Simmering Anxieties

Being able to cook—wow—that caries high social status.

So my thoughts must have been whispering to me all throughout childhood, because that’s the idea I grew up with, although no adult ever tried to drill it into me. My mom watched cooking shows sometimes. Perhaps it came from that. Perhaps, even at a tender age I had an adumbration of admiration for self-sufficient housekeeping, of which cooking plays an important part.

In 2008, when I was a teenager and the world was having a meltdown, my mom went back to work. We now we had to manage alone things we had been used to managing under maternal supervision. This included meals. Breakfast had been an every-man-for-himself affair for a while by then, but now lunch and dinner frequently fell into the same category. And every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—unless Dad cooked for us or Mom got home early—here’s what I would have:

Two Eggo toaster waffles. Round and yellow as pirate doubloons and flavorful as communion wafers. I can only assume they were extruded into a mold in some assembly line somewhere upstream of Costco Wholesale, whence we acquired them. They could sit in the freezer until the moment you needed them; then pop them into the toaster and, if you were lucky, they might not even be soggy.

Spread on these waffles was a generous, substantial, frankly insane quantity of Kirkland Signature peanut butter. The leftover warmth from the toaster would make the peanut butter a little runny, and since there was so much slathered on there, it quickly spilled off the sides of the waffles, dripped over my hands, and left oil stains on the paper plates.

On top of that would be a modest drizzle of Hersey’s chocolate-flavored syrup. Like the other ingredients, available in bulk from Costco.

To wash all this down, a glass of pulpy orange juice.

That was it. No meat. No vegetables. Everything gleamed with the pristine indefinite shelf-life of a manufacturing plant. Yellow Styrofoam bedecked with concentrate of peanut and an industrial interpretation of what “chocolate” is. And orange juice.

Let me tell you, though, I was pleased as punch to be assembling these thrice daily monstrosities. I told everyone that I cooked for myself. I heard a statistic somewhere about how some dismally low percentage of Americans did that, and thought that I must be pretty exceptional and spectacular.

After some personal growth—both in terms of putting on a lot of weight, and in terms of maturity—I left behind the peanut butter waffle life (much to the joy of my parents, who I’d been fighting with me about that diet).

But my notion that being able to cook was—wow—pretty amazing lived on.

I next turned to eggs. From my mom, I learned how to prepare them fried, scrambled, and boiled. And, having obtained this knowledge, I once again became as proud as an eagle on the Fourth of July. Oh, the ways I’d go on about the virtues of cooking for yourself. “A lot of people don’t even know how to fry an egg.” In the college dining hall, I would take hard boiled eggs, mayo, mustard, and tunafish from the salad bar and appear with a lunch tray of deviled eggs. “It’s easy to make them, if you know what you’re doing.” Someone stab my college-aged self, he’s insufferable. But, I can’t help it, I still proud of him for those deviled eggs. It’s really is easy to make them, if you know what you’re doing.

Yes, the feeling that being able to cook is—wow—an A-plus life skill still has a firm hold of me.

I’ve gone through many culinary obsessions. Lentils, sourdough (before it was cool, I beg you to know), noodles, paella, risotto. But I’ve never really mastered cooking as such. I enjoy it, but I feel somehow ill-at-ease in the kitchen at the same time.

Maybe that comes from fear of messing up. The best cooks can shake off a failure with a laugh; it’s how they improve. But culinary catastrophes flatten me.

At one point I got into stew. My stews we turning out thick and meaty and delicious—red wine and soy sauce are a winning combination to impart meaty flavor even where you don’t have meat. So I decided to multiply the recipe and make stew for my friends and family. The first time, I burned it. The whole house smelled like smoke. I did salvage that stew by adding lots of vinegar and port, but the burning incident had been very public. The second time, I had trouble cooking the alcohol out. When the stew burned some throats, I faced the worst teasing. These failures devastated me. I still blush to think of them. For what crime is worse than having made out like you know how to cook—wow—only to prove incompetent?

See, while my belief that being able to cook is—wow—absolutely tubular has remained fixed, my belief in my own culinary competence has caught up with reality. The fact is, I’m not such a good cook. I scrape by well enough for myself, and close friends. You’re an acquaintance? Let’s eat out—I know a good place.

And, yet, I still think of myself as someone who cooks all his meals himself. It’s true that I don’t eat prepacked meals ever and that I rarely order out. But overnight oats, canned fish, and sandwiches—my staples—don’t involve any actual cooking. Except when I get fancy and grill the sandwiches, I suppose. And while I continue to churn out some sort of one-pot dish for myself about twice a month, I really don’t measure up to my friends who really make a hobby of cooking.

And, I’ll admit, that makes me feel inferior. Because being able to cook—wow—that’s something exceptional.