Lockdown has drained the joy from cooking. I was born to cook. My mother started teaching me how to properly bread chicken cutlets when I was a child, and why the best way to test red sauce was with the heel of a loaf of Italian bread.
I grew up in an apartment in Queens that rested above my grandfather’s butcher’s shop. As I got older, my parents took over a grocery store where they sold produce and prepared food that my mother made in the back room.
If you look at my Instagram account, it’s peppered with various, sometimes elaborate, meals I make for my family. A bolognese on a Sunday. A panzanella salad in the summer. Roasted cauliflower with whipped feta, or homemade aioli for dipping fresh vegetables and grilled fish. On Christmas Eve, a seven-course meal of crab legs, clams, and caviar: the Feast of the Seven Fishes. I even developed a small line of kitchen tools to raise money for an abortion fund.
It’s a lot easier to feel good about cooking when you don’t have to do it three meals per day, seven days a week.
Cooking is more than a hobby for me — it’s therapy. Being able to do something with my hands other than type, the meditative nature of chopping garlic — even the joy I get from people enjoying food that I cooked — it’s all restorative.
Or at least, it was. Quarantine has turned my once favorite thing in the world into drudgery. It turns out that it’s a lot easier to feel good about cooking when you don’t have to do it three meals per day, seven days a week. And preparing meals becomes a lot more fraught when any trip to the grocery store could give you a potentially deadly virus. Quarantine cooking is more about necessity than excess. Making complicated, showy meals right now is downright irresponsible. Instead, we’re cooking to just get through the day.
Spontaneity is no longer an option. Our meals have to be planned meticulously based on what we’ll be getting that week in our CSA and what we have in our pantry. There’s no running out to the store for more parmesan, or dropping by the farmer’s market to see what’s in season.
There are no more dinner parties, or family gatherings on Sundays; no more inviting my daughter’s new friends’ families over for brunch. There’s no taking a break to sit in our neighborhood café, eating Castelvetrano olives while watching people walk by.
I’m trying to focus on how good ingenuity can feel in the face of scarcity — I’m making meals I normally would never have tried before, piecing together random recipes so that no piece of food in our fridge ever goes wasted. Wilting kale gets creamed, softening carrots are grated into a carrot cake.
That we have food at all is a blessing, I know. You can’t feel too sorry for yourself when your fridge is stocked and your family is safe. I’m fortunate that my husband is a good cook, as well. He’s taken over breakfast duties, making scrambled eggs for our daughter and — on days when I’m sad — pancakes with white chocolate chips for me. (And thank goodness for having a nine-year-old, mature enough to occasionally make her own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.)
Yet I can’t help but miss cooking like I used to know it. I want to not worry about rationing garlic because the next grocery run won’t be for another week. I want to come up with a showy, difficult meal on the fly and spend hours cooking. I want to never see a can of beans again.
This pandemic has taken so many things from us — most of them a lot worse than the joy of cooking. But I think of it the same way I do the empty streets of New York, my daughter’s loneliness over not seeing friends, or the strange and sad exercise of buying face masks for toddlers: None of these things will kill us (in fact, they’re keeping us safe) but they do signal a dramatic shift in life as we know it. And that’s something worth grieving.