Cookbooks to Heal a Broken Heart
Emma Vuletic |
About once a year when I’m feeling particularly blue, usually around an icy English March, I take to bed with a copy of MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me. I’ll search for the passage where Fisher quietly thrills in eating alone on a New York-bound cruise ship as nearby couples look on — alarmed that a woman dare enjoy her own company and appetite.
Or I delve into Nigel Slater’s memoir Toast — whilst eating toast and drinking tea, naturally.
Or I grab my well-thumbed copy of Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and A Glass of Wine and think of my ex-mother in law, a rigorous cook whose kitchen shelves were lined with books celebrating food.
After the spectacular breakup of my marriage it was my mother in law’s kitchen that I often missed. In her domestic temple, at that beaten-up oak table where the children once marked their names, a series of daily rituals took place – those moments that ferment our lives in soulful meaning. Peeling the potatoes; washing the lettuce; feeding the scraps to the chickens; making and drinking Turkish coffee; thumbing through the multitudes of cookbooks and chef’s memoirs that she had collected through the years.
It would take me years to address the emotional impact of losing my marriage, but grieving for my ex mother-in-law’s kitchen was a sideways sort of shuffle into healing my broken heart. MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, Jeffery Steingarten and Ruth Reichl kept me company on those long, hollow days in my lonesome apartment. They all had complicated stories — family, debt, loss, the aspic of heartbreak and disappointment that pickled their beautiful, messy lives.
And yet they got up each day and they cooked… and therefore so could I. I decide that my itinerary — departing out of Heartbreak and arriving some place more joyful — was going to involve reading with a glass of wine each night at the kitchen table.
Food can be transcendent. Napa Valley stalwart Meadwood’s nine course tasting menu (that I had revised on a press trip) was so magical that it brought me to actual tears. Once a meal is done, however, your taste buds struggle to search for a memory of a taste. You’re more inclined to remember the story surrounding the meal — Who was there. Where you sat. How gracious the service was — than the meal itself.
I was there with MFK Fisher on the boat back from France as she ordered her second glass of Beaujolais, much to her fellow diner’s consternation. I was there when Julia Child first laid eyes on the land that would become her farm house. All of this gave me hope and inspired me to live a brighter, tastier life.
