What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [76]
Food is used not only to woo someone into bed but into one’s life as a new friend, with the possibility of becoming a lover, or not. The food we offer might well lead to marriage, which shows how powerful cooking for another can be.
“The dish that made me marry my husband,” reports one woman, “was his mole poblano, and the fact that he spent days making it. When I got to his house, there was something in the air I had never smelled before. It was utterly amazing!
“But,” she adds, “it was also a high-pressure meal. What if I hadn’t liked it? I don’t know what would have happened. But I did like it. And now he makes his moles in far less time.”
This story was told over a dinner with five Minnesotan women I had met while on a book tour. In answer to my question, what would you cook if you wanted to seduce someone, the youngest woman, a pretty blond publicist about twenty-five years old, shrugged and said that she’d have to make her spaghetti with red sauce because that was all she knew how to cook.
“But,” her companions chimed in, “cooking anything for someone says that you care!” And the sign of a caring person is no small matter.
A friend of ours was in a professional relationship with a woman for a period of time. When it was clear that part of their relationship should be over so that it might blossom in other ways, he invited her to dinner. But this wasn’t merely dinner. It was a meal that invited her into his life.
“I made my usual pasta puttanesca,” he explained, “but I served it on a large platter. And I cooked a whole pound of spaghetti, which is way too much for two people, but I wanted there to be this feeling of plenty.”
Another special touch came with the tomatoes. “There were red and yellow tomatoes, but instead of dicing them up as I usually do, I cut them into fans and lay them around the pasta.”
The beautiful presentation, the generous platter that would necessitate the lifting and serving of the pasta, made me think of the Bowerbird arraying his colored stones to attract his mate with the promise of a beautifully furnished home. This meal was a gift, an offering. (And it did work.)
Cooking together also has a seductive power. Maybe it’s the nerves, the excitement combined with the chances of colliding into each other while stirring the risotto or opening the oysters. And there’s the challenge of doing something together that’s slightly tricky, like rolling out long sheets of pasta or shaping ravioli.
“We’d make fajitas!” sparked one of the Minnesotans.
Fajitas? I was thinking of foods a little less prosaic than fajitas, but then she added, “All that chopping and mixing would be fun to do with someone,” and I saw her point. You could make fried egg sandwiches and it would be fun.
“Fondue,” suggested another woman at the table, her choice for a seductive dish. Curious, because fondue is one of those few dishes that involves cooking and eating at the same time.
“The dipping of the bread, the small amounts,” she elaborated, “we’d feed each other bites of the cheese and wine-soaked bread.”
“Our first date was a cooking date,” Eric says. He’s telling me about getting together with the woman he eventually married. “We made a Spanish dish, a lasagna of sorts. It was so complicated. She was nervous—she cut herself twice. We probably should have made something simpler. It took so long to make that we were exhausted by the time we sat down to eat.”
The first meal I made for Patrick when I knew we’d be spending the night together was a picnic. We met in Phoenix, where neither of us lived, because we were going to hear Ram Dass speak. To be outside in the warm desert air by a pool in winter seemed so luxurious that it never occurred to me to look for a restaurant. Instead, I made a number of small dishes to enjoy poolside—a lentil salad, a very green