The emotional power of food is well
documented, in both scientific and literary realms. Perhaps most
famous is the incident the first volume of Proust's In Search of
Lost Time, in which the taste of
a madeleine, a small
cake, incites in the narrator a rush of emotion, which he eventually
traces back to times spent with his aunt when he was a child. I
wanted to try to harness this power.
I and
my ex (let's call her Maddie, since that's her name) spent six weeks
in the summer of 2013 working on an organic farm and living in a
cabin that had no running water or electricity. Lacking a microwave
or toaster oven, Maddie gave me a crash course in stovetop cooking.
By the end our time there, I could light the gas stove without
flinching, sauté
veggies, and make mostly unburnt pancakes. Helping to cook those
meals was incredibly satisfying, and our pride in our culinary
creations made them taste that much better.
The
experience of working on the farm was a powerful one for both of us,
and every time I cook, or even see someone else cooking, memories of
that time crop up. Naturally, those memories are a little painful
these days. However, Maddie and I have managed to maintain a
friendship in the weeks since the breakup. I wondered would happen if
we cooked together, not as romantic partners, but as friends? Perhaps
I could hijack my emotional associations with cooking, and redirect
them to this new experience, this new form of our relationship.
You
might think that this experiment was doomed to fail, and you might be
right. Still, I couldn't get the idea out of my head, so on Saturday
morning I met Maddie at the Kalamazoo Farmer's Market to find
ingredients. I knew attempting to recreate a farm meal exactly would
be impossible, but I at least wanted to get close, and most of our
ingredients then, if they didn't come from the farm itself, came from
the farmer's market.
If
change was the name of the game, than perhaps it was a good omen
that, when we finally found Dennis, the man whose farm we had worked
on, he stood under a new sign for a new farm, having moved from
Bangor, MI, to Battle Creek just a few months before. On the one
hand, it felt like yet another loss. On the other hand, rerouting
connections was the whole point of this adventure, so it looked like
we were off to a good start.
Still,
there was some nostalgia. We bought a bag of salad mix and I mentally
reeled off the list: lettuce, mustard greens, mizuna, arugula, and a
little round leaf whose name I could never remember. We also bought a
bag of baby kale, and I remembered how Russian kale turned silver
underwater when we washed it. The bunch of onions reminded me of
pulling bulbs from the ground as Dennis's one-and-a-half-year-old
ostensibly helped, although really he was just bringing me back dead
onions that I had thrown away. Dennis threw in a few bags of spinach
for free, as he had a surplus, and I laughed, thinking of all the
people who had come to the market in July in August, looking for
spinach we didn't have.
We had gotten to the market late, and
by this time most of the vendors were packing up, so we grabbed a
garlic bulb and called it a day. It was hot, and a long walk back, so
we decided we'd wait and cook the next day. This wouldn't have been
an option on the farm. Although we were provided a certain number of
meals each week, when we on our own for food, we were really on our
own, and if we were too tired to cook dinner, then dinner didn't get
cooked.
It was nice not to have that kind of
pressure when we started cooking on Sunday. This was going to be a
semi-improvised meal, using whatever we had – or whatever we had to
use up before the end of the school year.
“Can we add chickpeas to whatever
we're making?” Maddie asked as we were getting out ingredients.
“Because I have them.”
This sort of improvising was common on
the farm. We would often start with one thing we wanted to use, and
then we'd build the rest of the meal around that.
On this particular day, I had decided
I wanted to make an egg scramble. This was what the garlic and onion
were for. To those, we added some gouda cheese that I had brought
from home and some of Dennis's spinach. Since we had so many
greens, we decided on a salad for the side, to which we would add the
chickpeas. Maddie also had a couple peaches, so we could each have
one those as well.
Since we hadn't cooked together for a
while, it took a while for us to settle into a rhythm, but soon I was
slicing cheese and chopping onions as Maddie chopped the garlic and
washed and cut the spinach. Once all the ingredients were ready, I
got down what we jokingly call the 'farm bowl', which we had had on the
farm but never used. Maddie cracked the eggs into the bowl, a skill I
have yet master, and I mixed in the fixings as she started on the
salad.
Then came the actual cooking. Here,
the electric stove had a clear advantage over the gas stove we used
on the farm, whose only settings were “barely warm” and “blink
and you'll be eating char for dinner.” As I cooked the scramble on
a relaxing medium heat, Maddie decided to chop up the peaches to add
the finishing touches to the salad. Soon, we were ready to eat.
Having had almost no expectations for
this meal, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the food was delicious. The ingredients were perfectly balanced,
with the sweetness of the cheese perfectly complementing the onion
and garlic, and its gooeyness offset by the spinach. The salad was
crisp and juicy, and the sweet peaches and nutty chickpeas made a
great combination. After the first couple bites, Maddie and I
high-fived. This was better than almost anything we had made on the
farm, in no small part because the flavors weren't burnt off.
Soon after we started eating, a couple
of friends joined us. We talked about about finals, the colleges
literary journal and the art of photography, our plans for the
summer. It was relaxing. No expectations, no pressure. Just some
friends hanging out.
Only time will tell if the experiment
worked. I think it did, though. Already, the memory is taking on
a certain sheen. The rough parts, the emotional complexities, are being
polished over. Soon, I think, it will be just another fond memory of
a good meal, with good company. And that's exactly what I wanted.
