Alone in the Kitchen with a Toddler

The cultivation of solo, and collective, cooking tastes

Image courtesy of: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hendry/2964510041/

My first apartment as a working adult didn’t have a kitchen—at least not an intentional one. Like many New York apartments past and present, especially on the Upper West Side pre-war block I occupied, the gorgeous brownstones of the neighborhood had been broken down into standalone apartments, each with plumbing and gas scattered in like garnish without much thought to function. My studio apartment—which consumed my entire salary as a publishing assistant—had originally been the library of the house, and so its “kitchen” consisted of the 30-foot long narrow hallway from the front door to the main room, just wide enough to fit a refrigerator, sink, and a single four-burner stovetop smaller than my desk. (A reality I only had to reckon with when my first intended meal in the apartment—a roast chicken—couldn’t even fit in the oven.) I quickly learned to scale back my intentions for daily feasts, making just enough for myself plus one set of leftovers, and quickly began to take pleasure in the art of small-scale eating. I would make that tiny roast chicken (or chicken legs, more likely) on a bed of roughly chopped onions and stale breads, then mix in the cold leftovers the next day with a pot of rice and shlep it to work. Salads were washed, dressed, and eaten from the same bowl (or more likely devoured straight out of the bag with my fingertips like potato chips). Wine glasses had to be stemless because of the height of my cabinets (which could only accommodate four glasses at a time anyway), and the notion of a coffeemaker was laughable in a zero-countertop kitchen. On move-in weekend, my IKEA-savvy little sister put together three narrow standing cupboards to act as a pantry, just deep enough to hold a face-out box of pasta. My kitchen for that year was, in many ways, highly curated—the equivalent of a showroom space allowing you to make one meal at a time. (I was grateful and frustrated that I lived around the corner from Fairway, the greatest supermarket in history.)

I didn’t have wild culinary ambitions at age 22 (several years before I got into food work full time), but I came to savor the dishes that became my individual standards of solo dining. In particular, I had one no-fail dish that I could always make to great satisfaction—I’d thinly slice an onion and some garlic cloves, and saute in olive oil in my tiny non-stick pan until they’d fully softened and started to tip towards just burning on the edges. Then I’d add chopped kale, arugula, or whatever greens were about to wilt away in my fridge, handful by handful, squeeze half a lemon over the top, and let them sit over low heat until they had softened and turned into a glossy, aromatic pile. While the greens wilted, I’d bring a tiny pot of water to boil, whisk the water until it formed a swirling vortex, and crack in two eggs to poach (I was vinegar-averse at the time, something that didn’t shift until I worked in restaurants several years later). A bowl of greens and onions, two runny eggs, and a generous cracking of salt and pepper (or chili flakes if I was feeling sassy)—this was my ideal meal, eaten at my desk or on the couch with a jam jar full of coffee on the side in the morning, or white wine in the evening. Even though I didn’t use a table for my meals, I felt like a true gourmand, because I felt fully settled into my own resourcefulness. If we define adulthood primarily by self-sufficiency, I felt—briefly—like a real grown-up.

As a parent, I get few opportunities to cook just for myself—primarily because I still feel an obligation to give my kid balanced and varied encounters with food, to make every meal a nutritious experience (physiologically or sensorially). This weekend, solo-parenting while my husband on a trip, I had a chance to revisit those greens again, and realized that part of their appeal was that they could be made while one’s mind was entirely occupied by other things. The kale was so hardy, it was essentially impossible to destroy, and as long as one didn’t start the poaching process until the kale was already in the pan, both elements could come off the stovetop at the same time without making me any worse for wear. As my daughter stood on her kitchen stool and ate her pancakes by hand (reheated from frozen, since we had made a big batch the week before), I could actually eat the way I had when I was a twenty-something—leaning against the doorframe, bowl in hand, looking out the window and making a to-do list for the day to come.

There’s a strong impulse to romanticize the act of cooking alone because of the freedom it affords—the ability to relish the pleasure of a single bite, catering only to your own tastes, eating the entire box of macaroni and cheese straight from the pot (preferably after letting it congeal into an cold orange glob overnight, as that’s really when it’s at its peak). All of these really add up to cooking as a way of being free from obligation—that somehow cooking for others can’t be as intensely pleasurable as cooking for oneself. Nora Ephron wrote beautifully about the process of making mashed potatoes for one, a sensory delight but also an edible way of coping with the fact that no one else is going to make them for you. Laurie Colwin spoke lovingly about her Greenwich Village cooking days, straining spaghetti in the bathtub and hosting dinner parties on a fold-out card table, and finding herself by way of her occasional successes and far-more-frequent failures. She took pleasure in the emergent community established by those that she could bring to her table—proof that, in a city of strangers, someone will always be willing to risk friendship for a home-cooked meal of fried eggplant , salad, and bread. (As Colwin says, “dessert was always brought in,” a principle to which I enthusiastically subscribe.)

