A Love of Food

1

I’ve been cooking for Jen almost since the day we met, sometimes feasts cribbed from glossy-paged cookbooks but more often mundane fare I’m forever varying, abandoning, and resurrecting. There are the roast chickens, the pastas, a half-dozen dishes destined for the tortilla, salads this way and that, a little Chinese, some Thai, seafood now and again. I like to cook. I like the choreography of the kitchen, the timing, the imposition of order (on a day, on a space, on the food itself). I like the way oil shimmers in a pan and the way it smokes. I like the fact that no matter how caught up I am inside the prison of my own personality, which is too often sour, solitary, quarrelsome, that at six in the evening I can open a cupboard, put a pan on the stove, and in this way, at least, tell my wife that I love her.

Jen was not the first woman I wooed from the kitchen, but she was the first to accuse me of using cooking as a substitute for a variety of advances otherwise absent from our budding romance. Where were the purple e-mails? she wanted to know. The fervent phone calls? Those whispered sweet nothings, which are not nothing and never have been? Maybe, at first, she thought I was only being shy, a flaw easily forgiven, but she quickly caught on, and one night, some months into our relationship, she looked at me across the dining-room table and asked if I would never say anything more ardent to her than “come over for dinner.” She might as well have discovered that I had a wife and kids squirreled away the next state over, so much did I feel caught, so quickly did I scramble to defend myself. “What about all these meals?” I said. The puerco pibil and strawberry paletas, the braised short ribs and watermelon salad, the key lime pie, the risottos and gazpachos, and let’s not forget the sometimes extravagant sandwiches? Didn’t all that count for anything? Cooking is love’s original language, a creole of amino acids and peptides, a lexicon of sugars and fats. There is a reason the early Christians called their communion agape, “the love feast”; a reason the Basuto of southern Africa believe the first marriage began at a cook fire. To cook for another is not always a significant act, but at its best, what happens in a kitchen is neither art nor science but a form of speech, a vow, and as much an expression of love as anything one might recite at an altar. It wasn’t that I had been reticent about my feelings for Jen; no, quite the opposite, she had not been listening closely enough.

None of this is true, of course. Or at best it is only half-true and entirely beside the point. I had, indeed, been making a kind of gustatory love, but, as Jesus told the tempter in the wilderness, neither man—nor woman—can live by bread alone. So I tried, over the following months, to be less miserly with my affections, but character is awfully static, a continent pushed and shoved by tectonic forces, resistant to change over anything less than the extremely long run. And yet, for some reason, Jen stayed with me.

2

Maybe love is little more than a kind of genetic neediness, a habit we fall into, an itch masquerading as augury. At times it feels like a vestigial tail, slightly embarrassing, a drag on our careers, our wanderlusts, our assorted sex lives. The critic Vivian Gornick has declared that it no longer signifies, by which she means we have become cynical about love, wise to its inevitable shortcomings, as much in fiction as in our own lives. Perhaps, like fear and anxiety and grief, love is something we will one day pharmaceutically manage. Dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin: these are the words that will trip down the palate of tomorrow’s Humbert Humberts. Until then we will focus on the practical paths to conjugal bliss: the...