Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (17 page)

I do rapid calculations. Dad is working late again. One brother has an away wrestling meet and won’t be home until seven-thirty. The other one has two friends in his room, working on a team project; they ordered pizza an hour ago.

Still cradling the phone under my chin, I yank the chicken nuggets out of the toaster oven so fast I burn my fingers on the pan. “I guess so, honey,” I tell her, trying to sound sorry. I hang up the kitchen phone with a clatter. Dropping the chicken nugget pan into the sink, I bump open the pantry cupboard with a spare elbow. No blue box, no canned ravioli. I nudge open the fridge with my burned fingers. What did I expect?—there are no mushrooms in there, no fish, certainly no liver.

But there is, oh hallelujah, a carton of eggs.

Luxury.

Eggs Florentine à la Mom

SERVES ONE.

6 cups fresh spinach leaves

11/2 to 2 tablespoons butter

1 tablespoon flour

1/2 cup heavy cream

1/2 teaspoon sugar

3 large eggs

Salt and pepper, to taste

Wash and clean spinach leaves and place in a steamer. While the spinach is steaming, melt butter in skillet. Measure flour. Discover a colony of mealworms in the flour, escapees from the kids’ most recent science project. Try to pick mealworms out of the flour before stirring it into the butter. Remove cream from the fridge, smelling the carton just in case. Look at the expiration date. Throw carton into trash. Decide to go with steamed spinach instead of creamed spinach.

Prepare to poach eggs. Look for the egg poacher. Discover that it is now coated with purple acylic paint from last spring’s egg decorating project. Spend fifteen minutes trying to chip the paint off the poacher.

Snatch the steamer off the burner just in time to prevent major kitchen fire. Check inside pot. The same scouring pad you have been using on the poacher can also be used to remove the incinerated spinach from the steamer.

Rinse out the skillet and melt some more butter. Consider breaking eggs into a small mixing bowl. Decide you have enough washing up to do already. Break eggs directly into the skillet, scrambling them with your spatula as they cook. Salt and pepper liberally.

I
n 1961, while in my early twenties, I lived for about a half a year in Paris at the now-legendary “no name hotel” on rue Git-le-Coeur. The halls smelled of marijuana, garlic, cheap frying oil, and Gauloise cigarettes. Brion Gysin lived across the hall, and William Burroughs lived in a tiny back room on the floor below. The poet Gregory Corso provided the place with its legendary name: the Beat Hotel.

I was attracted to the bohemian lifestyle, but theirs was a gay or guy thing, so I was never really welcome in their circle. There were plenty of other younger poets, painters, and jazz musicians staying at the hotel to befriend.

My room, number 23, had a small two-burner gas stove in the corner that ran on a meter. I often used it to cook an evening meal (a hearty soup), which I then shared.

Once in a while, I ate alone. Then, in want of companionship, I’d go downstairs to the bar to chat with whoever was hanging around. Most often I’d talk to the concierge, Madame Rachou. She was so short that she had to stand on a wooden crate behind the bar in order to serve coffee. She had blue-white hair and loved the American and English writers and artists who inhabited her hotel—not the usual response to Anglos in Paris at that time.

When just the two of us were together in the bar, she’d refer to me sympathetically as
toute seule
—all alone. How I hated that expression, expressing, as I thought it did, pathetic lonely datelessness. Perhaps my face revealed how I felt, for often she would sit down opposite me at one of the small tables and share some gossip. When she found out I was interested in food, she described the rich hare ragout and bean and lamb stew she’d cooked and served in the café when her husband had been alive.

Those evenings were my first real experiences with solitary dining, and eventually I came to like it. So what if I sometimes ate
toute seule?
I was young, living in Paris, and my whole life lay ahead.

I have a food-writer friend who eats lunch alone every day in his Manhattan apartment. In the evenings, he goes out to eat with friends. He makes a ritual of his solitary lunches. After he prepares a dish, he takes off his apron and changes into a jacket and tie. He sits down at his table, which has been set with his best sterling silver and china. He puts a freshly ironed cloth napkin on his lap.

Although I admire his approach, my own solitary meals are nowhere near so ritualistic or formal. Still, I’ve come a long way from eating
toute seule
in a drab room at the Beat Hotel. These days, when I eat alone, I try to make the experience at least a little bit grand.

A few years ago, in Barcelona, I purchased a special plate. It’s one of a kind and so I only use it when I dine alone. It’s earthenware, glazed a rich yellow with a green and red-brown rim, and there’s lettering on it.

