How Not to Cook
You could trace my family’s heritage of eating disorders all the way back, like an unbroken vine. When my mother was a teenager, she kept a notebook meticulously recording every calorie she ate each day. Before her, my grandmother binged on bread and margarine after work, then told everyone that she was throwing up because of migraines. At the bottom of the tree lies my little sister, who tells me about “fear foods” like hot chocolate and pizza, who used to eat 1,300 calories a day, who hasn’t had a regular period in years. Grandmothers, mothers, daughters, starving all the way down.
Except for me.
As a teenager, I felt suffocated by the feeling that I had escaped a family curse on the slimmest technicality. Unlike my mother and sister, I never counted calories. Sure, I had my moments of dysphoric self-hatred in the bathroom mirror, and I took a perverse sense of pride in those days when I forgot to eat lunch — in other words, I was a teenage girl. But most of the time, I didn’t think about food at all. And as I grew older, stumbling through the minefield of female adolescence, I realized I had to fight to protect that precious, hard-won reprieve. When my sister eyed my plate and asked my mother how many calories I was eating, I lashed out like a cornered animal. “Keep your disease off me,” I said, terrified, as though her disorder could infect me if I let it get too close. The deadly allure of getting smaller was always lurking — at the dinner table, on TV, in photos of the female singers I idolized.
My mom did her best to shield us from this pressure, to save my sister and me from the pitfalls of her own childhood. She unfailingly pointed out examples of unrealistic, Photoshopped or bone-thin models in fashion magazines. She reassured us that fat was normal and healthy, told us that she was proud of her own “chubby” thighs.
And there was always plenty of food on the table. Believe it or not, despite — or maybe because of — her long history with scales and crash diets, cooking is my mother’s calling. When I was a kid, she started building her own food blog; over a decade later, it’s her flourishing full-time job. Even on days when she only ate a bowl of yogurt for dinner, my mom served the rest of us Korean beef, or honey-roasted brussels sprouts, or overflowing pulled pork sandwiches. As long as I didn’t have to make it myself, I could keep food at the periphery of my thoughts, at a safe and comfortable distance.
***
You’d think having a parent who cooks for a living would make me an above-average chef myself, but you would be dead wrong. Cooking was always so clearly my mom’s domain; I never felt the need to do it myself.
Until, of course, the pandemic. In the summer of 2020, I got permission to live on campus (flying back home to California felt like an unnecessary risk), alone in a DeWolfe suite meant for four people. For twenty years, I had subsisted entirely off my parents’ cooking or the convenience of an unlimited dining plan. I dropped my boxes at the entrance to my new room, walked into the empty kitchen, and realized I had no idea how to preheat an oven.
My mom could not have been more thrilled. She texted me a list of basic pantry ingredients I should buy before I did anything else, sent me an industrial kitchen’s worth of cooking utensils and supplies, and mailed me a copy of America’s Test Kitchen’s Cooking for Two.
That summer, I embarked on a new project: learn to cook; learn to function on my own. At first, I had to call my mom roughly three times per meal, whenever I encountered a problem or question: “How long do I heat the oil? Can I substitute white vinegar? Does this look done to you?”. Every effort to make dinner took me at least two hours, without fail, so I made a habit of eating half a box’s worth of pasta at 10 p.m., alone in my apartment. There had to be 50 other students in the building with me, but I hardly ever saw or heard a soul on the way up to my anonymous, hotel-esque room.
When summer melted into fall, I moved into a dark and vaguely depressing Somerville flat with two of my friends, where we would spend nine months play-acting at adulthood. As the months rolled by, I accelerated my efforts to fall in love with cooking. I splurged on a New York Times Cooking subscription and bought every ridiculous ingredient their recipes called for. I wandered the grocery store aisles aimlessly, waiting for inspiration.
I had a full-time job that I felt totally unqualified for. I hadn’t seen my family in eight months, and every time it seemed marginally safer to buy a plane ticket to California, another Covid wave snuffed out the plans. I was in a relationship with someone who made me feel microscopically small and cosmically unloved. But if I kept hauling home a bag of miscellaneous produce every week, if I kept laboring over Moroccan baked fish and spiced chickpea stew, then maybe I was growing. Maybe I was clawing back control.
In September, I couldn’t celebrate the Jewish new year with my parents. Desperate to believe in new beginnings anyway, I made my mom’s honey cake recipe. Although I tried to follow the instructions to a T, the batter consistency was all wrong; far from the moist, rich cake I remembered from childhood, mine turned out dense and dry. When it got colder, my roommates and I made weekly pilgrimages to Star Market, and I learned to make shakshuka — one of the few Israeli foods my mother ever cooked, and definitely the only one I wouldn’t screw up. A few nights a week, I biked over to my boyfriend’s house and tried to paper over our growing distance by cooking kimchi fried rice together or — in a day-long fit of true desperation — baking him a coconut cream pie. When we sat down to eat what we’d made, he would pause to imitate my chewing — mouth open, loud, obnoxious and crude, a little ritual that never failed to shrink my appetite.
