COOKING LESSONS

by Katie Hunter

Remember our kitchen? I think you brought those wire shelves we pushed against the wall. The shelves that held Alice’s bowls and Jane’s blender and your red KitchenAid mixer and, of course, your tart pan. It’s my grandmother’s you said as you placed it on the middle shelf.

We have to make her apple tart you added. Beneath your baseball cap, brown wisps stuck out like spaghetti al dente.

For sure, I said, embarrassed I’d never baked a tart. That I’d never been taught. Ashamed I didn’t know what half these items were, these kitchen things you brought to our third-story walk-up, carried with the mesmerizing confidence you seemed to carry through everything.

But I didn’t tell you that. I didn’t want you to see me as inept, as someone who was nowhere near as sure as you when it came to cooking. When it came to all things, really. I didn’t ask you how you might have felt, starting our last year together. The last year before we’d metamorphosize, or so I hoped, into fearless, successful graduates. I didn’t ask whether you doubted yourself too. If you did, you never showed it.

Instead of asking you these questions, I drank a glass of water. It was hot moving in, wasn’t it? Especially that year. The last one of politics classes and crispy quesadillas at the union. The last year of dorm rooms because we’d finally drawn the golden ticket: a campus apartment.

Three years of being friends by then, you and me, since we hiked during freshman orientation in Asheville. You wore scuffed boots and a backpack that swallowed your frame. I wore brand-new hiking shoes that gave me blisters.

You were ahead, alone, and mostly silent. You offered your trail mix when I caught up.

You were from Tennessee and rode horses, I learned, as we passed by skinny pines. I used to ride too, I told you, my mouth full of M&Ms. But I stopped in high school, I shrugged, as if my lack of follow-through in life, my fear of failure, hadn’t been why I quit.

You couldn’t stand George W. Bush, I learned. Neither could I. We stopped for a water break and I told you the name of my freshman dorm. You smiled and said That’s where I’ll be too.

I wanted an audience, acceptance, so I told a story around the campfire that night about my sister’s wedding in Mexico—about how the best man, loud and brash, had gotten drunk and lost in the night. We’d spent the next day searching for him. My sister found him on the beach an hour before the ceremony, I said in punchline, making everybody laugh. You laughed hardest of all, your eyes flashing and mouth wide, savoring details like the marshmallows we blistered in the flames.

You were the first friend I made away from home. We had many more years ahead, I thought. More afternoons of ogling pizza stones in Williams-Sonoma or declaring Malbec a superior wine like co-ed sommeliers. More evenings spent running on cross-country trails.

You were always generous, staying with me the first half-mile, before you’d nod at me and go. You were so fast. You were a force and I admired that, even as it made me jealous how quickly you moved: on trails, in the kitchen, in class. How you never seemed self-conscious, even when you looked like you’d just rolled out of bed and into class, wearing running shorts just in case.

Remember our junior year, when those College Republicans called parental leave “economic suicide”? You fileted their talking points so quickly as I sat there, silently cheering you from the front row. As I tried, always tried, to keep up with your arguments. With your quickness, with your confidence. I wish I had known it wasn’t a race.

I knew you liked to cook before our senior year. But knowing isn’t the same as tasting. It’s not the same as seeing you slice Granny Smiths into a bowl, your focus like a surgeon’s.

I’m making the apple tart you said, rinsing your knife. Wait until you try it. It’s delicious.

I was sold from that first bite of tangy cream cheese and spicy, nutty apple, an otherworldly combination of softness and crunch. Divine, to put it in your words.

To put it in mine, the tart was fall and comfort. It was the warmth of home, even though mine lacked a father and made-from-scratch desserts. Sometimes my mom and I would make brownies from a box, but mostly we’d eat ice cream as we watched Gilmore Girls. A treat to myself for doing homework or getting yet another A. There hadn’t been anything like the tart.

(When I made it last year, for one of my dinner parties, I used Fuji apples. They were all my husband could find and they were pleasantly sweet. I think it turned out well, and that you’d have liked it. You’d have liked my husband too, I think, if you’d gotten to meet him).

I haven’t forgotten the cakes either. You sticky-noted pages in your copy of Martha Stewart’s Wedding Cakes book, the one that Alice bought you, when another friend of ours got engaged. The first to “bite the dust,” we joked.

Fondant-covered, seven-tiered extravaganzas: nothing intimidated you. One night you baked three layers of vanilla cake. Remember how, once you thought they’d cooled, you stacked them on top of each other? They held just for a moment like a perfectly golden tower. Then they collapsed into a sugary sinkhole.