This lettering is my inspiration:
Pa amb Tomàquet
reads one line. In the middle of the plate there’s a circle containing an “i,” and at the bottom, the word
Pernil.
In the Catalan language this means “Bread with Tomato…and Ham.” And that, if I can find all the correct ingredients, is my favorite eat-alone dish.

For me
pa amb tomàquet
sums up all that is best in the Mediterranean, an area whose cuisines and flavors I’ve been studying my entire adult life. This same basic combination appears in numerous Mediterranean lands. Good sea salt and extra-virgin olive oil are the only other essential ingredients.

I’ve written before about a version my husband and I ate as a beach picnic on the Greek island of Paxos. There the country-style bread,
frigania,
was sun-toasted, the local oil had a faint overtaste of hazelnut, the air was balmy and bore the aroma of wild herbs and spring wildflowers, the light slanted just perfectly through the olive trees behind us, and we were soothed by the gentle sounds of the Ionian sea. It was one of those afternoons you never forget, where the taste of food merges with your memory of the setting. It was what my husband calls “a day of pure Mediterranean bliss”—the sum of everything I’ve been writing about through the years, and which, when I recall it, always brings a smile to my face.

In the Ionians they replace the ham with thin rings of young red onions. In Italy they usually forgo any embellishment, preferring the simple combination of tomato and bread. One morning in Turkey, in the Euphrates Valley, where much of the Old Testament is set, I was handed a variation I call a “breakfast burrito.” Turkish flat bread had been rolled around some smashed wood-charred onions and ripe tomato slathered with olive oil. The oil had been seasoned with a sprinkling of red pepper paste and dried mint.

I love these and other Mediterranean versions, but I adore the Catalan
pa amb tomàquet
the most. Perhaps this is because the first time I ate it—at a bar within La Boquería, the huge, boisterous, and legendary central market of Barcelona just off the Ramblas—was the first time I tasted it with jamón Ibérico. Jamón Ibérico is the extraordinary ham from the black-hoofed pigs raised on acorns around the town of Jabugo in the Extremadura region of Spain.

Alas, jamón Ibérico is not yet available in the United States. I know some importers who are working hard to bring it over. Hopefully, this will happen within the next few years. In the meantime, I sometimes add a very thin slice of serrano ham. But more often than not, I eat the bread and tomato alone.

Because this dish is so simple (a child can put it together in seconds), the ingredients must be perfect. Late summer vine-ripened tomatoes are a necessity. In northern California, where I live, we’re blessed with wonderful multihued heirloom tomatoes from July through October. Off season, I look for sweet, juicy, aromatic cherry tomatoes, which I crush before spreading on the bread.

The bread is key. It should be country-style crusty and very fresh, preferably from a local bakery. When I’m at home, I always use bread from the Della Frattoria bakery in Sonoma County. I recommend grilling it the way the Catalans do, over a hardwood fire, or, if that’s impossible, on a stovetop toaster grill set over a gas flame. This method is much preferred to the result obtainable from an electric toaster, in that the bread will be slightly charred by the flames.

Extra-virgin olive oil is one ingredient on which I never stint. I always buy the very best that I can find. If you choose a Tuscan oil, your
pa amb tomàquet
will be somewhat peppery; if you use a fine Spanish oil, it will be closer to the original. Either way works well for me, depending on my mood. As for salt, my favorite is the large-crystal British sea salt called Maldon, which dissolves when added to the crushed tomatoes.

Of course there are numerous “world class” dishes that I’ve written about and greatly enjoy—Spanish paella, Moroccan bisteeya, Provençal bouillabaisse, and cassoulet from southwest France. But when I’m going to eat alone, I always reach for that lovingly lettered yellow plate, the one that says
Pa amb Tomàquet.

Pa amb Tomàquet

Cut a rustic-style bread with a serrated knife into 1/2-inch slices. Lightly toast the slices on a grill or in a toaster oven. Slather the toasted slices (on both sides) with freshly crushed ripe tomatoes. The layer must not be too thin or too thick—more like a thin, even red sheen. Sprinkle with fine salt. Slowly drizzle a light, golden extra-virgin olive oil on top on one side.

If you like, you can top the bread off with paper-thin slices of serrano ham or large, fat fillets of anchovy, preferably imported from l’Escale.

You may want to rub some garlic on the bread as well, but I’ve yet to meet a Catalan gastronome who would approve. Eat with a knife and fork.

