In the early 1960s I lived in Manhattan for five years, with a new husband, Glenn, who worked for the National Cotton Council, which was based in Memphis. The Cotton Council was staffed almost entirely with born Southerners who had more than happily moved away from home, north to the city. One of them, Charlotte Norman, had grown up and lived most of her life in southern Louisiana—Abbeville and then New Orleans—where food preparation was and is, of course, a very big deal. In her family, her father, called Boy, had been the cook; her mother, Thelma, was a schoolteacher who did other things. After her husband died, Thelma had to ask where the oven broiler was.
Boy Norman traveled. But whenever he was at home, he and Charlotte and her sister Toni cooked the evening meal together. No shortcuts. They cooked by the standards set in their culture and their community, which were exceedingly high. Stirring the roux took as long as it took, and somebody had to stand over the pot stirring it until the flour-oil mix turned the proper grocery-sack brown. Usually, they didn’t eat until nine or ten o’clock.
Charlotte lived alone in Manhattan, and it was she who taught me to respect and prepare food. I grew up in Mississippi. My mother, who was from Arkansas, had been a fairly adventurous cook herself—often making us curries and egg foo yong instead of the usual fried chicken and greens—but Charlotte’s relationship to food went far beyond ingredients.
One Saturday afternoon when I went over to her apartment, I found her in her tiny kitchen, finishing up a Louisiana dish—might have been gumbo or étouffée, perhaps a batch of roux—and ladling it into small plastic containers for freezing.
Was she planning a dinner?
No, she said. They were for herself, so that when she came home from work she wouldn’t have to start from scratch.
You cook for yourself? I asked. At twenty-two, I was more than a little sassy. I had never lived alone in my life.
Charlotte has this look, a straight-on gaze of exhausted befuddlement, the slightly scornful gaze of one who stands in wonderment at the other person’s rank unknowing.
Why wouldn’t I cook for myself? she said.
That was more than forty years ago. I can see her at that moment, as precisely today as if she said it last Saturday.
Charlotte and I cooked many, many meals together. Usually, nobody from the Cotton Council went back to the South for holidays. We couldn’t afford the plane fare, or we just didn’t want to go. During one Christmas season, Charlotte and I issued written invitations to a black-tie five-course meal in my apartment. Using instructions from a Gourmet magazine, Charlotte boned a chicken, keeping the shape of the chicken intact so that the carver could slice straight through white meat and dark, breast to rump. On another occasion we made Diana Kennedy’s mole de pollo, down to grinding spices and hot peppers in a molcajete. The preparation took all day and was not a success. We used the wrong kind of chocolate, didn’t grind the peppers enough, drank too much tequila and missed a step—who knows? The dish was a flop. Exhausted by the time we got to the table, we dumped the chocolate chicken and went out to eat.
In time, once life has kicked us around a bit, sassiness cools. Since that Saturday in Charlotte’s kitchen, I have lived in many places, sometimes alone, and have cooked many meals for myself, in small and large kitchens—some of them in furnished digs, outfitted with the cheapest, most basic kind of cookware. I would not say that I recall Charlotte’s pointed question—which wasn’t really a question—every time I cook and eat alone, but often as I sit quite happily alone at some table in some new town, I do.
Over the years I’ve settled on a few basic beliefs, one of which is that whatever we do for pleasure, we should try to do, or learn to do, and practice on occasion, in solitude. A kind of test to gauge our skills and see how deep the passion lies and to find out what it is we truly like, to discover—minus other tastes and preferences—what specifically gives us pleasure. We all have our eccentricities. Alone, we indulge.
And so, the solitary cook fixes her meal. She eats, enjoying what she’s made however she likes, whether eating salad with her hands (as I like to do) or mopping up the last bit of sauce with bread or even—childlike—fingers. For many it’s eating that is the hard part. What to look at or listen to. When to stop, how much to save.
So many details to attend to.
In my judgment, those who cook for themselves generally fall into two groups: the ones who, like Charlotte, prepare ahead and those who, like me, cook for the night, the moment, the one occasion. In the times I have lived alone and fed myself, I have routinely stuck to certain dishes, cooking them over and over again, until in memory, the place and the dish merge and become a single event. I never planned to do this—say, to fix only baked potatoes with a green of some kind, cooked or raw, in a particular kitchen in a certain town—but I could not seem to stop. Repetition became a ritual. When shopping for the night, I would stand in a market trying to convince myself to make something different tonight, not to buy the same one-third-pound slab of salmon, the same prewashed spinach, boned chicken breast, or plum tomatoes I bought the day before.
