When my husband left me, I headed for the kitchen
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Loading... - Patrik Krenn
- 23 Jun 2022
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The day after my husband first said he didn’t love me any more, I made a Nigella recipe for parmesan french toast: big wodges of white bread soaked in egg with parmesan, dijon mustard and Worcestershire sauce, fried in butter to a deep golden brown. It reminded me of the “eggy bread” my mother would make when I was a child. The week after that, having told our children their dad was leaving, I made meatballs from the Falastin cookbook by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley. It’s fiddly but worth it. Each meatball is sandwiched between slices of roasted aubergine and tomato, with a rich tomato sauce on top followed by torn basil leaves after it comes out of the oven. I served the meatballs with a big pot of coarse bulgur wheat cooked with bay leaves, which is one of my carbs of choice when I am feeling fragile. I’ve been eating a lot of bulgur lately.
People talk about “comfort food” as if it were a kind of trivial indulgence. But this is missing the point. True comfort food isn’t sticky toffee pudding on a cosy night in, or sausages and mash on a crisp cold night. It’s the deeply personal flavours and textures you turn to when life has punched you in the gut. Comfort food should really be called trauma food. It’s what you cook and eat to remind you you’re alive when you are not entirely sure this is true. At least, this is how it has been for me.
When you feel you are falling apart, cooking something familiar can remind you of your own competence. I have cooked my way through many bleak afternoons, but it was only cooking for months in a state of heartbreak during the pandemic that taught me just how sanity-giving it could be. No matter how miserable I had been the night before, or how much my appetite had faded, I needed to get up and make breakfast for my son. The ritual of cracking eggs was grounding. My whole body often felt shaky but the act of flipping his pancake proved to me that my hands were steadier than I thought.
With hindsight, there were warning signs. Then again, when you have been together for 26 years and have three children, it’s hard to tell the difference between a warning sign and the normal imperfections of middle-aged coexistence. I thought we were OK. The week before he left, he walked into the garden and said, “Your hair looks so beautiful in the light.” It was June 2020, just as the first lockdown was easing, and we had been eating a lot of asparagus: his favourite vegetable. Until the week he left, every text he sent me ended with five kisses. After he left, it went down to two. Then in September he dropped off a letter coming clean about the woman he had fallen in love with and all the kisses stopped, like a candle that sputters before it goes out. Read More...
