me & ina & nigella
by bam
cookbooks we’ll discuss another day. today, instead, we’re tuning in. i have a feeling i’m not alone.
when no one’s around, when no one’s paying attention, i like to mosey into the kitchen with ina, or better still, nigella. i’ll take giada, or paula deen.
i’d rather not with what’s-her-name, the perky one, the uber-perky one, the one who sort of scratches nails on my chalkboard, the one who’s always taking shortcuts to get to dinner on the table in less than 30 minutes.
i make dinner in less than 30 minutes most every single night. i need little inspiration in that department. i am looking for the real thing, the sensual thing, the wrap-your-ample-arms-around-my-shoulder-and-teach-me-a-thing-or-three. that thing.
it is, most days, the only thing i ever watch on tv. and i only watch while i walk. it is, by now, an old bad habit. like blindly stuffing potato chips from bowl to fist to mouth. rather mindless. i walk in circles, horizontal circles that never get me anywhere.
and while i walk i learn to cook. i time my walking so i can walk while ina’s cooking. she lulls me into such a dreamy state i don’t even notice that i’m plodding. she purees, i perambulate. she sautees, i sweat right along.
there is the butter in her throat, the way she talks i mean. and then there’s that salt-worn shingled house with all the sunlight streaming in. i love the way she sets a table. makes it look so easy. makes it look so bountiful. so understatedly over-the-top. so gosh-i-wish-i’d-grown-up-beside-her-stove.
i want ina to invite me over. i want someone to cook for me the way ina cooks for everyone she loves. and she sure loves everyone, it seems. her table, i’m telling you, is practically an orgy. one i want to squeeze into.
i watch ina often as i can. nigella i only watch when my dear friend sandra passes off a pre-recorded tape. i love reading nigella. she flings words as easily as she flings mousse around a silver bowl. watching her rocket-blasts me into orbit. she is something of a seductress. the way she whips an egg white even. or pops the garnet gems out of a pomegranate. no wonder she wears no apron in the kitchen.
i love how she sneaks downstairs in her silky robe, reaches in the midnight fridge, sinks a spoon into something lustful lurking in the shining light of the chilling, sleeping stainless box. licks like the goddess that she is.
i have a confession to make, which i will make because we’ve been pulling up chairs for a while now: i watch ina and nigella in particular because they are especially good at teaching what i’m trying to learn. and not just cooking.
they are teaching something you would maybe never guess needs to be spooned out in half-hour lessons. they are, i pray to God, teaching me how to understand that i needn’t be afraid of cream and butter, avocado and, oh my God, a dab of sugar.
they are teaching me to breathe in the kitchen. not just breathe. maybe even dance. imagine dancing in the kitchen.
i watch them so easily cook and feed because i am trying to learn how to feed myself in the very way that i feed the ones i love so much: i am trying to teach myself that i needn’t choke or sputter when someone steers a crème brulee my way.
i am trying to teach myself that after all the years of being at war with food—starting back when i was 18 and shrank to under 90 pounds then held steady before ballooning at the mouth of the soft-serve machine in my college cafeteria, then whipsawed up and down for years and years—i can, at last, lean against the sturdy shoulder, sink into the ample bosom of my cooking friends ina and nigella, and let myself slowly open to the gentle notion that what comes to me on a spoon will feed me in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with calories and fat grams, things i used to count obsessively, things i’ve now long left behind.
but still, i’m not as far along on this curriculum as i’d like to be. some day i’d like to taste a bite of my little boy’s birthday cake. or my own.
are you surprised? me, who talks so convincingly about feeding everyone all around me? you shouldn’t be. i’ve spent 32 years studying how it is we eat and feed the ones we love. i know more about the metaphor of food than just about anyone i know. i feel it in my bones. i ache to be fed—to feed myself—in the way i so easily imagine feeding.
my blessed friend jan once did so. i was lying in a hospital bed, stitches running straight across my middle. she came to bring me lunch. she didn’t serve just any salad in any tupperware. she brought blue-and-white china. and real silver. she packed that salad with every bit of goodness that she could gather.
that jan can cook, we say around here. she fed me that day in a way that i can taste even as i type, years later. she fed me through and through.
jan is like ina and nigella. she makes it look easy. and she, unlike the friends i tune into on the screen, is wise enough and knows me deeply enough for me to truly trust. i have been fed in the way i long to feed myself. without fear, or ducking in and out of rules for what’s allowed, what’s safe, what’s not. it happened once—maybe twice.
i tune in to ina and nigella to see if i can gather up the steam to make it happen three times a day.
okay, people, this is about as scary as it gets for me. to lift the veil on the deep and mystifying struggle i have struggled with for, geez, two-thirds of my gosh-darn life. struggles come in many, many forms. to struggle with something so essential–something so potentially rich and filling in wholly non-caloric way–is poignantly difficult. you can’t ignore it, lock it in a cupboard and never worry about it again. it comes at you as many times a day as there are reasons to feed or be fed. it is so simple, i tell myself. but then, midway with fork to mouth, i’ve gotten stuck so many times. turned down so many slices of cake, it’s amazing the baker’s union hasn’t come and shut me down. i wince every time, worry to death that i’m offending. my aim is not to offend–oh God, the hours i’ve wasted worrying that i’ve offended; my aim is to come to peace.
you know i would love to hear your thoughts. anyone else get over this or any other hump they care to bring up here, at the old, banged-up maple table?
by the way, thank you for making this a place where, tremblingly, i could tell the truth.
