Learning to Cook
Learning to cook, like so many of life’s great initiations, presents us with a series of tests. In the early sixties, still a teenager, I moved to New York City. First I shared a ninth-floor railroad apartment, essentially a long, narrow hallway, in a Westside tenement building with an ever-changing cast of roommates. At the far end of the front room was an efficiency kitchen. Technically, it fit the definition. This kitchen in miniature had the basics—sink, refrigerator, two-burner stove with a tiny oven, and one wall cabinet the size of a cereal box. Functionally, it was quite the opposite. Inefficient (as well as unsafe), I quickly realized this wasn’t a workable lab. Crammed in behind an eating bar, there was hardly room for one. The oven worked only sporadically, and lighting a burner always caused a certain panic, match-lit and flaring up as it did, we’d stumble over each other in the dim light to find the baking soda. It was dark as the stage pit, and ventilation was an issue. Too much use seemed like a bad idea.
That, and being at the peak of ballet student poverty, meant meals took the form of fast food—quick, easy, and most of all, cheap. If we cooked anything, it was fatty hamburger patties (grease hung in the air for days), ramen noodles, and cheese omelets. Otherwise we ate peanut butter spread between slices of Muenster, sandwich-like, and lots and lots of bad fad foods. Since my roommates showed little interest in food other than the obsessive high-carb, quick-energy remedy to hunger, I kept my culinary curiosity to myself, hungry for the day I would have a kitchen of my own where I could learn to cook, where no one would notice my kitchen cluelessness . . . [Read the full essay in Essay Pages]
Copyright © Jane Alynn
Published in The Natural Enquirer, February/March 2010
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