The meals that make us are never the ones we most want to remember. I didn’t find myself in a bowl of perfect pumpkin ravioli with butter-fried sage, or a pizza I embarked on a pilgrimage across the continent to find. Instead, it’s in the terrible roast dinner that you burned or the custard that curdled that your identity is forged. It’s there in the meals you hated and the ones you rowed over and the ones you never even ate. If we could all tell our life story in vignettes about lobsters in Maine, and peaches from sun-drenched Italian orchards, and Michelin-starred bites of glory, we’d be very lucky – but also very boring indeed.
The meals that made me – the ones that nudged me towards a better life, and taught me not just about food, but about myself – are as muddled, as up and down, as the life I’ve lived. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
1 In which I try to impress the New York Times with tilapia
The most important meal I ever cooked was grilled tilapia. I made it for a reporter from the New York Times, who was writing a profile about me, and who was, therefore, in the kitchen of my Sheffield flat trying to ignore the fact that the front door opened on to a view of the toilet. I’d curated a menu very carefully, hoping to communicate something about who I was as a cook and as a person, about my Ghanaian roots and my integrity in the kitchen.
After much fuss, what I fed the celebrated New York Times food writer was a near-raw fish draped with onion bits, which we embarrassedly pushed around our plates for half an hour and later pretended had never existed. Keen to impress, I’d bought whole tilapia from the fishmonger in the market – something I’d never cooked before and will likely never cook again. It turns out you can’t just cook a whole fish for a couple of minutes on each side, as though it were a delicate fillet of sea bass.
Sometimes, I would remember that meal and freeze with horror in the middle of a busy street. I tell this story now not because I’ve made peace with it, or learned some important lesson about cooking, but because I’ve realised that by being the worst meal of my life, that tilapia has liberated me from ever having to be that horrified again. It is the abject low against which I measure all other kitchen failures. Sunken sponge cake? Burned loaf? At least it’s not the tilapia.
I never apologised to that writer for that meal, as it happens. I hope she reads this. I hope she knows I did her a favour by taking her straight to her lowest ebb. One day she’ll thank me.
2 The big chill
The first ice-cream I had during that solo holiday in New York – fresh out of a flunked university course and with time to kill – was a tub of pistachio gelato from a Whole Foods shop around the corner, and I stored it on my bedroom’s broad windowsill, overlooking a grimy gully between my tenement building and the next one over. I ate it with a spork I’d saved from an airport granola pot, and although I knew there was a whole world of dumplings, pizza slices and Technicolor bodega delights just outside those walls, I felt happy enough with my ice-cream and my duvet in this strange new city.
A storm had swept over New York as I’d arrived, bringing with it a mass of freezing air that sank into the streets and settled over the park and pooled around my little ice-cream tub on the windowsill. It was a cold so intense that it prompted the longest stretch of homicide-free days since New York City records began. It froze the edges of the Hudson. All through this blizzard, while the arctic wind bit at my ears, I ate ice-cream.
I ate Vietnamese coffee ice-cream, thick and smooth with condensed milk, alongside a little ball of burnt honey ice-cream so perfect that my cheeks hurt from smiling by the time I was done. Fumbling for dollars with frozen fingers, I bought another round the next day: salt-and-pepper pinenut and bourbon vanilla. I embarked on a trek that took me to Brooklyn and back in search of a fabled cereal milk soft-serve I’d been imagining for months. I stomped and slipped through the snow to get a tub heaped with butter cake ice-cream.
The lushly verdant lawns, picket fences and loamy woods that furnish the events of Ray Bradbury’s 1957 novel Dandelion Wine (a favourite of mine) are as far as I could imagine from the Manhattan I visited that winter. And yet, there in my cynical 20s, swaddled tight in my scarf against the clamour and chill of the city, I found myself thinking about the novel’s preteen protagonist, Douglas: about how strange everything looked through his curious eyes, and how promising the future was stretched out before him. I remembered that I, too, once had that insatiable teenage appetite. There’s something about being in an alien place that softens the jaded shell you’ve developed over a lifetime. In New York City, I was, for the first time in a long time, hungry enough, and curious enough, to let more of the frozen world in.
“And looking at one single label on a jar, he felt himself gone round the calendar to that private day this summer when he had looked at the circling world and found himself at its center,” Bradbury wrote. I licked an errant trail of ice-cream from my sticky fingers, rebuttoned my too-thin coat and stepped back out into the storm. “The word on the jar was RELISH. And he was glad he had decided to live.”
The ice-cream made my teeth ache, and my synapses sparked with sugar, but I went on regardless, because I knew then that I wanted to taste more.
3 In praise of all the oysters I never ate
I’ve tried only one raw oyster, and it was gross, and I’m happy never to try another as long as I live. But still, oysters have made me. They made me because food writer MFK Fisher wrote, 75 years ago, that she once ate oysters, and danced with the senior class president, and spent the evening in a haze of newfound, dizzying sensuality. “I knew that I must down it,” she recounts in her book, The Gastronomical Me. “Then, as Olmsted put her thin hand on my shoulder blades, I swallowed once, and felt light and attractive and daring… Practically the Belle of the Ball I was!”