E
ight
P.M.
and stomachs all across the land are beginning to rumble. Down in the village, women are darting out to buy last-minute baguettes before the shutters on the
boulangerie
crash shut for the night. The men are drinking aperitifs of cold Chablis at the café-bar and chatting in duos and trios and quartets about why the village needs a new well. Any minute now, their coins will clink onto the counter. They’ll wrap scarves around their necks and wander their separate ways through the wood-smoke-scented air, along cobblestone streets, in the final wisps of light, toward home. And there, waiting for them in the warm glow behind the windows, will be more talk and laughter, and no doubt an enormous pot of coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon or pot-au-feu, one of those mellow, classic, slowly cooked dishes, the privilege of families and intimate gatherings of loved ones.

Bastards.

Oh, come now! There’s no need for this misery-loves-company nonsense. There’s more than sour grapes in the kitchen for dinner, surely. I just have to make myself go in there and fix it. And then sit myself down and eat it. And, somehow, I must try to feel pleased about it.

It’s rather odd: I have read quite a number of essays over the past few days on the subject of eating alone. You wouldn’t believe for how many it ends up quasi-erotica. In one piece I read, the writer went so far as to take her dinner to the bathtub! Oh, the moans and groans of illicit pleasure, the unbridled indulgence that eating alone inspires in some!

I can remember one time eating alone and liking it, but it wasn’t like that. It was at the end of my infantry-officer training (don’t ask), and I had spent several months, obedient and sleep-deprived, being marched up and down in troops all over the place and eating two-year-old chicken cacciatore out of aluminum pouches, before crawling into trenches to be vigilant. The afternoon before the close of that lively period of my life, I was walking back to barracks and I passed a mess hall that we weren’t allowed in, on pain of death. Through an open door, I spied a buffet table covered in tiny triangular sandwiches with no crusts. There was a tea urn at one end of it. I happened to be wearing webbing with a tin cup in the pouch. I pulled out the cup, held my breath, raced through the door, filled the cup with tea, grabbed a sandwich, tore out again, then stood panting around the corner under the eaves. Egg salad on Wonder bread has never been so tasty! Tea has never been so hot and sweet!

But that is the one and only time I can recall loving the fact that I was alone and eating at the same time. Otherwise, there is little I find more depressing, and frankly I do have a hard time believing anyone who tries to pass it off as anything else. If eating alone were truly the juicy experience some describe, there would be restaurants in the red-light districts full of plate-sized tables in curtained-off booths. Travelers would rave about the thrills of eating on airplanes, that peculiar form of solo dining, miraculously planned for a crowd, where everyone faces front like a brigade and nibbles silently off the world’s only tables designed for one. On the other hand, since eating alone at least sometimes is a fact of life, I can understand wanting to make the best of it. And perhaps even exaggerating how good it all was, after the fact: it sometimes takes that in life to convince ourselves we’ve had fun.

“Like Lucullus!” you want to say. (He always gets dragged into this.) He was the Roman general famous for bellowing, “Tonight, Lucullus dines with Lucullus!” when his cook, having noticed that Lucullus had no guests and would therefore be dining alone, dared to serve him a less than feast-worthy meal. Well, not quite like Lucullus, although at least he had the good sense to stay home, rather than resort to a restaurant, where there’s always the risk of being seated (in all one’s lonesome splendor) in front of a mirror. Lucullus gets points for keeping up decorum. Fine. But don’t forget, he had chefs in his kitchen fixing dinner for him, carrying it to his side, and lifting it onto his plate with a silver fork.
*
I’m sure that if Lucullus had had to cook for himself that night, like
moi,
he’d have been contemplating a boiled egg on the couch like the rest of us. (By the way, I say this after several weeks of dog-sitting in a grand empty house, where I’ve been subsisting on reheated pasta and store-bought cookies.)

These weeks remind me of that summer I spent in Spain a few years ago. I was staying all by myself in a borrowed house with no telephone, TV, or radio. It was just me, two gas burners, three months’ worth of Booker Prize novels, and the grand idea that I was going to write a novel myself. By the end of the season, having eaten enough
pan con tomate
to soak up the entire Mediterranean Sea, I had grown Einsteinesque eyebrows (not ideas, alas!) and produced some of the most embarrassing writing of my lifetime. So that just goes to show you. Incidentally, not long afterward I found a quotation from Montaigne, which I now keep close at hand because it reminds me of where my priorities should be. To live, he said, “is the most illustrious of your occupations…to compose our character is our duty, not to compose books.” I’ve found no better way of composing my character than by exposing it to other interesting characters, preferably over frequent lengthy dinners. (After all this time alone in the countryside, I can definitely feel my character going slack.)

