After the accident, cooking became too painful. Alone, under lockdown, I remembered an old hunger.
Food was not something I worried about at the beginning of this. I had plenty—pasta, rice, beans—and bought more, including a large jar of olives for the martinis I knew I would make. Unexpectedly, as the weeks went by, I found that I was eating less and less. Somehow, I have reverted to the self I was nearly three years ago, after my partner died—when I could barely eat at all, when I went to restaurants because I could not bear to cook for myself alone. Perhaps the aloneness is exacerbating his absence. Whatever the reason, the act of eating has become harder and harder.
Then I wake up with the thought: pancakes. We used to make them nearly every weekend, a full batch. I would make the batter from my mother’s copy of Joy of Cooking, and he would cook them all up, patiently standing by the stove as you must with pancakes, a task I never liked. We’d enjoy a few fresh and eat the rest throughout the week, to be warmed up for quick breakfasts before work. When the accident happened, on a Sunday, I still had a full container of our pancakes in the fridge. I put them in the freezer, these flat cylinders we’d cooked together only the day before. It was months before I ate them, and only then because wasting them would have felt worse.
I have not made pancakes since.
I have reverted to the self I was nearly three years ago, after my partner died—when I could barely eat at all.
Now, though, I vacillate—should I, shouldn’t I?—before finally pulling out the old cookbook. Pancakes are better made by two, I decide. I have no patience to stand there and get them perfectly golden as he did. But I keep at it, though a few are slightly scorched.
[Subscribe to our 2x-weekly newsletter and never miss a story.]
When I get close to the end of the batter, I feel something close to regret—a quiet sorrow that the task is nearly finished—and I wonder if I’ve actually enjoyed the cooking. But, at last, using a soft blue spatula to scrape the dregs from the stainless steel mixing bowl into the pan, I am relieved to be finished with this emotional, churning chore. The resulting cake is small and misshapen, two near-ovoids joined, and when cooked and removed to cool I find a depression underneath, as if a teaspoon had been pressed in to form a pond. On goes a slice of butter, and a few bites in I fill the pond with maple syrup: cool sweetness, warm salty fat, cake. I eat it on my feet, with my fingers. Then I eat a larger one, on one of the plates we bought together after inviting a bunch of friends over for Christmas dinner, and realizing we had nothing half-way decent to serve them on; they are bright and colorful and still bring me joy.
There are plenty more cakes, but I decide to pop the remaining ones in the freezer. I don’t know when I will eat them. But somehow, I’m comforted to know they’re there—a reminder of an old ritual to last me through this long, uncertain time.
Every year, California dairy farms emit hundreds of thousands of tons of the potent greenhouse…
Highway 7 runs north-south through western Washington, carving its way through a landscape sparsely dotted…
One of the greatest pleasures I had as a child growing up in the Chicago…
Undocumented immigrants experience food insecurity at much higher rates than other populations, yet they are…
Writer Charlotte Druckman and editor Rebecca Flint Marx are both Jewish journalists living in New…
Last fall, first-year law student Karissa Kang arrived at Yale University and quickly set out…