When I think of oysters, then, I think about the first flurries of queerness that I ever felt: at 14, stumbling through the park with a belly full of cheap cider, wondering who I was going to kiss next. Our lives and appetites are worlds apart, but MFK Fisher and I have a shared truth, and it tastes like the ocean, and it makes us fizz.
If it sounds strange that I’m nourished by a meal I never ate, it shouldn’t. So much of the eating we do isn’t the physical movement of food from plate to gut; it’s the process of consuming an emblem, and growing strong off the promise it carries. All those ice-creams in New York, for instance, were about the revival of childhood fantasies, and self-indulgence, as much as they were about the pleasures of milk, cream and sugar. It’s why the anticipation of a sip of cold lager on a hot park bench is the best part, and why the prospect of mince pies soars so far clear of the reality.
There’s a short story I read once, by Lydia Davis. In it, a story within a story, a man recounts the happiest moment of his life: “His wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.” My happiest moment is that dance, and the eating of the oyster.
4 The people’s pizza v Donald Trump
I was sitting in bed with a slice of pizza and a polystyrene carton of mozzarella dippers when I first read the stories. It was January last year, and some people in New York had taken pizza, heavy with melted cheese, from takeout boxes, and eaten the steaming slices in the midwinter air. So far, so normal. But this wasn’t a Norman Rockwell vision of peace and plenty: assembled raucously outside the US District Courthouse opposite Cadman Plaza Park, hundreds of protesters were celebrating a verdict overturning President Trump’s controversial immigration ban, passing around boxes of Domino’s pizza in righteous jubilation. A little over 10 miles east of the rally, pizza had played a vital role in revolutionary action at JFK airport, too, with samaritans handing out pizza to demonstrators, reporters and pro bono lawyers camped out on the frontlines of the immigration debate.
Cocooned in my bedsheets, with Gilmore Girls playing in the background, I was several hundred miles and a world away from those protests. As a food writer, I was still deep in a vision of food, and cooking, as an escapist haven. I thought that maybe some day I’d perfect my black treacle brownie recipe, and that would be that.
But that pizza across the Atlantic shook me free of that happy delusion; I realised how political food could be. I read about the legendary restaurant Dooky Chase’s, and the rare, special place it had afforded civil rights leaders to organise, and be nourished. I learned more about the Black Panthers’ free school meals programmes, and the enduring impact of malnutrition on disadvantaged groups, even in today’s wealthy society. Even Jane Fonda was in on the action, serving dinner to demonstrators protesting against the Dakota Access pipeline. At a time when the world is as calamitous and uncertain as ever, food isn’t a distraction; it’s a vital, precious weapon. If an army marches on its stomach, the kitchen is an armoury.
5 No woman is an island, as long as she eats blueberry loaf cake
I tasted blueberry loaf cake for the first time, and the millionth time, at a table in an eating disorder unit, watched over by a papier-mache tree hung with motivational quotes. I was there to teach the outpatients how to bake, and in the name of keeping things simple I fell back on a recipe I knew almost by heart: a cake flecked with lemon zest and studded with blueberries. It was easy to make: ideal for trudging through the basics of measuring, stirring, sieving and folding, to bake our way, by numbers, to a perfect cake. Seven years earlier, I had sat, crying into a limp ham sandwich, at a unit like this one, 200 miles away. This time, on the other side of the table, I was ready graciously to bestow on these girls the wisdom of a life post-eating disorder.
Except I found myself fumbling over the carton of flour, and cracking eggshell into my batter. The spoon felt unwieldy as I beat the butter with the sugar and vanilla extract, and I grazed my knuckles into the lemon zest more than once. All of the condescension I’d brought into the kitchen slipped between my fingers, and the proudly risen cakes charred in the oven under my nervous watch. As mundane as cake-making had become to me, I was surrounded now by people for whom the texture of flour on a fingertip was novel and the smell of lemon a rare treat. Among those curious new eyes, mouths and hands, in the eating disorder unit, I became a beginner again.
It’s impossible to be closed to the world and still open your mouth wide for new foods. I don’t know anyone who ever took a bite of the day and really tasted it, and swallowed it, and made it part of themselves, and was able to stay shut away in their old habit. Babies know this implicitly: they touch bits of banana, dog toys, loo paper to their lips with eager curiosity. They sense that the mouth is the liminal place between “me” and “out there”, and that by feeling the strange world around them with their mouths, they make it a part of them. Those with eating disorders feel the significance of this junction all too clearly, and a mouthful can easily become a transgression. Every single bite opens us up to the world. No woman is an island, as long as she eats.
When we sat down to eat that blueberry loaf cake, still warm from the oven, blackened crusts politely pushed to the edges of our plates, I saw the girls take tentative bites, and I soared at the sight of the pride on their faces. I remembered the rapturous, wide eyes of my friend’s six-month-old daughter Cleo, sucking a soggy pizza crust for the first time. I opened my mouth and ate, and felt. Without good eaters, there’s no good food. I tasted the tender, lemony crumb, again, for the very first time.
Eat Up by Ruby Tandoh is published next week by Serpent’s Tail at £12.99. To order a copy for £9.99, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Ruby’s new column appears in Feast.
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