Despite my best efforts, I dreaded cooking every day. I couldn’t seem to develop the right instincts; everything I made was just a little too salty, too dry, too heavy on the sauce. But I kept pushing, in part because I needed to be competent at something. A failure to feed myself would be the nail in the coffin of my gap year self-improvement dreams, definitive proof that my life was careening off the rails. Here was the ultimate test of my independence, my freedom from disorder: If my mother and sister’s vision of control was an empty stomach, mine was an unrelenting commitment to making better food.
***
In December, my parents caved and bought me a plane ticket home. For a month, I indulged in the pure luxury of sitting down twice a day for a meal cooked by someone else. Cocooned by the warmth of family meals and temporarily freed from the burden of managing my own life, I felt myself exhale for the first time since September.
When I flew back to Boston in January, the icy wind and darkness felt unusually cruel after a month in California, my loneliness sharper and more inescapable, my shortcomings overwhelming. All around me, it seemed like people were thriving despite the circumstances: bagging fancy summer jobs, learning new quarantine hobbies, reconnecting with family. Meanwhile, I was plagued by the constant sense that I was barely holding it together. Even cooking a homemade meal every night — the least I could do — began to feel impossible. Prepping ingredients took forever. I ran out of ideas for new recipes and let my groceries expire by the bagful. I ordered takeout three nights a week. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how creative I got, I couldn’t stop hating cooking.
***
In March, just as Cambridge began to thaw and those first misleadingly sunny days returned, the disaster I’d been trying to stave off for a year finally happened: my boyfriend broke up with me. When he broke the news, I was in the middle of cooking shakshuka for dinner. Every 10 minutes, the kitchen timer interrupted our parting conversation. “Tell me what I need to change about myself. I’ll do anything.” Stir in cumin and paprika. “I don’t think we can fix this.” Pour in the tomatoes; let it simmer. I’d made him banana bread the day before, one last attempt to show him my devotion by subjecting myself to baking. In the days that followed, when I couldn’t eat for the first time in my life, my roommates finished it.
For those next few agonizing weeks, I gave into the allure of starvation, of getting smaller. In a haze of what I now understand as grief, sustaining my body became a dreaded chore, an unmanageable task, an afterthought. I drank Soylent just to force down the necessary nutrients, because cooking was totally out of the question. I shrank.
But summer came anyway. I relearned how to care for myself and rediscovered my hunger, the sheer joy I could absorb from a slice of chocolate cake or a microwaved bowl of mac and cheese. I hardly cooked that summer, but when I did, I nailed it: “Sheet-Pan Chicken With Potatoes, Arugula, and Garlic Yogurt,” “Pasta with Burst Cherry Tomatoes,” things that looked good enough to proudly feature on my Instagram story. And I ate like hell.
When my relationship collapsed, so did any remaining illusion that I could tightly control my life, or that I would fall apart if I couldn’t. Perfecting my sheet-pan dinners wouldn’t save me from unpredictability, or failure, or disappointment. And when I finally stepped away from my single-minded, self-defeating cooking mission, I didn’t lose meaning or direction. If anything, I suddenly found moments of joy and pride in the kitchen that had once been buried beneath my anxiety and expectations.
I’d always thought that by becoming a talented chef during my gap year, I could produce tangible evidence of my personal development. I wanted a trophy to bring back with me to campus, proof that I hadn’t wasted my leave of absence, a sign of my newfound maturity and strength. Here’s the thing about growing, though: you usually can’t feel it happening. I never noticed, but every time I led a meeting or started a new project at my grown-up job, every time I convinced our landlord to fix a broken refrigerator or install a lock, every time I said “it hurts me when you treat me like this”— I grew an inch.
These days, I still struggle to eat in public. Halfway through a sandwich in the Smith Center, I’m suddenly paralyzed with self-consciousness, hearing the sound of my chewing like an echo in a dead-silent cave. On first dates, I prefer drinks to dinner. It’s hard to be witty and personable while you’re calculating the cleanest, least obtrusive way to eat a bowl of pasta.
But I’m still discovering my own growth, all the ways I’m different and more resilient than before. It shows up in small, surprising ways. When I attend an exercise class or go for a bike ride on my own. When I play guitar for my friends, even though I’m embarrassed. When I trust myself to do a hard job well.
In the fall, I moved back into Currier House with my blockmates after a year and a half apart. We really won the lottery with housing this year: our suite has its own fully-equipped kitchen. I haven’t cooked in it once.
— Magazine writer Tamar Sarig can be reached at tamar.sarig@thecrimson.com.