I gasped—all that work for nothing. You, though. You just smiled and shrugged.

Guess I’ll try again you said, and then I started laughing and so did you and then Alice and then Jane. Tears ran down our faces as we dissolved onto the floor.

Even now I remember you, wiping your eyes as you laughed, your hands coated in sugar and flour and love.

You were a dinner party legend too. Let’s have the guys over? you’d suggest. Two friends of ours, not boyfriends. I don’t really have time for a boyfriend, you said once, as you headed to a horse show. Perhaps you were a little scared too, but I don’t know because I didn’t ask. I can only guess.

Because the only time I saw you cry was over a boy. You laid on your dorm room floor and wept so hard you howled, like you were wounded. He didn’t like you like that, I learned, as I sat there trying to think of what to say. I’m sorry is what came out.

That was all I could say because it felt impossible seeing you collapsed. Just like all those layers of cake. I turned away as if wounded, too.

What else did I not see in all our years of friendship, just because I couldn’t bear to see you crumble? Because I wouldn’t let you be anyone other than whom I imagined—my gold standard, unshakeable, even when it came to feelings? To love? If you broke, did I have any hope?

We didn’t speak much about feelings, you and I. Perhaps we were too vested in the selves we showed each other: women sparkling with confidence, no matter what. Perhaps I was too vested in seeing that part of you instead of seeing beyond it.

Perhaps if I had known your fears, I could have been a better friend. Maybe I would have been less scared, too. Less scared of failing and being unfit to love.

You always loved us though. I know this now. You loved us with that bowl of Granny Smiths sliced and coated in cinnamon; with that coq au vin simmered on the stovetop and muffins you made during finals week. With the Joy of Cooking you gave each of us roommates on our birthdays.

With those menus you’d plan for our senior year dinner parties, featuring cannelloni and gratin and boeuf bour- guignon. Things I had to google before emailing our guests. I’d take forever, wouldn’t I? Tinkering with food puns, layering adjectives like casseroles. Just like an aspiring writer. An aspiring writer who thought she’d go to law school. Just like you.

We’d squish until our elbows touched around the kitchen table. You’d transform its cold gray surface with your work: mushroom pizza with charred tomatoes, glistening ratatouille, a butternut squash soup you and Jane made with a blender that went into the pot. (An immersion blender, I know now, because I finally bought one).

We’d help ourselves while you refilled our wine glasses and minded the oven and detailed Roe v. Wade’s erosion across the South. Meanwhile I told funny anecdotes about professors and drank too much and mostly tried to sound wise, swishing my wine glass, sharing thoughts about NAFA. As if I knew what I was talking about. As if I knew anything back then.

If only I had known I wouldn’t have you much longer. Maybe I would have listened more and talked less and lived in the moments you baked into creation, the moments spent with friends sharing apple tart for dessert.

But I desperately wanted to be worth listening to back then. Someone worthy of the time and love you put into our meals.

I’m trying a new pappardelle recipe you told me once. When I came home from my run there was a whole rab- bit carcass on the counter. I shook my head and smiled as I sliced San Marzanos beside you.

I still get a kick out of it. Us, two just-legal Julia Childs holed up in a mildewy college apartment, your hair wet from the shower and my hands covered in tomato juice.

Remember when she cooked rabbit? Jane emailed me last week. God, she was a legend.

It doesn’t really have a kitchen, you told me, about your studio in New York. The one you moved into the summer after we graduated. But you didn’t mind much because you loved trying restaurants in the Village. You loved sampling plums from the Union Square market. It’s heaven here, you said on a Sunday afternoon. Car horns blasted in the background, slicing your words like a knife through brie.

When we hung up, I wondered how you could be so happy when I felt like I was crumbling inside, not sure of who I was or what I wanted. Not sure of a marketing job that bled into happy hours with two-for-ones and greasy pepperoni slices with strangers.

I would tell you how exciting it was to be single in D.C. How exciting it was, a year since graduation, to have a real job and business cards with my name in bolded font. I wanted you to be proud of me. I didn’t want you to worry.

Most of all, I didn’t want you to know how weak I felt. How much I felt like I was failing at my job, with its lonely office and difficult clients. How much I hated dating and the cavalier attitude it required. How much I missed you laughing over coffee at my jokes and even the annoying way you’d leave your riding clothes strewn around the bathroom. How desperately I missed your cooking and the way you Jackson-Pollacked our kitchen in pesto and butter and spice blends. The way you plated and poured and spoke passionately about the right to choose over our cozy meals together. You were home and inspiration intertwined.

