What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [2]
Think about short pasta with cauliflower for example. You might ask yourself, for starters, do you love, or even like, cauliflower? Do you want only a small amount of pasta in proportion to the vegetable or the other way around? Do you eat like a bird or feed like a lion? Avoid oil or embrace it? I happen to love a lot of cauliflower and want just a few noodles for textural contrast when I make this dish, but you might want a full 4-ounce serving of pasta decorated with just a few cauliflower tidbits. Both are entirely legitimate approaches, and when you’re alone in your kitchen, there’s no need to explain or defend the choices you’ve made.
A friend who read our manuscript early on scrawled at the bottom of one chapter,“All these recipes are Southwestern!” And although we live in New Mexico, this has pretty much nothing to do with the preponderance of such recipes in the book. It surprised us, too, how often people turned to some combination of chiles, tortillas, salsa, and cheese as solutions to what to eat when alone. It’s as if these are the new American foods and flavors, and particularly satisfying ones at that. And they have little to do with where one lives. Minnesota, Washington, New York, California—the Southwest is everywhere.
We were also stuck by how many times people called for “good olive oil.” In a way this wasn’t too surprising since quite a few of those Patrick interviewed originally were on these trips to countries where olive oil plays a major role. But others called for good olive oil too. It’s clear that something has shifted in our food culture, that you can live in Arkansas and never have been to Italy and still be sure you’re going to cook only with “good olive oil.”
Good olive oil aside, we’ve given a lot of these idiosyncratic meals and menus a try. Of course there are those down and dirty dishes that can’t be translated or shared but that do horrify and amuse, but then there are some solo eating practices that can, with a twist here and a knock there, be turned into quite usable recipes. Finally, there are quite a few dishes that are really very good and definitely worthy of a recipe, and we want to share the best ones with you. Who can, after all, argue with the goodness of a meal consisting of a roast leg of lamb and a bottle of old-vine Zinfandel? Why, a vegetarian, of course! But what vegetarian can argue with warm polenta smothered with wild mushrooms or braised greens?
Everyone eats alone at one time or another. There are those periods of solo eating that ensue when we’re young and out in the world for the first time, again when we’re old, and sometimes during the years in between when we find ourselves without a partner to eat with. But during those years that we are living with partners and children, there are also invariably times when we find ourselves eating alone, cooking for just ourselves and no one else. It may be only for a single day, perhaps a weekend, or possibly a week or more that we’ll find ourselves no longer constrained by what others expect for dinner or what time it should take place.
Whenever these moments occur and however long they last, they present us with the opportunity to keep our own best company.
Eating in Bed
When it comes to where we eat, the bed is a zone that’s highly frowned upon but also indulged. On the bed is permissible, but never in bed, insist more than a few women.
“The thought of eating in bed is sort of creepy,” muses Maureen Callahan, “but that might have something to do with growing up in Florida. The thought of those big bugs marching up for a crumb or two . . . ooh!