Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jenni Ferrari-Adler is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Michigan, where she received an MFA in fiction. She has worked as a reader for The Paris Review, a bookseller, an egg-seller, and is an agent at Union Literary Agents. Her short fiction has been published in numerous magazines.
@JenFerrariAdler

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Introduction

Call it seven-thirty on a Wednesday night. No one else is home. A slight hunger hums in your body, so you wander into the kitchen. In front of the window a plant's stems wave like arms from their hanging basket. In the pantry bin, potatoes eye the onions slipping out of their skins. An apron hangs from the closet door like the shadow of a companion. Reflexively, you open the refrigerator and nod at the condiments, grab the hot sauce, and close the others back into cold darkness. Bottle of sauce in hand, you gaze around the room, inspecting the contents of the cabinets, the pile of paper menus from nearby restaurants, the spines of your cookbooks. You turn from the bookshelf and catch a glimpse of yourself in the window. In the heat, your hair has puffed wildly. You experience one of those weird lost minutes inside your head. Loneliness, you think, loneliness with its lyrical sound; you look like a lone lioness. You hear Alvy Singer, the young Woody Allen character from Annie Hall, say, "The universe is expanding." Bananas Shaughnessy from The House of Blue Leaves cuts him off: "My troubles all began a year ago—two years ago today— Two days ago today? Today." Then you remember your mother mixing cream cheese and lox into a pan of scrambling eggs.

You don't need a literal eggplant on hand to realize—with the pleasurable shock that comes from recognizing a small truth—that you are alone in the kitchen with one.

This book had its genesis in August 2004, when I spent the first of many such nights alone in Michigan. I was twenty-seven, a born-and-raised New Yorker, and I'd never lived by myself before. It was unsettling to be without a job or roommates, to have so much time alone in my tiny house in Ann Arbor. As a graduate student in fiction writing, I spent a few hours each day at my desk, following my characters around and trying to get them into interesting trouble. That left a lot of downtime. I ran on the treadmill at the YMCA, hiked in the arboretum, and drank many solitary cups of coffee. I hauled my laptop and bag from one cafÈ to another until it started to seem as if the hauling itself were my job. I was seeking, I suppose, some form of company and conversation, even if the majority of conversations were ones I merely overheard.

In my first semester I took a literature course, Exile and Homecoming, that contributed to my somewhat indulgent delusion that I was in exile. Where was the subway? Where were the bodegas and stoops? Where was my mother? Through the windows of my house I watched the neighbors rake leaves in the autumn and shovel snow in the winter. On the floor of my kitchen was a hopeful dog bowl—I didn't have a dog—and on the refrigerator were photographs of a boyfriend, a family, and friends. I had a life but I seemed to have abandoned it. Some days it required an act of will to believe my life still existed or mattered.

"Why does living alone feel so familiar?" I asked my little brother one night on the phone. He was living in a studio apartment in Philadelphia.

"Because it's like being alone," he said.

He was right, of course. Being alone—battling loneliness—was something at which I had always felt it was important to improve. Taking solitude in stride was a sign of strength and of a willingness to take care of myself. This meant—among other things—working productively, remembering to leave the house, and eating well. I thought about food all the time. I had subscriptions to Gourmet and Food & Wine. Cooking for others had often been my way of offering care. So why, when I was alone, did I find myself trying to subsist on cereal and water? I'd need to learn to cook for one.

It wasn't my first time in the Midwest. I'd done my undergraduate work—as I was learning to call it—at Oberlin College, which boasts many strange and wonderful things, one of which is a system of eating cooperatives. Students can opt out of the dining hall and into one of the communal dining rooms—if a room that seats eighty with folding chairs at round tables and is swept three times a day but is always dirty can be called a dining room. The kitchen featured four industrial-size mixers, two walk-in coolers, and a wok so enormous it doubled as a sled in winter. On the kitchen prep team, I diced eighty onions, wearing sunglasses that didn't stop my tears. When none of the vegetables I ordered came in on time, I still had to produce a stir-fry. I stood on a stool and begged brown rice not to burn. In some ways, learning to cook at Oberlin resembled learning to cook in a restaurant, only it was less precise. The diners charged the food the moment we set the big pots down.

After college, I followed the graduated masses to Brooklyn. I moved into a railroad apartment with two friends who had also gone through Oberlin's cooperative system. It seemed natural to us to make dinner together every night, and I gradually learned to cook for smaller groups. One of my roommates worked at the farmers' market and always brought home bags of vegetables. I worked, briefly, at a bakery in the neighborhood. At the end of the day I brought home bread; I had literally become the breadwinner of our makeshift household. Often, we had guests to dinner. We carried the food from the kitchen down the long hallway to the living room. We sat on the floor.

Over the next five years, we moved from neighborhood to neighborhood in Brooklyn. First, my boyfriend moved in with my friends and me. Later, he and I moved into our own place. Cooking for two was hard. I always made too much.

Now, marooned in the Midwest once again, I tried to live on a stipend. I tried to remember how to make friends. After class, I asked two girls if they wanted to go to a movie over the weekend and the asking made me blush. I tried to string together late-night telephone calls and infrequent visits into an approximation of a relationship. I missed eating salad and cheese with my boyfriend and going over the stories of our days. I missed the texture and chaos of daily life shared with others.

But if time were money, I was rich. There were hours, at least in the beginning, everywhere I looked. In addition to time, I had a galley kitchen, a shelf of cookbooks, two heavy pots, and a chef's knife. I lived near the farmers' market, a cooperative grocery, and a butcher shop. My bicycle had a basket. Which is all to say it was an excellent domestic setup.

But not only did I like to cook for others, I liked to cook with others. Would cooking alone be depressing? More or less depressing than living on sandwiches? More or less depressing than takeout?

"A potato," I told my brother, when he asked what I'd eaten for dinner. "Boiled, cubed, sautéed with olive oil, sea salt, and balsamic vinegar."

"That's it?" he asked. He was one to talk. He'd enjoyed what he called "bachelor's taco night" for three dinners and counting.

"A red cabbage, steamed, with hot sauce and soy sauce," I said the following night.

"Do you need some money?" he asked.

But it wasn't that, or it wasn't only that. I liked to think of myself not as a student on a budget, but rather as a peasant, a member of a group whose eating habits, across cultures, had long appealed to me.

"Are you full?" my brother asked.

"Full enough," I said.

"What about protein?"

Later that week, I diced two onions and sautéed them until they turned translucent and transformed the kitchen with their comforting smell. Flanked by books and magazines, I ate straight out of the pot at the table, my knees curled up to my chest. Aimee Mann sang from the stereo: One is the loneliest number. Everything, I realized, growing light-headed, anything was delicious. In the next weeks I continued on in...