Cognitive Cooking: Rewiring the Perfect Meal [Revised Draft]

If you were to choose a perfect meal, it probably wouldn't be making lunch with your recently ex-girlfriend. Even if you were trying to do the “let's still be friends” thing, you could probably think of less emotionally complicated things to do with your Sunday afternoon – but that's kind of the point.

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.