What She Ate

Cooking, eating, feeding others, resisting or ignoring food—it all runs deep, so deep that we may not even notice the way it helps to define us. Food constitutes a natural vantage point on the history of the personal.

Food, after all, happens every day; it’s intimately associated with all our appetites and thoroughly entangled with the myriad social and economic conditions that press upon a life. Whether or not we spend time in a kitchen, whether or not we even care what’s on the plate, we have a relationship with food that’s launched when we’re born and lasts until we die

What rescued me, and possibly us, was the fact that we had no refrigerator. Every day I had to restock our supply of butter, milk, and fresh produce, which meant that every day I had to go to the bazaar. These excursions into unmediated India could be nerve-racking—I had to speak Hindi in the bazaar, as well as dodge the cows and monkeys—but open-air food markets are powerful places. They can break down your resistance like a smile and a wave from a baby. The arrays of fresh produce were modest in this one, for it was a small bazaar, and its practicality appealed to me. No towering displays, just a scattering of the very local fruits and vegetables brought in that morning. The women selling produce sat alongside their eggplants and tomatoes and cauliflowers, listening impassively as I stumbled through my request, and always tossed a big bright chili into the bag as a lagniappe. The spices were the most aromatic I had ever used, the yogurt tasted better than any I had ever eaten, and over time this delicious bounty edged its way into my imagination. I stopped making the pallid soups and salads that had become my tormented specialty and started to cook real food.

Cautiously, I made a vegetable curry; even more cautiously, a pot of chickpeas for which I had to soak the dried beans—something I thought happened only in communes in Vermont, but there I was doing it. And perfectly! I was elated by my success. The recipes came from the Time-Life Cooking of India, which I had packed in a rare moment of optimism, and Time-Life was very good at writing recipes that worked. That’s what I wanted, something that worked—not necessarily authentic, just something that didn’t pick too many fights with India. I never tried the tricky ones, not the homemade cheese or the deep-fried breads or the syrupy, pretzel-shaped sweets called jalebis. I didn’t want to fail. It was as if India, marriage, and I were wobbling into the future on a unicycle, and I had no wish to threaten our precarious sense of balance.