On Gentle Food

Quiet Cooking for Noisy Times [RECIPES]

Shelling our peas. Quietly.

Over the last three days, my Apple watch has, for the first time in five years, alerted me to the fact that the noise level where I was was in the danger zone. On four occasions, it was at 95 decibels, which is equivalent to:

• being 50 feet from a jackhammer

• being 200 feet from a subway

One of those times, I was drying my hands in the cemetery office bathroom after visiting my father’s grave to trim a yew shrub that had gotten straggly. Another time, I was walking around Target. Another time, I was standing online at the grocery store. The last time, I was talking to my mother while driving.

None of those times felt remotely loud (except when I was talking to my mother) which means that I am likely used to the noise; I have gotten acclimated to it.

I was raised just outside of New York City, with the Long Island Railroad running right behind the building across the courtyard from mine, where my grandmother lived. When it blew past, my building shook. Three blocks away, the IRT subway line ran underfoot from east to west into Manhattan a few miles away, and walking over the grates along Queens Boulevard, there would be a gush of warm air as the N train rumbled by beneath my feet. If I was with someone, we couldn’t hear ourselves talk to each other. Inside our apartment, the noise level was deafening in its rage and its silence; enmity had its own seat at our dinner table, and I swore that when I left home and eventually met someone I loved and settled down with them, I would live quietly by design, and I mostly do.

But growing up in noise was how I used to live, and I never thought about it too much until I began to question what it means to be submerged in it as one might be submerged in deep, dark water, and what it does to one’s nervous system and one’s breathing.

My need for quiet — or at least less noise — will, without question, be threatened in the coming months; it already has been. The violent noise that will become a part of our day-to-day will quickly infiltrate every part of our lives, and no one will be safe from it. Trying to avoid it will be like stuffing a live octopus into a pillowcase; it’s going to touch every one of us, and just when we think we have it under control — we turn off the news, we limit our exposure to trauma triggers, we choose our sources wisely, we take breaks from social media, we do things that will quiet our bodies like immerse ourselves in salt water or practice yoga or take particular care with what we eat — it will insinuate itself, again.

My quiet kitchen.

Over the weekend, when Susan and I went to Long Island to tend my father’s grave, we passed — in the cemetery — a man pulling a red wagon filled with impatiens; it was only when we got closer to him that we saw he was open-carrying a Glock on his hip. Imagine: a man goes shopping for small, delicate flowers to leave when he pays respect to someone he loved. He chooses these over those, and assembles a tray of lovely mixed colors. He drives them over to the cemetery, parks, and pulls them along on a child’s red wagon down the long rows until he gets to the gravesite. Maybe he lets them know he’s there, and he leaves a small pebble on top of their stone. Maybe he weeps. Maybe he pulls a handkerchief from his back pocket, reaching around the wide pistol handle jutting into his bottom right rib as he bends down.

Why was he open-carrying in a place of such solemnity and sorrow. What threat could he possibly feel.

More noise.

The need for quiet extends to the kitchen …. My instinct at times like this — compounded by the summer season — is also to cook slowly and with as little dramatics as possible.

Roasted asparagus + olive oil fried duck egg + pecorino + red pepper flakes

Trying to escape the noise of the coming months will not be easy. We don’t live near the sea (yet) so soaking in calming and curative saltwater will not be an option. Neither will be turning off the computer: I write for a living. Neither will be putting down the phone: I have an elderly mother whose aide has to stay in touch with me. One of the things that has helped me in the past is to bury myself in the words of others, and better still if they’re quiet, and take me somewhere I’ve never been: currently, I’m doing re-reads of my dear friend Katherine May’s books, Enchantment, Wintering, and The Electricity of Every Living Thing, which are wise and deeply anchoring, and continue to rescue me. It was Katherine who introduced me to the work of Raynor Winn, whose book The Salt Path, is never far out of reach. I’ve just finished Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (again), most of which takes place on the northern Orkney Island of Papay. (There’s no rhyme or reason to the fact that all of these authors are British.) I’ve picked up WS Merwin, Margaret Renkl, Rob Macfarlane, Annie Dillard, John O’Donohue, Marie Howe, Doris Grumbach, and Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, which I haven’t read in a few years: they are sitting in a stack right next to me as I write this.

On my nightstand.

The need for quiet extends to my kitchen.

We replaced the rattling tea kettle with an electric one that brings water to a boil in less than a minute. We stopped using the plastic cutting boards that destroyed the blades on our carbon steel knives, and have gone back to using wood both for its beauty and its safety (no plastic in the food), and its evidence of time and use; several of our wooden boards were inherited from Susan’s Aunt Millie. My instinct at times like this — compounded by the season — is also to cook slowly and with as little dramatics as possible. No macho BAM, no forced eye-brow incinerating grill conflagrations, far less meat and angry pyrotechnics. Instead, summer vegetables are cooked quietly and often slowly to a point where they are just short of falling apart, the way I read about in Tamar Adler’s wonderful An Everlasting Meal. Sometimes, vegetables and the cheeses and herbs that grow with them — rosemary and Pecorino, tomatoes and thyme, Striato d’Italia and its blossoms and some grated Teleme — are folded into a rough pastry case, as in Heidi Swanson’s rustic tomato tart, which we make again and again in season. And sometimes, they’re just cooked gently until they begin to sweat and release their juices, and are eaten at room temperature with some warm pita and a little Moroccan zaalouk on the side, or drizzled with some very good olive oil. A few years ago, my friend and one of the greatest chefs and food minds I know, Sara Jenkins, plunked down a plate of soft-cooked eggplant and tomato in front of me and Susan while we were sitting at the dining bar in her Rockport, Maine restaurant, Nina June; it was exactly what it said it was — soft-cooked eggplant and tomato, cooked slowly and then baked — and remains one of the most extraordinary dishes I’ve ever eaten, anywhere.