What I told you instead: You’d be impressed, how much I’m cooking. I had started hosting dinners in the tiny flat I shared with Alice. Nothing fancy, I added. A spring risotto with asparagus; a ricotta pudding our guests had loved. It wasn’t quite the same but, for an evening, it was a reminder of warmth and friendship and home.

Have you tried ramps, you asked me once, on a visit down from law school. We were at the farmer’s market and you held a bundle of greens, their pink stems curving scythe-like into bulbs. When I said I hadn’t you held them up for me to smell and I said oof when their pungent sickly odor hit my nose.

I promise they’re delicious you laughed. And you were right. When I cook them now in my tiny apartment in Oakland, their edges browning, their odor turning sweet as they sizzle in the pan, I think of you.

Cooking was your love language, wasn’t it? It was the language you spoke with your friends. It was the one you shared with your husband, a man who loved all things culinary and loved no one more than you.

In a toast at your wedding, I got credit for making a stealthy match, when really all I did was see the obvious: two politics-driven people so similar in spirit. So sure of where they could go in life. So I simply sent an email connecting you. I didn’t know what it would lead to beyond conversation. You lived two states apart.

But after just a few weeks, you seemed surer of this than anything—sure of where this new love would lead. Sure that you’d have time together.

When I wove daisies into your hair on your wedding day, your eyes shining more brightly than I’d ever seen, that’s what I thought too.

In the weeks after we lost you, so suddenly, someone forwarded a diary you’d kept. Recipe Adventures, you called it. Each entry is a snapshot: what you’d made for breakfast that morning, the new deli you’d tried for lunch, who you’d hosted for dinner.

As I read it then, all I could think of was how you were gone. How you would never make these meals or enjoy them again with the people who loved you. For months after, as I ran through foggy San Francisco, I pictured you crossing the road ahead of me. I saw the truck coming with no headlights; the truck you couldn’t see. When this happened, I stopped and closed my eyes. Twice I doubled over, heaving, unable to breathe.
But as I read these entries again, eight years later, I truly see you as you were and it makes me smile. I see you putting a crumble in the oven, wearing those blue mitts that swallowed your arms. I see your fingers covered in slivers of basil or strawberries, freshly picked. Like that time—remember that time?—you sat in our kitchen making jam with your mom on the morning of our graduation. As the rest of us scrambled around packing, trying to end one chapter and start another in a page turn, you took your sweet time savoring the moment with someone you loved.
Reading that diary, I hear your graveled, chipper laugh as you shrug off mistakes. I came back from my run and tried to make oatmeal. I put too much cinnamon in – who knew that was possible?
And I see you finding the lesson—and the deliciousness—no matter what. Next time, I’ll follow the recipe – and defrost! The fear of getting e. coli tamped down the fact that the burgers were delicious around the edges. Alas.
You treated cooking and life as journeys. Journeys in indulgence in making and eating and most of all, sharing those experiences with the people you loved.

You loved us forcefully and weren’t afraid to make mistakes because they were chances to learn. I wish I could have looked at my life that way too, when you were in it. That I had worried less about saying the right thing or getting things right; that I’d been less afraid to venture beyond my fears into doubts and questions and layer cakes that risked collapse but weren’t any less delicious for it.

I wish I could have told you how much I loved and admired you. How much you lifted me up when you laughed at my stories and my dinner party emails; how much you buoyed me when you listened and took me seriously or sent me a recipe you knew I’d love when I was at my lowest and trying so hard to conceal it. Try it, you’d say, as if you’d known.

Today I own a tart pan and a Dutch oven. I own a cast-iron skillet and a wok and a fancy Japanese chef ’s knife even though I prefer to use the one you gave me.

When I use it to dice onions or slice garlic, pressing it against the clove to remove the skin just like you showed us—me and Alice and Jane—I think of you. How I wish you were still here to share recipes and opinions on the crazy state of politics these days. How I wish I could show you the sourdough I’ve baked or the stories I’ve written or the tomatoes conquering the garden I’ve grown with my husband.

I would tell you about my students too, and how I worry I’m not good enough to teach them sometimes. I would tell you how I still struggle to feel worthy of the love that’s in my life. But I’m working on that.

I would tell you that I channel you when friends come to dinner. I pour wine and plate pasta and mind the oven but never forget to stop and sit and listen. To savor the moments, these precious moments, with the people I love. There’s nothing more divine.

Hiding Behind Bubbles
digital photography
Renate Valencia