the broken-heart diet, REDUX

On Cooking When You're STILL Too Enraged to Eat

The empty bowl of doom.

A little while back, I wrote a piece about what it means to sustain oneself in times of trouble.

Most of us then didn’t have a clear sense of where we’d be now, nor did we know how we might respond to the unthinkable. Here we are, over two months later, and I, for one, am struggling with my own response to what we are facing, and the now-chronic anxiety that it’s engendered in so many of us. I turned back to this piece, which had been paywalled, to see exactly how I was thinking about sustaining myself. As I said, unlike many people, the first thing that goes for me when anxiety hits is my appetite; I can wake up and then remember at 9 pm that I haven’t eaten a thing. I always manage to forget that with no food comes the inevitable low blood sugar that makes me shake as much as abject fear does.

---

We know this: that the act of cooking is both metaphysically and physically sustaining.

We know that food is a metaphor for peace, for history, family, comfort, stability, instability, nurturing. At its most fundamental, it’s fuel. The entire process —- the shopping or harvesting, chopping, boiling, peeling, poaching —- can be meditational, or it can be utterly discombobulating. It can be focusing and calming, or it can be dangerous. Let your attention wander while you have a sharp knife in your hand, and you have a sharp knife in your hand. For me, the danger part is irrelevant, because when I am undone —- distracted, furious —- I have zero interest in food. Not cooking it; not eating it; not feeding it to anyone else.

I’ve completely lost my appetite over these recent weeks (apart from the mammoth handfuls of popcorn I’ve mindlessly jammed into my mouth while walking through the kitchen to get to the other side of the house, where my wife works). This is a thing with me: when I am upset, I don’t eat. When the bottom is pulled out from under me, I can’t, and don’t, and won’t sustain myself. When I’m so unmoored that I feel like I’m living on one of those amusement park rides that spins forward and forward and then backward and then tilts as centrifugal force plasters everyone to its insides while the floor literally drops out until the riders are physically ill: I don’t want to look at food. When my father dropped me off at college for the start of my freshman year at Boston University, I did the opposite of gain the Freshman 15: I lost so much weight during my first month at school that my jeans hung off me like a burlap sack. I hadn’t even noticed that I wasn’t eating until my dormitory neighbor and closest friend, concerned that I might be unwell when I stopped having the energy to get out of bed in the morning, dragged me to meals with her, three times a day.

from The Gashlycrumb Tinies, by Edward Gorey

---

Over the years, I have become well-acquainted with the acronym HALT. My hands shake when I’m HUNGRY or ANGRY or LONELY or TIRED. I try and identify HALT long before it happens, and although H is for HUNGRY, HALT hunger doesn’t actually hit me as hunger, per se, but as a sort of dizzying lightheadedness associated with anxiety, fear, fury, or the kind of quiet panic that is the precursor to fight/flight/freeze. It’s not a stomach-rumbling hungry, but an existential one, and if you give it a little push —- the merest nudge —- it lists over into full-bore self-loathing, and this is when I stop cooking and eating. Because, if I am as awful as I think I am, as everyone else tells me I am, as undeserving of the rights that are due me as a taxpaying citizen (of a modern democracy that my father and uncle fought against the Nazis for) are under siege, why bother to care for myself. I mean, really. What’s the point?

My paternal grandmother, Bertha Altman, on the left, at the 1939 World’s Fair with my aunt and grandfather

My paternal grandmother —- an elfin woman/badass Brooklyn cardshark to whom I was not particularly close after my mother helpfully turned her into a pariah (the story is in Poor Man’s Feast-the-book, and in Motherland) — used to call me when I wasn’t feeling well and say Can you take sustenance? It always struck me as an odd thing to ask —- it had such an antiquated feel to it.

Can you take sustenance? Can you accept that which will sustain you? Will you accept it when the world says you are undeserving?

So all these years later, when the bottom drops out and I’m shaking with rage, or fear, or withering sadness, or all of the above, I ask myself this question while in the throes of HALT and the self-loathing it brings about in me. Can I accept sustenance? And if I can, what will it be?

Assuming I have enough energy to cook at all, I learned the hard way: nothing fancy, nothing complicated, nothing acidic, nothing sweet. Essentially, I am describing what Elizabeth David would have called nursery food, and that’s fine. Diets can wait; clean eating is a wonderful idea, but not necessarily in moments like this. When I can’t get out of bed, I don’t crave a green juice with a shot of wheatgrass (if you do, more power to you). A few days ago I was catapulted out of bed by explosive anxiety, and attempted to make myself a fruit smoothie; I nearly blew out the motor on my Bullet, which started to smoke. So I made an egg instead. (Yes, we still have eggs in these parts and they are not $1000 a dozen.)

