Cooking & Confinement
Just a short couple of months into the Covid-19 lockdown, I was on the phone with my Aunt, and she said that she and my cousins had been on the phone remembering favorite meals enjoyed together before our forced seclusion, and it seems like food and community, and food in community, was what I missed most in those grueling, uncertain first months.
In a time when any foray out of the house could portend very serious consequences, cooking became, for many of us, a way not just to feed ourselves, but to reminisce about, to yearn for, and to revisit beloved engagements with the pleasures of food.
It started with the ubiquitous focaccia recipe and the sharing of sourdough starters between friends, but there was something about being able to travel through recollection of meals past that could make a necessary confinement feel briefly more permeable.
Like many people in the beginning of quarantine, we viewed our groceries with suspicion and were even washing cans of beer, but as it came to seem more likely that surface transmission was viewed as relatively low-risk, the grocery store, the Middle Eastern spice store in our old neighborhood and inevitably Amazon, and even the Walgreens up the street, handily offered the raw materials to re-engage with that pleasure in spite of the grim circumstances.
Whether trying a friend’s grandmother’s casserole recipe for the first time, trying to perfect my own version of the best $2 egg sandwich I’d ever had, or teaching myself how to make Pad Thai from scratch (we had the other half of the bag of salted shrimp for two years after), engagement and focus in the kitchen offered a brief respite from the ambient worry, and also kept us fed.
I don’t think we even picked up to-go until late Spring of 2020.
My friend J and I would cook each other food each week and present it to each other like grains of hope, when we would meet to go on long walks, and that practice, coupled with the prep work of making sixty some episodes of “Cooking With Big Mark,” a creative collaboration with my Father, a former Restaurateur, had me spending much of my free time either cooking food, eating the food we’d just cooked or thinking about what food to cook next.
Food is a portal—to place, to culture, to history, and to the realm of the senses. I would pause in our isolation to think about the culinary pleasures of the then very recent before times: a perfect taco made by a friend, the parsley tahini sauce (and basically everything else) at the Middle Eastern Grocery in Andersonville, the lentil soup available across the street at Taste of Lebanon, the cuisine of Harvard Square in the late nineties: unagi maki at Roka, Long Island duck at Rialto, the garlic soup at Iruna, or my father’s lamb chops, crab cakes or risotto or the still memorable Ile Flotante at “Le Marquis” in Downtown Crosssing, Boston when Jean-George was still actually behind the stove, in a space and time where none of those places were actually reachable, even without the intervening circumstances, but they were still very much available in memory. And these memories offered reminders of not just comfort but a kind of transcendance—when you start eating something and you immediately wish you could go back to the the first bite and your body feels lit up with aesthetic arousal, and a sense of disbelief that something so tasty actually exists in this maddening world.
I know many folks can’t stand to think of this period, and we were certainly lucky the supplemental unemployment paid for all of the needed ingredients to feed this nostalgia, but I think about our quarantine fairly frequently, and the chance it offered to reset life more squarely in reality—as I’ve written before, if death lurked in the literal air, why would I not not start doing the things that get set aside for “someday?”
Until that period I had almost stopped cooking, had not written much since finishing a (still) unpublished novel, and certainly hadn’t produced or directed theatrical productions, but the question the moment presented me with was: “why not?”
If the days felt numbered, I found real comfort and surprisingly rapid improvement in my technique in the kitchen, and that led to a lot of dishes, which I would wash while composing stanzas of poetry in my head.
I still hate doing dishes, but they seem to offer me my best thinking time if there is no time for a long walk.
And cooking and my ongoing fascination with the alchemy of ingredients led me back behind the bar, trying to push the outer limits of what a cocktail “should” be. Does it necessarily need syrup, does it need citrus, does it even need alcohol in it? My most recent recipe is a blend of lightly sugared adaptogenic mushroom tea, which has been infused with cinnamon and vanilla, which is then combined with a chilled tea of lemon balm, holy basil and green tea. Will it sell as well as the guava, passion fruit and ginger tea I adapted from a dear friend’s recipe? I quite doubt it, but I enjoy playing with possibilities, and it’s rather nice to be paid to be “at play” in the realm of ideas, which regardless of circumstances, always offers its welcome.