The beginning of the 2020 stay-at-home order was almost cozy, despite the wild, panicked predictions that hinted we would not be free in two weeks, or three, or twelve. The first wave of homestuck cooking hit with the force of an internet food trend: everyone was baking sourdough. I saw dozens of posts from people creating dead-drops for starters and sharing what they’d learned through the heartbreak of knead and rise and sometimes ruin. It was a warmer game of wait and see; a set of microbes we could control. 

No baker, I set about cooking the kinds of things that took hours of intermittent attention, typically reserved for the holiday season. Heroically starting with a whole chicken I would make collagen-rich stock, shredding the meat and separating it into halves. One half went into a mushroom-gravied pot pie, puff pastry like a golden crown baked separately and placed on top. The other into a glass container of curried chicken salad that needed to sit overnight before being served on early spring tomatoes, delivered to my door by a masked essential worker who could not enjoy the same hours of fretting and table setting. 

As spring became a Californian smoke-darkened summer when we kept our windows closed, the appeal of cooking waned at once. We were hot, bored, screwed out of travel and parties and the species of flirtation that only emerge from their chrysalis on warm nights when we linger at beach and bonfire. Those of us who still had jobs and could do so quietly shifted grocery budget into takeout money, always planning for generous tips. 

It seemed the virtuous thing to do. We were saving the economy! We were supporting people who depended on tips who now had to deliver to our kitchen tables rather than wait on us at theirs. For months, I volunteered with an organization that bought meals from local restaurants to deliver to frontline healthcare workers. Through this work, I became familiar with the takeout menus and loading doors of a hundred restaurants in my own city. I huffed the perfumed air that arose from the delivery boxes I crammed into my car, deciding that later I, too, would order from the Ethiopian joint that served unexpected ravioli under sun-charged and spiced sauces. And so a season of gorgeous takeout meals began. 

No matter how well you set your home table to receive a sushi dinner, the experience will always lack the zero-calorie components that you crave. I tried to evoke the sun bouncing off blonde wood tables, the carefully-set ceramic dishes of soy sauce and wasabi. I laid out plates and dished up our rolls, no less skillfully cut than they were at the bar. The fresh fish glistened like sensuous jewels, the short rice lay pressed grain to grain, their big bellies fit to one another like milkfed puppies in a basket. The maki were rolled tight, the heaps of orange masago glittering like a gnome’s hoard of gold. But it was hollow, no matter how full we felt. 

Each perfectly balanced bite that the complementary wooden chopsticks lifted to my mouth reminded me of being out. The sushi chefs’ genial yells as our party came through the door, the ability to eavesdrop on another table where someone is having their first raw fish, their second divorce, their final dinner before they leave town. This luxury and lack was to be the pattern of even the best meals we had at home during the plague year: delight in the delicious and despair in deprivation.

Meal kits from our very favorite restaurant in San Francisco (an Argentine grill with a spectacular bar) required some home cooking and assembly to keep the dishes from suffering the degradation of travel. I am a mean home cook with a cast iron skillet that I can hardly lift, but I could not wield the fire and fortitude of an open-flame grill that sears and crusts asado mixto all day long.

Cocktails from the best bars in the Bay arrived neatly jacketed in formal mason jars, labeled helpfully: Double Manhattan, Yuzu Martini, Old Fashioned with a sliver of orange skin floating within like a lab specimen. Drinking at home quickly separates the social drinkers from the folks who are diving into the bottle after oblivion. One of the former, I lost my tolerance and my taste for alcohol, despite these alchemically correct creations. I developed a collection of tiny jars that sat beside the dust-furred bottles on my bar. For what? Nothing in my life cried out for portability as I barely left the house for over a year. 

