What To Cook When You’re Grieving
Over the past year, I’m sure we’ve all asked ourselves this question at least once. Here’s how I tried to sort it out.
Our baby, Fiona.
How are you supposed to eat when you’re grieving? This has been a question on my mind over the past week, as I’ve been working on another food project that takes up a lot of my time. Do I have any qualification to tell people how to express grief, especially in a year where any personal heartache is a drop in the collective ocean? I haven’t even been sure that food is a priority for others in moments of sadness and loss.
Not too long after I first asked myself the question, I found my personal answer. The first sign came in the form of a text I saw from my mother at two in the morning.
“Anyone awake? At the doggie ER with Fiona 😷😴."
Fiona was the tiny counterpart to my parent’s dog, Rex. She weighed eleven pounds. My mother called her “our forever puppy” or “daddy’s little girl,” because she loved my father most of all. My parents brought her home as a baby in April of 2016. She used to sleep splayed out over my father’s neck, but it wasn’t a burden because she was so small. She had been suffering from pneumonia for the past month, but had seemed to recover until last night. She had thrown up her dinner and started shaking uncontrollably, her breath shallow.
Nine hours later, I received the phone call at my restaurant prep job. Our family’s baby was gone due to sepsis.
That’s the funny thing about cooks— the show must go on. It’s not like a performance where you have to fake a smile for the audience, and there’s likely already sweat and tears going into your meal. I went to work an hour after receiving the phone call that my grandmother died in 2014. I don’t mean this as a bragging point. I think there’s something sick and masochistic about insisting that people keep moving when there’s a sudden irreparable hole in their life (and, trust me, some chefs do). Rather, I have in both these circumstances found it to be evidence of the incontrovertible truth that the world keeps turning, and what else are you supposed to do anyway? It’s also the only way I know how to move forward, to lose myself.
As it turns out, I also like to be soothed by my own tastes. Comfort and comforting [myself] often end up looking the same in my world. It’s my responsibility to cook a meal for the staff between services. Everyone else ended up eating my missing Fiona food, whether or not they knew it. The following scrawl is in cook language, not necessarily to be replicated as is, but to give a feel of the cadence and flow.
I started by making enough pie crust to fit a hotel pan, plus a third pan for the vegetarians in the house. I’ve been using a box grater for the butter recently. I find the chunks to be the right size, and the gluten doesn’t shrink so much when the crust is cooked. I rested the dough for an hour before rolling it out to roughly the size of a sheet pan, then I rested it again for at least another hour. I then started sweating my vegetables— I diced two red onions, two quarts worth of cut potatoes, a kabocha squash, and sliced a cup of garlic. I sweated all these out with about a stick and a half of butter, about two tablespoons each of white pepper and coriander, and some cayenne and salt to taste. It was only a few hours ago, but I can’t remember if I added the zest of a lemon. As the vegetables were getting soft, I threw in about a half a cup of flour and cooked it out a little bit until it was thoroughly coating the vegetables. Pro Tip: playing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” over and over again in the loudspeaker that is your brain will make the food taste better. I then added equal parts milk and leftover whey until the vegetables were covered, and put the heat on high while I diced about five pounds of chicken. Once the contents of the pot had come to a simmer, I took out enough vegetables for the vegetarian mini dish. I seasoned the chicken, and coated it with flour because I was worried the mixture was looking a little thin. I then turned off the heat, put the contents in the hotel pan, and covered each individual pie with the crust. I put steam slits in the top of each mass of dough, covered them with caraway, celery seeds, and fennel seeds, and cooked them both until they were golden brown. I rested them about ten minutes out of the oven before serving.
The crust was perfect— crispy, buttery, flaky. The sauce underneath it, however, was broken despite my best intentions. “That’s an apt metaphor,” I snorted scathingly to myself. I giggled hysterically; a few more tears followed. It may have been soupy, but it still also was exactly what I needed.
“That dinner was amazing!” an unknowing server exclaimed to me after. “Thanks so much! Your food is always the best— don’t tell anyone I say that though.”
It’s easy for my food to be the best there, because my job exists to support the full-time staff that already works tirelessly. I’m a part time worker who is there to unload extra burdens off their regular staff, a morale booster, so I can spend more time making everyone else more comfortable. Regardless of my honest assessment of my role, it’s exactly what I needed to hear.
It’s not supposed to be pretty (also an apt metaphor).