Here is my list of what to cook on my Broken-Heart Diet, in no particular order, and based on the contents of my pantry:

1- A baked potato + butter + black pepper + salt. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Poke a large russet potato a few times with a fork. Throw it into the oven, on the middle rack. Let it bake for about 45 minutes, until the skin shatters when you give it a squeeze. Slice it in half (but not through) lengthwise and widthwise and press the ends of the potato toward the middle, so it opens up; add the butter and black pepper. (If you have a countertop convection oven, all the better.)

2 - Buttered toast. Don’t get fancy. Cinnamon raisin, which I normally hate, is good here, provided the butter is salted.

3- Pastina + butter + black pepper + Parmigiana. The first time my northern Italian godmother made this for me, I actually cried. You know when a little kid is so sleepy that they start to cry from relief when you put them down for a nap? That’s what happened to me, only with pastina. Cook the pastina, drain it, toss it with butter, and add the black pepper and Parmigiana. Take to your bed.

4- An egg fried in toasted sesame oil + rice wine vinegar + cooked rice noodles + tamari + scallions. Get out a small stick-proof pan and put it over medium heat. Glaze it with a dribble of toasted sesame oil. Carefully break in the egg, and let it cook for however long you’d like (I like medium soft). When the edges begin to brown, drizzle in the smallest amount of rice wine vinegar. Slide the egg out onto a single serving of cooked rice noodles, add the tamari and the scallions (and if you’re feeling energetic, some toasted sesame seeds).

5- White rice + butter + American cheese + black pepper: Cook a cup of white rice however you want to. My method: put it in a sieve, run cold water through it until the water is clear, put it in a small saucepan, and add enough water to come up to the first knuckle of your index finger. (Naomi Duguid taught me this trick.) Bring it to a boil, reduce it down to a low simmer, cover it, and let it cook for 15-20 minutes, or whatever the instructions tell you to do. Take it off the heat, leave the cover on, and let it stand another 8 minutes. Remove the lid, add a tablespoon of unsalted butter and two (sometimes three) slices of American cheese (preferably white; don’t judge me), cover the pan for another 5 minutes until the cheese is mostly melted, blend it in with a fork, add black pepper. If you want to get fancy, add chopped parsley. The end.

6- Poached chicken breast + sticky rice + chile crisp + scallions: poach some skinless, boneless chicken breasts (they’re good for this purpose), make your sticky rice according to these directions, slice the chicken width-wise, artfully fan it out over the rice (which you’ve put in a small bowl that you can clutch), top with chile crisp (however much you want of it), and chopped scallions.

7- Heidi Swanson’s Chana Masala, which is my absolute favorite. I don’t understand why, but Indian spices calm my constitution (bad choice of words) like nothing else. I once had an Iranian physician tell me it probably had to do with the fact that turmeric is usually given to colicky babies.

8 - A simple cup of miso soup: years ago, I worked in a part of Manhattan populated by Japanese shops and a small Japanese grocery store. Every morning when I walked the two blocks from Grand Central Station, I’d pop into the grocery store, walk straight to the back and say hello to the lovely woman standing behind the counter, who had just made a vat of miso soup that could have fed the Upper East Side. She had no English and I have no Japanese, but she would smile broadly and hand over a styrofoam cup of extraordinary miso soup that had been cooked together with wakame and small cubes of silken tofu. I ate this for breakfast every day for two years, and I have no idea why I still don’t.

9 - A small bowl of buttered millet grits: Back around 2015, our friend Deborah Madison came to stay overnight on her way up to an event in Massachusetts. She examined the contents of our kitchen pantry (because this is what chefs do), unearthed a bag of Bob’s Red Mill Millet Grits that I’d bought on a whim, and said Give me a saucepan and some butter. So I gave her a saucepan and some butter, and she cooked it the way you’d cook polenta and then dumped into it the sweet butter and a pinch of salt. The three of us stood in the kitchen, eating it straight out of the pot. It reminded me of the farina of my childhood, and it was very, very good.

10- A grilled cheese sandwich, which has to be made with bland, unfancy cheese on white bread: one famous chef I know butters the inside of the bread, but then spreads mayonnaise on the outside — mayo is made by emulsifying fat, egg, and acid — the result of which is, sadly, excellent.

There is a wonderful book devoted to cooking for those who are undone (including oneself), and it ranks as one of my all-time favorite cookbooks to read, let alone cook from. I am declaring Janet Reich Elsbach’s Extra Helping a must-have, until normalcy begins to reveal itself (and even after). I’m not sure when that will be.

In the meantime, please take care of yourself, and ask yourself the question: Can you take sustenance?