Cooking Alone

There is a gift I give to myself when I feed someone.

This is the great secret of cooks: They show exceptional effort in preparing food for others, while doing as little as possible when it comes to feeding themselves. In this way, a cook will never make their best food when eating alone.

When I am preparing food for myself, I will put next-to-no effort into the process—cobbling something together out of whatever is handy. The only options I will explore are on the path of least resistance.

Cooking alone is more marked by the absence of another than by the quality of the food. It is a function of life drained of celebration. Even if I cooked the best food I’ve eaten in weeks, I will start cleaning before I am hardly done chewing and set about instantly getting over the shabby accomplishment that went unappreciated. Having to clean the pots and pans after you’ve eaten the food you made only for yourself is the final puff of smoke signaling a lonely defeat.

When there is someone else to share the meal with, it allows me to try to raise my game to try to bring us a shared joy.

For new guests, I get to marry an estimation of their taste and palate with my own technique to try to create something that will resonate for us together. It is like making a portrait for them based on who I think they are and what I would want to contribute to their life. For returning friends and dear ones, when I cook it is an opportunity to show a level-up in my skills from the last time we ate together. To that end, I am always looking for ways to refine and improve dishes that are already familiar, and also to expand my repertoire.

Maybe there is performance to it. A flex. But the benefit is at least more physically nourishing than singing for someone or having them watch you skateboard.

When my wife and our daughter would go to visit family in the Bay without me, it would be a common refrain for me to prepare a pot of chili and then let it sustain me for the duration of their trip— “Chili Week.”

Chili is such a stereotypical Dad dish, that I was evoking my inner Homer Simpson and reveling in a regressive state of simple taste and low effort. A reliable bowl of slop I could take some modest pride in the relatively light effort I’d spent making, and then reheat and eat again and again until it was a burden on my guts and palate.

Recently my lady went away and I was faced again with the dilemma of what to eat while I was alone. Since we lost our daughter, the Simpsons has been something that hurts in her absence and I avoid rekindling my inner Homer. A pot of chili on the stove would serve to remind me of the ways I miss being a dad. But how would I feed myself while I was alone in the house?

I managed to get through some leftovers for most of the time she was gone, but towards the end of the week I was left with hardly anything in the fridge other than some bacon and eggs. There was a box of dry pasta in the cupboard and we had some good aged Parmigiano-Reggiano in the fridge. Though these are not the orthodox ingredients necessary to make a Carbonara, I realized that I could make a hack-version of the dish that would suffice.

But to cook Carbonara—even a makeshift version—would bring me to a different dilemma. You see, this was one of my daughter’s absolute favorite foods, and to prepare it is to prepare it for her, though there is no physical form that I can see her enjoying it. I decided to forge ahead and make it, in spite of my sentimentality and lack of proper ingredients.

My Carbonara recipe has evolved a lot over the years. Good dishes are things that one can continue to refine and tweak and adjust according to what is available. There is an uptightness that people get about authenticity in Italian food, and for the most part I agree. In most of the United States there is a strange compulsion to pour a bunch of cream on pastas and turn ‘Carbonara’ into some kind of an alfredo-ized heart-attack on a plate. Or to add frozen Birdseye™ peas or God only knows what else.

To clarify, a proper Carbonara ideally should have only a few particular ingredients: Guanciale (smoked pork jowl), Pecorino Romano (sheep’s milk cheese), eggs, black pepper and pasta. The beauty in cooking carbonara is in the restrictions of the ingredients. That means there is very little room to botch any steps of the preparation, lest the end product be compromised and instantly disappointing to someone who’s had a legit version. The materials are not ubiquitous in the US, but they can be sourced with a little effort. The gap between getting those items and instead substituting bacon and Parmigiano (to say nothing of the supermarket ‘Parmesan’ cheese that is easier to find) is the distance between that authenticity and what passes for pasta from sea to shining sea.

While my products that day were not authentic, I hoped at least my technique could be.

I ground pepper into the clean, hot pan to release the flavors and oils from it for a minute, then set it aside.

I chopped the bacon into lardons and started to render the fat out in the pan as my water boiled on the next burner. Guanciale is a headier fat than bacon, and it becomes sticky as it cooks. The pieces latch together like cry-babies that cling to one another co-dependently. Counter-intuitively, it helps to keep adding small amounts of water to the pan to let the pieces cook separately to a crispy, satisfying texture and not just taste like gummy fat that is stiff in places.

I grate my cheese into a powdery dust. A lot of cheese. More than seems reasonable, but that is all going to emulsify eventually and the little hill of cheese should be hard to trace in the end. The pepper is added to that. Then, I beat a couple of eggs and mix them together with the cheese and pepper so it creates a thick yellow mixture resembling a paste. That goo gets set aside.

Once the bacon/guancialle is crisp, I remove it from the pan and discard a good amount of the grease, though not all of it. I will fry a bit of minced garlic with a slight amount of fresh olive oil, reintegrate the bacon/guanciale and then introduce the 90%-cooked pasta to sauté with some of the water it has been boiling in. Then I turn the heat off and keep stirring. As the temperature comes down, I will cautiously add the cheese and egg mixture, plus some pasta water and mix it in the pan, careful for it not to curdle and make a nasty scrambled eggs and noodle dish. I also add a little chopped parsley, though that is probably a Roman party foul.

late-stage carbonara

When she was alive, our daughter Io loved Carbonara. It appealed directly to her tastes. Breakfast. Bacon and eggs. Noodles. She would gobble a plate up enthusiastically and give me a satisfied grin, even for my versions that didn’t fully hit the mark. When I cook the dish now, it is a tribute to her and every step of the process reminds me of our times together. Any adjustments I make to the preparation are things I hope her spirit will note and appreciate. It is an apology to her for not being a better, kinder, more loving father.

Since she has gone, I redirect the sorrow of her loss into support for my partner. When my lady is gone I don’t have that channel of service and redemption. The food I eat without either of them is tasted but never fully enjoyed. Cooking alone creates a vacuum that reminds me of the purpose I’d had that has now gone missing. Raising our daughter gave my life an intention that it did not have before her and has not had since her death.

We have to eat to survive, and I continue to put effort into cooking to make that necessity as dignified as is possible. But someone is missing from the table, and until I rejoin my daughter, all my dishes are turned into offerings that I hope might still please her dear, loving spirit.