What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [52]
Laura also has her favorite eat-alone sauce, blue cheese sauce. “While the pasta boils or the steak fries or whatever, you get a little saucepan, plop in a few spoonfuls of crème fraîche, then add tons of blue cheese and let it all melt together. Instant and delicious. Ugly as all hell, however. But who’s looking?”
What an appealing strategy, and how easy—quantities of vegetables, pasta, or a steak, simply cooked and then uplifted with rich blue-cheesy sauce. The sauce is also fabulous on polenta, especially if you use Gorgonzola cheese, but even if you don’t, it’s awfully good. Try it on steamed broccoli—you won’t believe that broccoli can be so delicious.
Peggy Knickerbocker, our writer-cook friend in San Francisco, mentions some snacky solutions for some of her daily solo meals. “That is,” she qualifies, “if I’m not making a green salad with seared tuna.” But when she’s eating a more snack-like meal, she might have popcorn with olive oil and sea salt, or, if she’s on a sweet track, she’ll go for frozen yogurt with angel food cake and a peach. But Peggy also tells us how she might make a farmers market salad, if she’s not into snacking or searing tuna. “In this case,” she says, waving her hand toward a half-dozen French bowls and fruit plates heaped with spring vegetables from the morning’s trip to San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Market, “I’d make a salad of fresh shucked peas, shaved artichokes, fennel, and shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano. It’s so good. What else do you need?” she asks us, and we can’t think of a thing, except maybe a glass of wine and a hunk of bread. Or maybe her salad is enough.
Laura and Peggy both cook for others frequently, and cook well for themselves, albeit simply, when eating alone. But more commonly, single people struggle with feeding themselves. A private eye named Nick Ault, who now works as a cop, is hardly alone in his predicament, which is having to wrestle a nasty schedule. He works three twelve-hour days in a row, followed by three days off, which creates a somewhat imbalanced schedule for cooking and eating. The days he’s working, cooking is impossible.
“Those days it’s hot dogs. A couple of dogs a day,” Nick drawls, then shrugs and adds, “What can I do?”
But despite the dog-dog routine, Nick is pretty sophisticated about food. He’s been exposed to a lot of good cooking, and he likes eating out, preferably at a restaurant’s bar, where he can rustle up some conversation as well as dinner. Nick can also rustle up a steak for himself and serve it with a sliced tomato salad. But more impressive than a steak, and quite in contrast to his double-dog days, is his Bolognese sauce.
“The key to making a good Bolognese,” he explains, “is taking your time with the mise en place, and enjoying the whole process. I take time to hand cut the vegetables, I get all the different kinds of ground meats the recipe requires, and I play a little opera—it adds to my enthusiasm. I use Pomi tomatoes and finish with a little cream. Then I eat off of it for several meals. I eat it on pasta or on polenta. It’s really good.”
When we ask Nick when he had last made his Bolognese sauce, he pauses, counts, then reveals it’s probably been at least six months. Again, he shrugs. “Eating alone is a hard thing. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with a bag of potato chips—that would be a meal. It’s hard to energize yourself to do it when it’s just you. So I guess I just get lazy.”
It is hard for many of us to look forward to cooking a meal that’s just for ourselves. It’s not just laziness, but some feeling that it’s not quite worth the effort when it’s just for us. That we’re not worth it! I hear this over and over. The hardest thing ever for me was writing cookbooks when I was unhappily single. It was so joyless to be cooking all this food, trying to really taste it, and then eat it or give it away. When people say they take the time to shop and cook well for themselves, that they don’t stint when it comes to solo meals, or deny themselves good food and wine, there’s something self-respectful and