There was nothing I could do. The fact was, I wanted the same thing again and again. And so I yielded, bought the goods, took them home, cooked, and ate, accompanied usually by music, preferably a public radio station that played music I liked. And I am here to tell you, the pleasure never diminished. I was happy every time.
In the 1990s I lived in Missoula, Montana, for a few years. When I first went there, I was alone and lived in a very small furnished place, part of a big house near the university where I had a job as a visiting writer. The kitchen was probably the smallest I’d ever cooked in, and there was no dining room, just a table pushed against the wall, big enough for three if they weren’t tall.
I was heavily into anchovies in those days. I fixed Guiliano Bugialli’s pasta with tomatoes and anchovies, his orecchiete with anchovies and parsley, his whole cauliflower with anchovy sauce. On the burners, I blistered bell peppers to peel and eat with olive oil and anchovies, and sometimes prepared a dish of my own devising: roasted sliced eggplant and peppers, with anchovies, garlic, oregano, and olive oil. There was a very fine Italian market in Missoula, the Broadway Market, owned and run by Alfredo and Ann Cipolato. Cipolato—who often sang opera for us as we shopped—regularly stocked big cans of salt-packed anchovies, which I regularly purchased and used. I also bought wine and pasta there and probably drank a lot of the wine alone, because whenever I’m in Missoula I always drink a lot of wine and have a lot of fun.
Mornings in Missoula, I made coffee and watched out the window. On sunny days students walked to class in beach attire even though the temperature was still in the thirties. Before I went to teach my class, I worked on a novel, The Track of Real Desires, the entire plot of which is based around a dinner party. I finished a draft of the book there.
Alone, I fed my appetite for anchovies. And fed it. Never sated, never bored.
In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, some years later, on another visiting-writer gig, I was living alone while in residence with a man I’d been with for some time, an actor, who was British but had a green card. By then, each of us had disappeared into a life apart but we didn’t know it yet and hadn’t parted. He slept late; I got up early. I loved those hours and sometimes went down to the quite large, if woefully equipped, kitchen, and made myself a batch of whole-wheat banana or apple pancakes, from scratch, with maple syrup. How happy I was during those minutes alone, reading the newspaper, with the radio playing softly beside me. I would cook myself two pancakes and vow no more, then scrape the rest of the batter out and cook another. How I love maple syrup! When the actor went back to England to visit family and I was truly alone in Tuscaloosa, for supper I cooked eggs, usually a frittata, with whatever vegetables I had on hand. Or pancakes. Sometimes oatmeal.
Breakfast starts the day; maybe by eating breakfast food at all hours, I was hoping to affect a new one, I don’t know. When my Alabama gig was finished, the actor returned to London and I went to Wimberley, Texas, and then Austin, where I lived alone for fifteen months.
Sometimes we find home, even for a temporary stay, and settle in. Old friends and family lived in Austin and I settled in there, in a boxlike little house not far from the university. Closer still was the magnificent Central Market, where I could choose daily from at least eleven kinds of sweet peppers and thirteen varieties of store-prepared sausage. In Austin I dabbled and experimented in the kitchen, but always came back to what I loved at that time: high-protein smoothies in the morning, pasta at night. It was about then that I began a fixation on salad, I think because by that time, you could buy it prewashed. At Central Market I could choose among many combinations: romaine, baby romaine, red baby romaine, mesclun, baby spinach, radicchio mix, mache mix…heaven.
I settled on penne rigate as my pasta of choice, usually topped with a fresh plum tomato sauce and sometimes with tuna or a combination of eggplant, peppers, and anchovies, as in Missoula.
As for the smoothie, I was down on milk in those days, for no other reason than temporary dislike and intolerance. This has passed, but back then I stuck to apple juice and kept sliced frozen bananas in the freezer for taste and froth, adding whatever other fruits were offered by Central Market, and a big scoop of vanilla protein powder.
I had put my stuff in storage, and so in Austin I used borrowed furniture and kitchenware. Somebody gave me a cheap microwave, something I’d never owned. I used it a lot, warming up last night’s pasta. I usually ate to one of the great KUT radio shows, Paul Ray, Phil Music, or Larry Monroe.
I felt like they were there with me.
