Is her vision of the ideal interior design a kitchen that’s twice the size of the living room? Does she browse through kitchen-supply stores and impulse-buy sauté pans? Does she think a Nobel Prize for Julia Child isn’t a dumb idea? Does she look forward to early retirement so she can spend more time hanging around the stove? These are all things I can identify with.
In fact, if I ever took out a personal ad, my description of myself would probably read: “I like to hang around the kitchen.” A kitchen is the most civil place to start a relationship: an unpretentious, low-pressure space devoted to mutual tasks and common ambitions. Leave the living room to the poseurs---virtually all of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had have taken place within 5 feet of a working stove. (Besides, I always figured that if you both know your way around a kitchen, all that multiple orgasm stuff would take care of itself.)
Strangely, some callous and unthinking living-room types find this attitude bewildering. I can sympathize: People with a pathological distaste for a stove might be rubbed the wrong way by a person who thinks that everything should be in the same room as it. My ideal living space would be a 900 sq. ft high-ceilinged studio where you can see the stove from anywhere in the place. Except maybe the bathroom---I don’t want to be a fanatic about this.
Being taken for a fanatic is a risk you run when you’re passionate about cooking. If you’re a woman, you also risk being confused for someone unhappily obsessed with eating---one of the chocolate-is-better-than-sex types. But let’s keep our heads screwed on here: Food is not more exciting than sex---although good food is definitely more exhilarating than lousy sex. (Or, as a woman friend of mine described a merely fair-to-middlin’ sexual escapade: “it wasn’t food, but it wasn’t bad.”)
I’m sustained by the faith that there is a fraternity of people out there who understand. They are people that know that sometimes, even though you’re worn out from a day’s work, you just have to go to another store because the leeks in this one aren’t perfect. They are people who go to restaurants for the inspiration more than the food---because they can generally do better at home and spend more on the wine. They are people who head straight for the cookbook section in the used bookstore, in hopes that there’s a reasonably priced copy of Escoffier that they can buy and give away because they’ve already got one.
Above all, they know the terrible paradox of eating alone: you always eat well, but you may also be wasting an episode of genius on yourself. To search for someone from this fraternity is not just matching obsessions. Assigning a high priority to making brilliant food is a sign of intelligence, spirit, and civility. It’s also just good sense: how can you crawl into bed with someone you’ve never cooked with?
But I suppose I shouldn’t paint too rosy a picture for myself of what at bottom may be a shared fixation after all. I had a girlfriend once---we made great food together but somehow things didn’t work out. On the other hand, we still eat together regularly, chop vegetables mutually, and get strange looks from friends when we both get excited over the combined flavor of a 1987 BC Muscat and hazelnut ice cream.
We still belong to the fraternity. It’s a relationship that’s worth savoring.
-Published in Flare, 2004
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