This is not to say that I don’t share the human need for solitude. On the contrary, I need more time alone than most people I know, but I really don’t see why anyone would want to drag food into it. A book, yes. Walking shoes, perhaps. An inspiring view for an afternoon, sure. But a knife and a fork? You’d really have to be losing it. (Unless, of course, you’re the Queen of England, just back from an official tour of the Commonwealth, in which case, yes, I can understand why you’d be just croaking for a plate of kippers mash in a lawn chair. But that’s exceptional.)

Epicurus said that we should look for someone to eat and drink
with
before looking for something to eat and drink. I agree: for society’s sake if not your own, never eat alone if you can avoid it. However, let’s say you’ve exhausted the little black book, or, as is my case at the moment, you’re six kilometers from the nearest house and you don’t know who lives there anyway: then what?

I once knew a widow with a clever approach to the problem. When I was growing up, my mother visited a lot of old people and she’d drag me along to play little concerts for them on my violin. One of the ladies we occasionally called on, Ida Coffee, lived alone with a pump organ, a cat, and a dog, in a tiny gray wooden house with a red roof. We arrived one day, knocked several times, then finally stuck our heads in the door and called out. No Ida in sight. We were just turning to leave when she batted though the pantry door wearing an apron. “Come in!” she said. “I’ve just baked myself a birthday cake!” (The fact that she was turning ninety that day makes this all the more admirable.) We all sat around nibbling pieces of cake and drinking tea, after which I sawed out my virtuoso repertoire to mad applause:
Morning Has Broken, Devil’s Dream, Edelweiss,
and little bits of Bach. Now, if only I had Ida’s cook-and-the-company-will-come philosophy bred in my bones! Ach, but I don’t. There’s no point going to great strides to concoct something spectacular for myself, because I simply won’t appreciate it on my own. On the other hand, if I wash down that bag of cashews on the counter with a glass of wine and call it dinner, I’m going to feel as though I belong living under a bridge.

Perhaps there’s a solution that strikes a middle ground, and before I send my immune system crashing to an all-time low, I’d better march myself straight into the kitchen and adopt it: one-bowl suppers, from scratch. Here’s my reasoning: If it’s possible to eat whatever has been made out of one bowl, chances are it will also have been possible to cook it in one pot, which is convenient. Eating out of a bowl requires only one utensil, so with bowl in one hand, and fork or spoon in the other, I can chew away at a meditative pace in a cozy armchair, rather than behind the candelabra at the far end of a table for twelve, like the last living member of a fallen dynasty. And bowls are comforting vessels. There’s something admirably self-sufficient about them. They seem specifically designed to hold the kind of simple, trusty fare that, although it probably won’t inspire lust, at least will help satisfy a lonely kind of hunger…

…Nice try. That would have been an ideal ending to this saga if weren’t for the fact that, instead of cooking, I just went over and did in all those cashews. (Rats!) Let’s face it: the truth about eating alone, despite our best intentions, is that nine times out of ten we eat badly. We eat inadequate food; we eat it too fast; and we eat it slouched over a computer or sprawled in front of a television, with all the enlightened social skills of seagulls. I’m convinced that this affects the way we live our lives afterward. It’s no doubt why I’ve been scuffing around in worn-out slippers and a slouchy turtleneck for days, avoiding the future. (It’s probably why the whole world seems to be falling apart at the seams.) Eating alone is not nature’s way. Babies never eat alone. They can’t. Children don’t, unless they’re in tragic circumstances. Old people eat alone regularly and it’s dreadful. No wonder they lose their appetites. My theory (and I have several solo dinners behind me to back it up) is that to compose a happy character, and thus contribute to making the world a nice place to live in, you’ve either got
to be fed
(that is, by someone
other than yourself
who cares about you), which feels good and means that you’re part of something larger than yourself; or, you’ve got
to be the person feeding
(that is,
other
people—not just dogs!—that
you
care about). That has the same positive effect.

Luckily, I have both to look forward to next week, when I finally get out of here. For now, however, I guess the best I can do is pretend that those cashews were just an aperitif. And, while I’m at it, I might as well make out that I’m just back from an exhausting tour of the Commonwealth.

Kippers Mash

Ideal quiet one-bowl comfort food for one. (Although I’d rather it were for two.)

Potatoes

Butter

Milk

Salt and pepper

Tinned kippers, drained

Parsley (optional)

Peel and boil potatoes until very tender. Drain. Mash them up with generous quantities of butter, milk, salt, and pepper. Mash in a drained tin of kippers. Scoop into a bowl and eat. No parsley required, but it never hurts, either.