What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [44]
When asked what she cooked when home alone, Emily Hartzog, a lithe surgeon who has spent a fair amount of time in England, said, “A hard-boiled egg sandwich,” and left it at that. When asked to elaborate, she explained, “You have to gob on the mayo, slice the eggs very thin, salt and pepper generously, and add translucent slices of tomato. They sell these on the trains in England; it’s practically the pinnacle of their cuisine.” It could be (if done with good quality everything—eggs, tomatoes, bread, and mayonnaise) quite a fine sandwich.
“Scrambies,” says cookbook author Martha Rose Shulman, but she doesn’t mean the kind of scrambled eggs that are hastily done in a minute or less. Rather she’s thinking about eggs that are creamy-smooth because they’re cooked very, very slowly over a tiny flame. “But if Liam is there,” (Liam is Martha’s son) “the scrambled eggs get cooked faster over higher heat since he hasn’t the patience or interest to wait for slowly cooked ones.” Compromise is just what happens when another comes to the table.
Kate Manchester, publisher of Edible Santa Fe, takes up the theme of compromise. “Eating alone is nothing less than a luxurious, even decadent, act,” she says, “because I get to think about myself. I don’t have to think about someone else.” And when the opportunity arrives, she tends to return to her past, which involves seafood since she’s from Rhode Island. “I find myself searching for that connection,” she says. But because good fish isn’t always an option in New Mexico, she has a back-up menu. “If it isn’t seafood, I’ll make johnny cakes and eat them with syrup and butter. I’d never even think of making them for my boyfriend or eating them when he’s here,” she reflects. “It’s a stolen moment when I can cook for my own palate.”
The one-unit meal, like johnny cakes, sidesteps the notion of a square meal with several foods skillfully balancing one another. Food writer Amelia Saltsman, who has no end of beautiful foods available to her from the Santa Monica farmers market, says that, in the end, she may just have a baked potato with butter and salt. “Basically, it’s about comforting carbs and good salt,” she says.
Other such ultra-simple meals mentioned include a baked sweet potato with goat cheese; rye toast buttered and then rubbed with garlic; polenta; or a solitary vegetable—an entire cauliflower, a big artichoke, pounds of asparagus, or potatoes. An authority on Greek food and the author of gorgeous books on the same, Aglaia Kremezi says, “My dish is fried potatoes with yogurt sauce—thinly sliced potatoes, lots of them, but not sliced too thin, not like chips. I fry them in olive oil until soft and only slightly crunchy, and eat them with a sauce made of yogurt, crumbled feta, and mustard. It’s no big deal, but it is really delicious and part of my solo ritual. I eat at the table, with a glass of wine, of course.”
Knowing Aglaia’s food firsthand and how good it is, we tried these potatoes and liked them a lot. They are the ultimate in indulgent oily little dishes. And the sauce was good on everything we could find to put it on. But because we weren’t sure exactly what she had in mind, we asked for more specifics. Mustard, it turns out, was crucial. “Add enough so that it’s not a very pretty color,” she said, and that made the difference.
People told us, though not nearly as often as we would have expected, that when left alone in their own kitchens, they resorted to eating cereal for dinner. A little cloud of shame seems to hover around the cereal eaters, as if they know they really could do better and perhaps should try. One describes mixing different dried cereals together for dinner, a habit to which her whole extended family is committed. A man confesses to eating Life Cereal with Coffee-Mate. But the cereal supper