Spring 2019 Issue
OF KITCHENS AND HEROES
Years ago, I met a lovely woman who had exchanged her McMansion in the Midwest for a railroad apartment in Manhattan. Which also meant that she had spurned her glorio...
PERSONAL ESSAY
Food Confessions of a Former dancer
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Food and I don’t have a great relationship—probably because I was a dancer. It was years ago, and you likely wouldn’t guess it, judging from my slowly settling, middle-aged form. But I was. A serious dancer, performing professionally for seven years, which inevitably meant I was also anorexic.
Starting somewhere in my mid-teenage years, just when other girls were discovering their curves, I discovered that food was the one thing standing between me and achieving my dreams. So I stopped eating—as much as physically possible. And all the pleasure I once took from a scoop of chocolate ice cream or a nice, healthy broiled skinless, boneless chicken fillet flew out of my life, stage right, like a grand jete.
These days, I eat happily, even occasionally heartily. But my husband does the cooking because, as I said, food and I don’t really get along. For me, confronting meal preparation is daunting at best, unpleasant at worst. It requires planning ahead, gathering ingredients, considering—no, imagining—how things will taste. As a writer, I push myself to “live my characters,” imagining them so completely that they’re virtually real. Living all those calories, even only in my head, is still a scary place to go.
The things I allowed myself to eat back in the day were functional, simply to survive. My go-to meal was brown rice (unbuttered) and steamed vegetables, seasoned with low-salt soy sauce. A big indulgence was air-popped popcorn, which I ate in quantity to fill in the gaps. Food creativity came not in planning what I would eat, but in figuring out how little I could get away with and not collapse in the middle of petit allegro.
It’s not that I can’t cook. In a pinch, I can make a decent stir-fry—the more flavorful descendent of my steamed-veggie-and- rice days—perfect for when my husband is out of town or down with a cold. I’m fine warming up leftovers or eating them out of their plastic containers straight from the fridge. My lunches often consist of wilting salad or cold, unsauced pasta with a splash of vinaigrette, or sometimes a half chicken breast from last night’s meal. My mother-in-law teases that I eat cold what most people wouldn’t eat warmed up. But it keeps me from fainting as I head back to my writing desk, and that’s all that I expect my food to do.
For my husband, however, cooking is a pleasure. He often comes home from work with a few choice ingredients, ready to have some fun. He rarely consults a recipe. He just gets something in his head and experiments, making it up as he goes along. Through the years of our married life, I remember gorgeous, monster king crab legs, some impressive winter chilis and soups, a delicious dish of Spanish rice and shrimp sparked with slivers of fresh red pepper alternating with avocado slices. And especially the poached salmon with peppercorns and herbs that he prepared to welcome me back from a long research trip, making coming home so delicious, I never wanted to leave again.
Once or twice every season, I take over the kitchen, using old family recipes I still keep in a metal index card box: matzoh balls from the cut-out orange Manischewitz package, or the hand-written charoset recipe my mother taught me when I was a pre-anorexic girl.
If I do confront the kitchen, I prefer baking, ideally for or with my kids. Popovers are my specialty, which I accidentally learned how to make bloom like giant mushrooms. (The secret, besides the right pan and the temperature of the milk, is cake flour.) And I’m pretty good at scones with fresh raspberries, and banana bread when the kitchen counter bunch has turned brown. Maybe it’s odd that the most indulgent aspect of cooking is what I do well. But from my dancing days, I learned to make every calorie count. And a gooey chocolate chip cookie straight from the oven was sometimes worth a little cheat, even back when I was the size of a twig.
The times when I conquer my kitchen anxiety are on holidays. Thanksgiving. Passover. Hanukkah and Christmas. (Yes, our family celebrates both.) There’s a narrative, a scene, a perfect moment to create, and usually a prescribed menu. Once or twice every season, I take over the kitchen, using old family recipes I still keep in a metal index card box: matzoh balls from the cut-out orange Manischewitz package, or the hand-written charoset recipe my mother taught me when I was a pre-anorexic girl. I have a 30-year-old Foley Food Mill and still make homemade applesauce every autumn after apple-picking. And our array of holiday cookies is the best on the block. We pack them up in tinfoil and ribbon and distribute them to friends.
I think context makes cooking tolerable for me. Maintenance cooking, that terrible, day-to-day chore, is a distraction from the other, more important things I do. As a child, I often wondered whether my mother enjoyed cooking. She was of the generation where it was her implicit duty, and though I don’t recall burned roasts or inedible stews, I don’t think she took all that much pleasure from it either. Sometimes I’m envious of friends whose food traditions and joy in cooking literally make me drool. But most of them could never do a quadruple pirouette on pointe, and I could. A long time ago.
Still, with my own family, I long to make powerful memories and pass on traditions that otherwise might go astray. In our uber-secular household, those few cultural anchors are our ties to the past, and if they are remembered fondly, they will continue. So, my most memorable contribution to the familial table is probably the way I prepare our gefilte fish at Passover. No, they’re not homemade. I can’t imagine going that far! But, for my goyishe husband and in honor of the pagan spirit of the fertile spring, I mix metaphors and add sliced baby carrot ears and a parsley tail, transforming our weird, cold fish patties into wholly unorthodox Easter rabbits.
Not surprisingly, back when I was starving, all I used to do was think about food. These days, I get so busy that I forget to eat. My husband and teenage sons know all too well my food craziness and recognize the symptoms when I skip meals. They also chide me when I still occasionally fret about my shape. “Mom, you’d look weird if you were that thin!” And I suppose I should believe them, because who’s looking at me anyway these days? But somewhere inside my head, I’m still that dancer with the nowhere-near-perfect, stick-thin, long-limbed shape. And when I get that way, my boys and husband plop me on the couch and feed me a healthy snack until I come back to my senses.
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