Cook like You Vacation Here

On leisure and what it does to culinary labor

This past week I worked from the shores of Long Beach Island, an 18-mile long stretch of the Jersey shore with a historic lighthouse at one end and a single causeway bridge to the mainland at the other. (And no, I did not realize that Taylor Swift was arriving there just as we were departing. Though it does explain some of the traffic jams as we headed out of town…)

As is the case when you’re staying in a house with eight other people (and a toddler, who thoroughly enjoyed the multiple babysitters), the days were structured around lazing and grazing. Mornings were for nibbling on random bits of pastry around the kitchen and refilling the communal coffee pot, wading in the warm waters on the kid-friendly beaches, and rotating like rotisserie chickens on wafer-thin towels while regularly basting oneself with SPF+50. Afternoons were for blasting away sand under outdoor showers, luxuriating in shade and air conditioning, and around 5pm, gathering with other housemates to sip on Aperol spritzes and to nibble on caprese salad and potato chips (something I almost never get to eat except on vacation). At the end of a long day, dinner became our first meal for which a fixed time and etiquette seemed necessary. We took turns cooking—grilled swordfish with capers and mint one night, spaghetti with crabs in tomato sauce on another. Our night on duty, we opted for grilled steak and asparagus and a knockout corn farro risotto, and reveled in the momentary glory of having fed a crowd without a total nervous breakdown. But we were quickly outpaced the next night by an old-fashioned seafood boil, a glorious spread of shrimp, clams, mussels, sausage, potatoes and corn that required all hands on deck (and on the plastic-covered table). Something about the slow shift from our scattered outings to the gathering for a group dinner sharpened our collective brain power, making us only capable of tackling impossible puzzles once we’d added a little gin to the mix. But, as our enthusiasm at the seafood boil quickly proved, it sharpened our aesthetic powers as well.

As the American economist Thorstein Veblen once wrote, the utility of leisure requires gaining the respect of others by intentionally avoiding labor. “The performance of labor,” Veblen wrote, “has been accepted as a conventional evidence of inferior force; therefore it comes itself, by a mental short-cut, to be regarded as intrinsically base.” Therefore, leisure, as the purview of the elite, becomes “the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability.” The refusal to work becomes tantamount to what Veblen called “conspicuous consumption,” rejecting the idea that meaning can only be found through productive labor. It is no surprise that Veblen wrote on this subject during the height of the Gilded Age, a moment in American history in which the proof of one’s power came through the visibility in the latest fashions, restaurants, and homes of society. At the time, Veblen saw a distinct “leisure class” forming in American society, a small subset of elite citizens who used their economic power to pursue a kind of exclusive leisure (usually predicated on access to natural resources, built in landscapes now overwhelmingly jeopardized by climate change). Yet that same leisure class also adopted the language of simplicity in how they talked about their leisure—they called their summer homes “cottages,” wore light natural fabrics instead of heavy silks, and played at lawn sports. (Think of Marie-Antoinette’s pastoral “hamlet” at Versailles, where she played at farm labor with the members of her court.) The phrase “recuperation and recreation” (not “rest and relaxation” as we think of it now) became the modus operandi—a chance to reset both the body and mind, but also to become a new person in the process of retreating from everyday life.

While once leisure could be argued as an act grounded in visible, profligate consumption, for some it was fundamentally about intentionally allocating productive time. While the Vanderbilts were constructing Marble House on Newport, the adult education movement known as Chautauqua assemblies emerged across the country, turning campsites and cottages immersive educational experiences. The notion that leisure time needed to be used not only to please and relax the body, but also to engage the mind, was a concept that married aspirations towards industrial-era productivity and anxieties around the evils of modern life. As “free time” became available to more Americans, they were bombarded with messages about how to make off-the-clock leisure time count. The concepts of the “beach read”, the vacation painting, the summer wellness retreat all emerge from the same concept of productive leisure: creating diversions that are also edifications, taking a break to “work on ourselves.” The Protestant ethic reaches so deep and so far into our psyches that even vacation becomes a chore—yet another thing we must labor to excel at.

Perhaps then, it is no surprise that summer cooking carries a similar leisure-labor tension in popular media, as home cooks receive messages to focus on recipes that are “as effortless as they are fun, like floating around on a pool” or seek out “foodie-menities” when booking their AirBNBs. The idea underpinning these pitching is that cooking on vacation needs to be an exercise in doing as little as possible by laboring as intentionally as possible—meal-planning in order to relax and go with the flow. (Or, as much flow as one can obtain as long as they have the pre-requisite flaky sea salt and sharp knives on hand.) We can’t adopt this kind of intentionally relaxed cooking in our ordinary lives, because leisure is not sanctioned unless we’ve set aside time for it.

Living like you’re on vacation means arranging life to maximize satisfaction; if only we could treat our working lives with such intentionality. Yet it also becomes a prime opportunity, especially in the kitchen, to try something that you’ve lacked the time and resources to explore while tethered to the workday. Whether it’s a multi-day cassoulet (maybe not ideal for August) or a Baked Alaska (there you go), vacation cooking should free us from rules of effective provisioning, and perhaps most significantly, free us from the expectation of culinary success. As happy as I was to eat great food all week, I would’ve been thrilled to have at least one kitchen disaster to consume. Then I’d know for certain that we really were letting our hair down at last, unconcerned with excellence, and pour myself another spritz.

Recommendation: On our drive back from LBI, we took a short detour through the Hudson River Valley and stopped for a few hours at the Storm King Art Center. We’d visited years ago, thanks to a rare car-owning NYC friend willing to drive up with us for the day, and it was such a welcome delight to revisit the place with a kid in tow. We especially enjoyed Maya Lin’s Wavefield, a work of seven rows of rolling earth and grass (built in a depression that previously acted as a gravel pit for materials for the New York State Thruway) set at the southwest edge of the Center. The Wavefield is only open to walk through from the 15th to the end of each month, so we felt especially lucky to be able to see it yesterday, and to walk over (and tumble down) the waves in a way that gave us a new appreciation of the entire Center, and of the entire genre of “earth art” that Lin has worked in for the last 30 years.

The Perfect Bite: All good vacations deserve ice cream, and this one did not disappoint. While my kiddo opted for her first taste of water ice (rainbow flavor), I preferred my scoop of sweet and salty (vanilla base, chocolate-covered pretzels, caramel ribbon) from the Harvey Cedars Ice Cream Parlour. It’s my longstanding belief that the way to vet an ice cream shop is by the quality of its plain vanilla base, and this one did not disappoint—the perfect vehicle for crunchy add-ons and mix-ins.

Cooked & Consumed: I did have one great moment of salvaging a kitchen disaster, and was exceptionally proud to do so: one of our housemates had steamed a batch of broccoli to death the previous day, and left the sludgy mess in a bowl in the refrigerator, assuming it was headed for the trash can. I decided I was going to save it, first by cooking it off in a hot pan with plenty of lemon juice, zest, salt, and chili flakes, then folding in a batch of caramelized onions and crispy chopped garlic. I then spooned the entire mess over toasted slices of baguette, baked in the oven for 10 minutes, and melted grated cheddar and Asiago over the top. I couldn’t have been more delighted at the former cook’s response—or more thrilled that I’d turned two cups of broccoli mush into an enjoyable appetizer. Proof that almost everything can be saved if given the right support.