Learning to Cook

            As a child I made chocolate chip cookies with my mother, of course.  She said once that she could get three more cookies out of a dough than I could because I ate so much raw dough. But my mother only cooked by necessity – and did it well, feeding her large family meals both nutritious and basically good. She preferred painting to cooking, and the kitchen was not a scene of much mother-daughter collaboration.

            In college I lived in a dorm, where meals were provided and kitchens hidden, so I didn't have any incentive to learn to cook. When I lived in Aix-en-Provence for six months during my sophomore year, I boarded with a Swedish roommate in a family house where the kitchen was not ours to use. A Provençal cooking class was offered in Aix while I was there, but, to my eternal regret, I did not take advantage of that great opportunity. I wasn't interested in cooking at that time.

            That interest didn't blossom until I became a student in Cambridge, England, and shared a house with four other women students. I bought a cookbook called "Cooking in a Bedsitter" and started cooking in the single pot on the single cooking ring in my room. Soon enough, I ventured beyond the room into the shared kitchen.

            Then I was hooked. I bought more cookbooks and started making more elaborate dishes, but it wasn't my four housemates I cooked for nor our kitchen that emitted the enticing smells but my boyfriend, Peter, who benefitted from my new interest and the marvelous kitchen in his marvelous house that was the site of lavish dinner parties.

            Peter's house, which he shared with several other Cambridge students, all male, was a Victorian semi-detached in a narrow lane called Portugal Place. Francis Crick's house, identified with an inn sign of a double helix, was a few doors down. The entrance to Peter's house led into a large book-filled front room, off-limit to the renters, curious and intellectually avid students though they were. I remember the upstairs living room, with its rickety harpsichord, and the attic room, formerly an artist's studio, that Peter took as his bedroom, but I especially remember the basement kitchen and its dining room. It had a low roof that Peter regularly banged his head on, a circumstance more understandable when you know he was blind. I was too short to worry about banging my head, but I do remember that the kitchen was low-ceilinged and that the only natural light came from a below-street-level window. It was a large kitchen with a fabulous stove and included a dark dining room, only used when Peter and I threw our splendid dinner parties. It had a grand, heavy, Victorian table with matching ladder-back chairs of heavy dark wood. We set it with candles and ladened it with steaming platters of beautiful food.

            We didn't do it often, but I loved those parties, planning, cooking, and serving grand seven-course dinners for six or eight people, flinging myself into the study of cookbooks, learning to cook by cooking. Peter would buy a large array of bottles of champagne, from half-pints to huge magnums and jeroboams. I would make delicate hors d'oeuvres, meat dishes of elaborate preparation, irresistible desserts. The only specific dish I remember is some sort of pie, which I remember because it was my first effort at pie crust and Peter raved not about it but about the perfect pie crusts his aunt would make, which I thought an unfair comparison, since I had only just begun as a pie-baker.

            But nothing dampened my excitement at being able to serve such fabulous food to my friends. One course was hardly downed before I jumped up to prepare and serve the next. We ate and drank to repletion. We toasted the queen. We talked of literature and music, Bob Dylan and opera. At the end, we sprawled around the table with its food-stained plates and half-emptied platters, sipping port, Beethoven still playing on the stereo upstairs. When the guests finally left, I was exhausted but exhilarated. I had discovered the magic of cooking and serving good food, the spell that Babette knew, a new dimension to life as beautiful as the sex, also new, post-party in Peter's garret up four flights of stairs from the basement kitchen, still littered with the detritus of the day's cooking.