This is a brave essay and one I think I know how you want to but are afraid to, write. Our own struggles are so dark for us, and yet, I’ve learned, don’t tend to improve until we shine light on them. That’s often done by telling others, or an other. When the person we tell doesn’t fall down dead, or says, “me, too”, we see and feel our painful thing differently. In this format, you are not controlling who you’re telling and that raises its alarm rate exponentially and makes it even more courageous. But the idea of just announcing who you are and letting the chips fall where they may is, indeed, a freeing notion. Nothing more to hide. How cool that you want this. Thank you for your kind words. You let me know that my care would matter…also a brave thing. Knowing that no matter how good the salad was that it wouldn’t taste as good on a porous paper plate with a fork whose tines were breaking off into the nourishment was easy. Is there much better in life than having our loved ones know us fully? You are letting us do just that right here at your table.
bam,you are so brave and so eloquent. bravo!l,b
growing up, i remember supermarkets sold vegetables shrinkwrapped in celophane clear tight around the foam container holding the thing we would eat. to protect which?: the foodstuffs from germs or us from the food. life as separation: we didn’t dare touch the food that we would eat, oh!, the contagion of germs, disease, life itself, so it seemed. when i lived for a season in a swamp along the choctawhatchee river, i hauled water miles down along a dirt road. there was no plumbing. and as for nature’s calling there was a shovel. easier perhaps for a man, but even that thought is just mass consciousness, for we – man or woman – like a bear, all beings, are just living creatures with defecation a matter of fact. oh how we cringe to speak of such matters. instead we sanitize and trust – by nurture more than nature – the smell of bleach and disenfectants, just as in those days the supermarket produce sections assured us of food safety. such frail notions that hold mass consciousness together in its painfully thin, fragile sense of assurance, battling the sense of isolation, separation.the greater life is one of union, enduring. this is birthed through honesty which allows the “me too” response, as jan observed, and thus is community created.
Amen to all of the above, and here’s my two cents, or maybe 17. First off while I don’t have food issues really, I struggle with Almost Everything Else. All of us struggle with something, face something that might be as scary as a dragon we have to slay. Daily, or nearly daily. But what matters, I think, in a life, is what we are able to do despite our struggles–and, I suppose, because of them. How we are able to be in, to build, to participate in community nevertheless. How we are able to share our gifts nevertheless. Whether we can live a life of gratitude nevertheless. Those things are the daily challenge. And I must say bam you score pretty high on that scale. Thank you for sharing your gifts, and your honesty and trust, with all of us.Now on to other random thoughts generated by today’s post. Our context–that of most Americans anyway–is one of abundance, overabundance, superabundance beyond the wildest dreams of most folks in the history of the planet. Because of this we are faced with a basic problem: how do we deal with this massive overdose of abundance? Food, clothes, home goods, garden catalogs, generally cheap and easy travel to thousands of possible destinations, goods for our children that boggle the minds of their grandmothers–it is an endless procession of abundance. What is the right response? To purchase what is necessary, or to be lavish? To embrace choice, or to be overwhelmed by it? To binge on the abundance which is made more abundant still by our happy dependence on credit, or to deprive because the abundance makes us uncomfortable? How on earth is one to walk a responsible, peaceable, grateful line here? I realize this is a problem I should not complain about, and I am not really complaining. I just think it is a dilemma over which our culture has yet to demonstrate its mastery.To narrow things down a bit and focus on food in particular. When was the last time any of you folks picked up a copy of Family Circle or Woman’s Day magazines? I so rarely do, but whenever I do I am overwhelmed by one thing: they are psychotic with regard to food issues. Half the magazine will be devoted to “luscious, decadent, sinful desserts”; the other half will be all about dieting, improving one’s looks, body image, and muscle tone, and developing willpower to deny one’s self decadent indulgences. I’m telling you if an alien picked these magazines up and flipped through them she would conclude that the culture which produced them was incoherent at best. To me they are a brilliant, crystal clear, regular as rain depiction of our nation’s dilemma with regard to food, health, body image, and abundance. And our very poor set of answers. In other words, none of us–even those of us who are supposedly Totally Normal–has an especially healthy perspective on these issues.So what am I getting at. What we easily forget in our happy oblivion of abundance is that we are, must be, an interdependent community, just as wm. u. says above. We are not made whole by our overabundance, nor especially happy (contrary to the VW ad which tells me “Woe isn’t you. Dare to be happy”). Our misery, rather, is masked by it. We do better to unveil our struggles, look for those “me, too’s,” jump headlong into opportunities at community-making with honesty and generosity. That’s what you do, bam! Thank you.
Barb, thank you for sharing this and thanks to all those who responded with such support.
Thanks to all who commented and those who read and were not able to. I wish in a million ways I could be Ina for you. Set a beautiful table, gather the chairs around and fix you a meal steeped in love, respect, and admiration. A shameless meal. No finger pointing, no shouting. Just laughter and acceptance offered as condiments to the already perfect you. We all have our “thing.”It makes us who we are. Food is an easy one to have.It is woven deeply into the fabric of our lives. I agree with jcv – our culture is schizoid when it comes to food. I used to be able to eat anything and never gain an ounce…then reality and age caught up to me and I struggle like never before. I think the key is balance, acceptance and peace. I’ll keep working on it…and sharing with others along the way..thanks for giving this a voice bam…
Hi BAM, I can only imagine the ‘actual’ table you create for those you love by just being a part of this ‘virtual’ table. We all have our ‘thing’ as KD puts it from Jersey so well. Thank you for sharing yours and letting all of us know we are not alone in dealing with whatever ‘thing’ might be our own to grapple with. My best to you.