former army barracks turned into an artists’ colony, I finished a biography and dined on baked potatoes—sometimes russets, sometimes yams—either with spinach and red onions sautéed in olive oil (or spinach and garlic, or spinach, onions, and mushrooms), or a salad. I would open up the potato and add some olive oil, salt, and pepper, then dump the green stuff on top. It is hard to say how much this meal pleased me at this time.

I had borrowed a boombox from somebody but didn’t have many CDs. Out there in the high desert the only radio station I could get was country music AM. I listened anyway. At night I did exercises to Moby and played Macy Gray’s first album. Or, once the heat had dissipated a little, took a bike ride into the mountains, on a blacktop road that ended in Mexico.

Last year I lived in Fresno for four and a half months. By that time I was sharing my life with the man who had previously given me the runaround in D.C., and we were good together, but because of another visiting job, we were apart for that time. In Fresno, I depended on Trader Joe’s for inspiration and meals. I had become hooked on a salad I used to get at Così in D.C., the one they called their signature salad: lettuce, pistachios, grapes, gorgonzola. I varied this in many ways, using pears or figs and walnuts, with feta or Roquefort. With the salad I ate The Trader’s butternut squash soup, usually topped with some cumin, cilantro, and a dollop of plain yogurt. I couldn’t get enough, and cleaned up the last drops from the bowl with T.J. whole-grain bread. I began to think of the store as run by a particular man, The Trader, the way people used to turn Betty Crocker into a real woman.

One time while shopping I told myself enough was enough and I bought The Trader’s red pepper soup instead. It was good but not what I was looking for.

The next day I went back to butternut.

I drank wine from Trader Joe’s, ate protein bars from Trader Joe’s, drank The Trader’s coffee, tea and the Italian fizzy water he sold in blue bottles.

Sometimes I went out and ate. When the World Series playoffs began and the Astros made the semifinals, I would go to a sports bar, where I ate food and watched the ball games.

Fresno had a great jazz station, KFSR. I’d bought a nice little Sony set with a remote control. It was in the living room next to my desk, down the hall from the bedroom. When I woke up I hit the remote, to hear David Aus or Joe Moore. At night, eating my soup, I listened to Mr. Leonard or Blues Mondays. I lived in an apartment complex set up for transient businesspeople. Everything was furnished, including a dieffenbachia in the corner with a tag on it reminding us to please dust the leaves. The pots and pans were cheap and tissue thin. I rarely used them but relied instead on the microwave that came standard in every apartment. One time, however, I did make a pot of soup. One Wednesday, Mark Bittman ran a recipe for Luccan farro soup in his
New York Times
column. Having never heard of farro but always trusting Bittman, I couldn’t resist. I made a pot for myself and then (because there was so much of it and under such conditions of transience I had no intention of putting food by) took a big bowl over to share with friends. They told me they feasted on it for a couple of days.