This is a tale about food, music, and love. By then, I was seeing another man. He showed up from time to time and after I moved to D.C. from Austin, he was still in my life but making a habit of not showing up anymore. When I ate alone I tried not to think of him but it was hard. By then, I’d bought a George Foreman grill, which became my cooker of choice. I’d buy a slab of tuna or salmon or a boneless chicken breast, season it a little, then slam it between the plates. I called it “Georging,” as in, I just Georged some salmon. I seasoned the tuna with garlic and rosemary; the salmon with ginger and garlic; the chicken breasts with a lemony mustard marinade. Salad, bread. WPFW played great jazz, Caribbean, reggae, rhythm and blues. I had a Sam’s Club combination TV and VCR machine with a ten-inch screen. Sometimes I had raspberry sorbet and vanilla frozen yogurt for dessert.
Eating alone at home with music felt a lot less lonely than eating out in a café or at a bar.
My apartment in D.C. was in the trees. In the spring, when dogwoods bloomed, I felt like I was living in a snow world.
That summer I went to Marfa, Texas, for almost three months. There, in a former army barracks turned into an artists’ colony, I finished a biography and dined on baked potatoes—sometimes russets, sometimes yams—either with spinach and red onions sautéed in olive oil (or spinach and garlic, or spinach, onions, and mushrooms), or a salad. I would open up the potato and add some olive oil, salt, and pepper, then dump the green stuff on top. It is hard to say how much this meal pleased me at this time.
I had borrowed a boombox from somebody but didn’t have many CDs. Out there in the high desert the only radio station I could get was country music AM. I listened anyway. At night I did exercises to Moby and played Macy Gray’s first album. Or, once the heat had dissipated a little, took a bike ride into the mountains, on a blacktop road that ended in Mexico.
Last year I lived in Fresno for four and a half months. By that time I was sharing my life with the man who had previously given me the runaround in D.C., and we were good together, but because of another visiting job, we were apart for that time. In Fresno, I depended on Trader Joe’s for inspiration and meals. I had become hooked on a salad I used to get at Così in D.C., the one they called their signature salad: lettuce, pistachios, grapes, gorgonzola. I varied this in many ways, using pears or figs and walnuts, with feta or Roquefort. With the salad I ate The Trader’s butternut squash soup, usually topped with some cumin, cilantro, and a dollop of plain yogurt. I couldn’t get enough, and cleaned up the last drops from the bowl with T.J. whole-grain bread. I began to think of the store as run by a particular man, The Trader, the way people used to turn Betty Crocker into a real woman.
One time while shopping I told myself enough was enough and I bought The Trader’s red pepper soup instead. It was good but not what I was looking for.
The next day I went back to butternut.
I drank wine from Trader Joe’s, ate protein bars from Trader Joe’s, drank The Trader’s coffee, tea and the Italian fizzy water he sold in blue bottles.
Sometimes I went out and ate. When the World Series playoffs began and the Astros made the semifinals, I would go to a sports bar, where I ate food and watched the ball games.
Fresno had a great jazz station, KFSR. I’d bought a nice little Sony set with a remote control. It was in the living room next to my desk, down the hall from the bedroom. When I woke up I hit the remote, to hear David Aus or Joe Moore. At night, eating my soup, I listened to Mr. Leonard or Blues Mondays. I lived in an apartment complex set up for transient businesspeople. Everything was furnished, including a dieffenbachia in the corner with a tag on it reminding us to please dust the leaves. The pots and pans were cheap and tissue thin. I rarely used them but relied instead on the microwave that came standard in every apartment. One time, however, I did make a pot of soup. One Wednesday, Mark Bittman ran a recipe for Luccan farro soup in his New York Times column. Having never heard of farro but always trusting Bittman, I couldn’t resist. I made a pot for myself and then (because there was so much of it and under such conditions of transience I had no intention of putting food by) took a big bowl over to share with friends. They told me they feasted on it for a couple of days.
When the semester was over, I left central California but managed to hold on to that recipe. I have made the soup often; in fact, I just made it last week. Still good. Still reminding me of nights alone in Fresno.
I have also discovered a version of butternut squash soup similar to Trader’s, one with roasted apples and garlic added to the puréed squash.
Charlotte has long since moved back to Louisiana. Her New Orleans house is situated only yards from the 17th Street Canal that overran so many neighborhoods after Hurricane Katrina. But, miraculously, her house did not float away. Her floors and appliances were ruined, and had to be replaced. Now she has a kitchen again.
And I am living in Buffalo, New York, where I never thought I would be. It’s a good city. I make a lot of soup in Buffalo.