And yet I don’t think we talk enough about how cooking for ourselves—just ourselves—affords us a very narrow slice of complete and total self-interest that can also be framed as a healthy expression of self-care. For many women, cooking has been historically framed as a necessary skill set fundamentally tethered to the ability to care for others—the thing you do not for yourself, but as an expression of love and support. And yet (as I explore in my dissertation, longer post TK on that), for cooking to actually have gained a credible presence in the American cultural landscape, it had to become something more than care—something that had an inherent value for the individual rather than for the collective. Cooking became an expression of ambition, of creativity, of personal excellence heretofore unseen. In short, it had to become untethered to the domestic labors associated with motherhood, marriage, and family life, to be seen as motivated by something higher than familial love.

The cooking of the twenty-something individual expresses an interesting middle ground between these two associations—the person who cooks as they move between being a dependent and having dependents, someone who, for a brief period, can actually use their cultivation of a personal domestic life to articulate their own appetites. I learned during that period in New York that baking cookies or pies was never going to be my path to fulfillment—indeed, the process of making pie dough from scratch continues to give me hives—but that something about savory cooking, especially with the workaday meals that gave me room to experiment with the outcomes, felt profoundly gratifying as an exercise in selfhood. I learned through trial and error exactly how runny my yolks should be—not on anyone else’s criteria, but to my own preference. Following a litmus test of my own making was intensely gratifying.

The community I eventually came by in New York was not entirely indebted to my cooking capabilities—and certainly was easier to find once I abandoned the costly studio after a year and finally got an apartment and a roommate in the slightly-more-affordable-at-the-time Brooklyn. But I relish looking back on that year as an essential window of self-development—the period in which I had to put myself, and my own appetites, first. I learned that I was capable of living alone, even if I eventually preferred to live with others, and that if put to the test, I could find a way to be truly full. Colwin ends her meditation on her culinary adolescence from a better kitchen, with a full pantry and kitchen sink and a dining room table that was actually designed for dining, yet she still longs for the days where she can “find herself alone in the kitchen with an eggplant, a clove of garlic, and my old pot without the handle.” I know exactly how she feels. And yet, I can’t wait to teach my daughter how to poach an egg for herself.

Recommendation: I spent most of this solo weekend catching up on work, but I did manage to squeeze in a single session of pleasure viewing, that of the film Don’t Worry Darling. This is one of those movies where the “making-of” drama so quickly outpaced the actual content of the film, it was difficult to approach it with a completely open mind. (I should’ve learned my lesson when so much of my first viewing of these two films was enhanced by knowing nothing about them ahead of time.) Despite its structural problems, I found the film fascinating (Florence Pugh is, as always, phenomenal), and its use of the backdrop of mid-century modern design extremely effective for facilitating a visual narrative of surveillance. Best of all, it leaves the door open for many more films examining the relationship between feminism and domestic labor in American life. (Clearly I need to watch the film The Yellow Wallpaper.)But it also makes me want to revisit the truly fantastic movie Colossal, which touches on a number of similar points in a contemporary context.

The Perfect Bite: As much as I would like to claim that I’m a purist in most food stuffs—I like my guacamole pea-less, my toast jamless, and I always order a vanilla-based flavor the first time I go for ice cream—I am an absolute dilettante when it comes to pizza. (And I say this having had a near-religious experience at L’antica Pizzera da Michele in Naples in fall 2018, where I ate an entire margherita pizza in complete silence that I still think about with total reverence.) So when my single parenthood weekend commenced, I knew that I had in mind a pizza order, specifically of a white pizza with prosciutto and arugula and a generous helping of caramelized onions and balsamic reduction on top. While my daughter chomped on her standard cheese pizza with “kid’s sauce” (aka made smooth), I was so pleased to relish an adult pizza that felt like it’d come straight out of the 1980s.

Cooked & Consumed: Very little cooking done this week due to said paper deadlines, but I made a small batch of frumenty as a side for a meal earlier this week, and it’s worth highlighting for a moment or two. Frumenty is a kind of cracked-wheat pasta (basically the size of pastina) that we picked up at a Middle-Eastern grocery in Malden a few months ago, and we’ve been working through it ever since. The dish is very popular in Mediterranean cooking, with a distinctive, slightly fermented flavor (due to a bit of soured milk incorporated during production) that stands up well to grilled meat and vegetable dishes. I boiled it like pasta as usual, but added a Parmesan rind from the freezer to give it an especially creamy finish. It was very tasty as a side to our dinner that evening, but I wish I’d saved enough to eat an entire bowl of it by itself, preferably topped with some chopped herbs, tons of cracked pepper, and slices of cold butter on each spoonful, just as Nora would have recommended.