ONE of the things they promise when you quit smoking is that food will regain its flavor. Taste buds paved beneath decades of tar will spring back to life, and an entire sense will be restored. I thought it would be like putting on a pair of glasses—something dramatic that makes you say “Whoa!”—but it’s been six months now, and I have yet to notice any significant change.
Part of the problem might be me. I’ve always been in touch with my stomach, but my mouth and I don’t really speak. Oh, it chews all right. It helps me form words and holds stuff when my hands are full, but it doesn’t do any of these things very well. It’s third-rate at best—fifth if you take my teeth into consideration.
Even before I started smoking, I was not a remarkably attentive eater. “Great fried fish,” I’d say to my mother, only to discover that I was eating a chicken breast or, just as likely, a veal cutlet. She might as well have done away with names and identified our meals by color: “Golden brown.” “Red.” “Beige with some pink in it.”
I am a shoveler, a quantity man, and I like to keep going until I feel sick. It’s how a prisoner might eat, one arm maneuvering the fork and the other encircling the plate like a fence: head lowered close to my food, eyes darting this way and that; even if I don’t particularly like it, it’s mine, God damn it.
Some of this has to do with coming from a large family. Always afraid that I wouldn’t get enough, I’d start worrying about more long before I finished what was in front of me. We’d be at the dinner table, and, convict-like, out of one side of my mouth, I’d whisper to my sister Amy.
“What’ll you take for that chicken leg?”
“You mean my barbecued rib?”
“Call it what you like, just give me your asking price.”
“Oh gosh,” she’d say. “A quarter?”
“Twenty-five cents! What do you think this is—a restaurant?”
She’d raise the baton of meat to her face and examine it for flaws. “A dime.”
“A nickel,” I’d say, and before she could argue I’d have snatched it away.
I should have been enormous, the size of a panda, but I think that the fear of going without—the anxiety that this produced—acted like a kind of furnace, and burned off the calories before I could gain weight. Even after learning how to make my own meals, I remained, if not skinny, then at least average. My older sister Lisa and I were in elementary school when our mother bought us our first cookbook. The recipes were fairly simple—lots of Jell-O–based desserts and a wheel-shaped meat loaf cooked in an angel-food-cake pan. This last one was miraculous to me. “A meat loaf—with a hole in it!” I kept saying. I guess I thought that as it baked the cavity would fill itself with rubies or butterscotch pudding. How else to explain my disappointment the first dozen times I made it?
In high school, I started cooking pizzas—“from scratch,” I liked to say, “the ol’ fashioned way.” On Saturday afternoons, I’d make my dough, place it in a cloth-covered bowl, and set it in the linen closet to rise. We’d have our dinner at seven or so, and four hours later, just as Shock Theater, our local horror-movie program, came on, I’d put my pizzas in the oven. It might have been all right if this were just part of my evening, but it was everything: All I knew about being young had canned Parmesan cheese on it. While my classmates were taking acid and having sex in their cars, I was arranging sausage buttons and sliced peppers into smiley faces.
“The next one should look mad,” my younger brother would say. And, as proof of my versatility, I would create a frown.
To make it all that much sadder, things never got any better than this. Never again would I take so many chances or feel such giddy confidence in my abilities. This is not to say that I stopped cooking, just that I stopped trying.
Between the year that I left my parents’ house and the year that I met Hugh, I made myself dinner just about every night. I generally alternated between three or four simple meals, but if forced to name my signature dish I’d probably have gone with my Chicken and Linguine with Grease on It. I don’t know that I ever had an actual recipe; rather, like my Steak and Linguine with Blood on It, I just sort of played it by ear. The good thing about those meals was that they had only two ingredients. Anything more than that and I’m like Hugh’s mother buying Christmas presents. “I look at the list, I go to the store, and then I just freeze,” she says.
I suggest that it’s nothing to get worked up about, and see in her eyes the look I give when someone says, “It’s only a dinner party,” or “Can we have something with the Chicken and Linguine with Grease on It?”
I cook for myself when I’m alone; otherwise, Hugh takes care of it, and happily, too. People tell me that he’s a real chef, and something about the way they say it, a tone of respect and envy, leads me to believe them. I know that the dinners he prepares are correct. If something is supposed to be hot, it is. If it looks rust-colored in pictures, it looks rust-colored on the plate. I’m always happy to eat Hugh’s cooking, but when it comes to truly tasting, to discerning the subtleties I hear others talking about, it’s as if my tongue were wearing a mitten.
That’s why fine restaurants are wasted on me. I suppose I can appreciate the lighting, or the speed with which my water glass is refilled, but, as far as the food is concerned, if I can’t distinguish between a peach and an apricot I really can’t tell the difference between an excellent truffle and a mediocre one. Then, too, the more you pay the less they generally give you to eat. French friends visiting the United States are floored by the size of the portions. “Plates the size of hubcaps!” they cry. “No wonder the Americans are so fat.”
“I know,” I say. “Isn’t it awful?” Then I think of Claim Jumper, a California-based chain that serves a massive hamburger called the Widow Maker. I ordered a side of creamed spinach there, and it came in what looked like a mixing bowl. It was like being miniaturized, shrunk to the height of a leprechaun or a doll and dropped in the dining room of regular-sized people. Even the salt and pepper shakers seemed enormous. I ate at Claim Jumper only once, and it was the first time in years that I didn’t corral my plate. For starters, my arm wasn’t long enough, but even if it had been I wouldn’t have felt the need. There was plenty to go around, some of it brown, some of it green, and some a color I’ve come to think of, almost dreamily, as enough.
2007