What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [9]
It’s hard to see this wildly gesticulating Frito maniac as the same man who meticulously crafts exquisite Pinots and Syrahs, but that’s the thing about eat-alone food: it’s not consistent with those sides of ourselves that the world, including close friends, sees.
“It’s about experimentation,” says Robert, not yet finished with the subject. “Do you know, you can boil a hot dog in cheap beer or wine? Once I got this Hebrew National Hot Dog and cooked it in Riesling. Any Riesling will do.” But other experiments fail. “Chocolate chip ice cream in root beer makes an okay float. But beer in a milk shake? I can tell you it’s a horrible, horrible thing.”
Here are some of the odd things that people confess to eating
Saltines crumbled in milk
Oyster crackers or matzo in coffee
Life Cereal dredged with Coffee-Mate, the original formula only, none of that low-fat or flavored junk
Cream of Wheat made with lumps
Dried cereal with broken butter cookies, drowned in milk
Wonder Bread, flattened, covered with butter and sugar, then frozen briefly, so it becomes a kind of sugar cookie
Cake batter (especially chocolate) and raw cookie dough (especially chocolate chip)
Frozen pound cake shaved into thin pieces and eaten cold
Leftover spaghetti that’s stuck together, fried with Swiss cheese
A baked potato covered with cottage cheese and a smashed up hard-boiled egg
People who don’t normally put a lot of stock into recipes can be extremely precise about their personal foods, such as how milk should look when poured over hot cereal (“It should just puddle around the edges, no more, or it will cool down the cereal and thin it out”), or the kind of bread used for a sandwich (“It must be white bread, like Wonder Bread, not a sturdier variety like Pepperidge Farms”), or the potato chips used to scoop up cottage cheese (“Only use Ruffles”), or how long eggs must be cooked (“Six minutes, not five or seven, but six”).
However strange, these foods do accomplish the work of getting a body fed.
When we began our survey with men, we secretly took pleasure in uncovering those nasty true confessions, the crude stuff, the so-called recipes that make any decent eater cringe—in short, the strange foods of the solitary eater. We got them from both men and women. Things—we can’t really call them dishes—like bread soaked in margarita mix, or sardine oil poured over cottage cheese. Who would do this, you may ask? Well, relatively normal people, it turns out. Perhaps even your own friends.
Cliff Wright, the author of many good cookbooks and one of the best cooks we know, has this tactic for feeding himself. “Sometimes when I’m on a recipe-testing roll, I end up with six Tupperware containers filled with leftover god-knows-what. I’ll take them all, dump them in a bowl of pasta, and start tossing. If the taste isn’t quite right, I add one or all of the following: fried pancetta, butter, cream, olive oil, prosciutto, egg, or cheese.”
I especially like the flourish of “one or all” of those fatty additions, and nothing in between, like butter and cheese. Of course, Cliff has a pretty good idea of what he’s doing, so he’s likely to end up with something that’s more than merely edible despite his slapdash approach. (Not always slapdash, Cliff has been known to use an otherwise spacious Sunday afternoon intended for reading to whip up a batch of crepinettes, a sausage-like affair that involves three kinds of meat, vegetables, and caulfat—and these just for himself.)
Personal foods may not be shareable, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t good to eat or aren’t enjoyed by more than just one or two odd souls. More than a few of our respondents mentioned stirring oyster crackers, saltines, matzo, or some other crumbly dry thing into cups of tea, coffee,