Chinese takeout felt more like normal life, the folded paper boxes with their red pagodas stamped on the outside had been a typical Friday night indulgence in the before-times. We summoned normality along with handmade noodles and soup dumplings, never fearing that the latter might be too hot to pop into the mouth whole and let them burst against our tongues. Everything that has survived delivery is defanged; a little damp from the steam trapped inside the container, never as hot as it was meant to be. Six months into shelter- in-place and restaurants began tamper-sealing everything, wrapping a sticky label over the seams of boxes and taping the handles of a bag together. I would unravel these deterrents, thinking of people so hungry, so underpaid that they might be tempted to pilfer an egg roll en route. I moved my tip marker from 25% to 30%. I stopped using the apps that had come under fire for wage theft. I limited myself to takeout twice per week. 

A few times we were overwhelmed by the generosity and abandon shown in our orders when they arrived. On one notable occasion, an order requested to contain two flautas rolled tight and crisp beneath a bicolor blanket of sour cream and guacamole appeared to our wondering eyes as a half dozen, three of which were inexplicably, delectably filled with queso fundido. On another, a serving of quesabirria described as dinner for two arrived in an eye-poppingly large catering dish and contained not less than forty of the crispy, melty packets of the taco genus, and enough au-jus-stew for dipping that the container was at first mistaken for a quart of hot soup.

The mouthfeel of generosity had the power to break my heart as the plague year reached its third anniversary. I missed indoor-dining restaurants with an almost homesick ache. Unlike most of the DoorDashing crowd, I would have traded every unselfconscious comfort of shoveling pizza unsupervised and in pajamas on my couch while using a kitchen towel as a napkin for a single waiter to roll their eyes at me and tell me I’m pronouncing endive incorrectly. Instead, I wept with joy opening the spread from a Thai kitchen where dinner for two was laid in an aluminum sheet pan, bedecked with flowers and blue sticky rice, the sultry wink of a fried egg laying on top, begging to be busted over braised short rib and spicy shrimp. The camera ate first because I couldn’t swallow past the lump in my throat at how beautiful it was, how carefully arranged to feel like dinner out instead of our 300th dinner in. 

Baked goods were far and away the best bet, perhaps because we are more accustomed to those ambassadorial pink boxes in our own context. How ofted does one sit at the bakery to eat cake? Tap three times on my phone and an intrepid masked fleet-footed messenger brought gold-leafed Earl Grey macarons tucked into a beautiful box as prissy as any mothered child. Tap again to summon a slice of decadent cheesecake from a Black-owned bakery, or assorted sweets and savories from a Taiwanese crepe joint. Bubble tea could be had with a box of popcorn chicken cut from fatty thighs, warning-sign-red spices on top and served with long sharp sticks with which to impale them and eat at my desk, because nine months in, ten months, two years, I had abandoned trying to build a table. My household were eating in front of our laptops and sending one another memes across the room like life preserver rings in a sea of Hong Kong milk tea. The same menu could bring us a Liege waffle or onion rings, and in the absurdity of those late locked-down pandemic months, all of this made perfect sense for breakfast. 

Planning for a movie night, I called up the nostalgic and limited menu of an historic Danish bakery across town and selected favorites: a butter horn, a chocolate eclair, and a slice of their fresh strawberry cake with whipped cream. (Is it strawberry season? Will it ever be strawberry season again?) With the delivery app open, I could not see the calendar or the clock. This is how casinos stay in business; keeping our eyes on the money and the wheel and finally, finally blocking out the yawning void. When the order arrived, the collection of containers was too big for what we had ordered. Butter horn and eclair shared a single clamshell— the kind we had become wary of for its sharding plastic corners, quick to spatter our prizes with blood if we were incautious. Beside them, a tall and lordly pink box, its roof askew and tacked down by a strip of masking tape. 

Taped to the side was a short note: we were out of cake slices so we just sent you a whole cake. I opened the box and they had indeed: a 5-inch diameter dainty thing, as pretty as a dancing dress all in red and white. I took a picture to share and thank the bakery for their generosity in this terrible, interminable time. How to explain or express that a little round cake in a too-small box had brought tears to my eyes? My saccharine offering of love and thanks went blissfully unnoticed; the bakery had not posted in ten years.

Thank you for joining me in this prayer of gratitude. Foundling Fathers will be out in June.