Eating Like the Romans

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of the bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a county when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.”

–James Baldwin, excerpt from Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind

There is a show called The Supersizers Eat . . . Basil found it online last year and we binge watched every available episode in just a few days. A production of BBC2, each episode has the two hosts reliving (and thereby re-eating) a previous period from history. While the title is stupid, the show is fascinating and funny, including Sue Perkins being hilarious long before her time on the Great British Baking Show.

One of the last episodes is about Ancient Rome and includes a re-enactment of a feast that was put on for Roman emperors. Course after course of decadent food, wine, and mead is brought out for the hosts to try to consume within the time allotted by the show.

As we watched the Ancient Rome episode, Basil said to me, “I imagine this is what dinner at your house growing up was like.” I laughed, certain anyone who spent time at my house while both of my parents were still around would confirm this to be true.

My parents both loved to cook and loved to eat. There were only four of us living there, but my parents would often cook portions as if we were expecting four more people to show up at any time. And because we were lucky to make many friends in Arizona and because the door to our house was always proverbially (if not literally) open, sometimes four more people would show up to sit down at the table. Even if dinner had long since been concluded, guests knew they were welcome to look through the two refrigerators in the house and make a plate for themselves.

Any day might warrant a large, lavish meal–no special occasion was required. It might be trying out a recipe for the first time one of them had clipped from Gourmet Magazine or making an old favorite from one of the cookbooks they had brought back to the US after our years spent in Japan. Once a menu was decided, one of them would stop at the store to grab whatever ingredients needed to be used that evening, instilling in me that going to the store every day for groceries was a totally normal thing to do. And then whomever got home first would start prepping everything.

As I have mentioned before in a previous post about athletics, my parents were both competitive athletes. During their marriage, their love of competition would resurface repeatedly in two common scenarios. One was dinner table discussions about history, literature, politics, and everything else: if my mother made a statement about something and my father thought she was wrong (or vice versa), neither of them could be rest until the fact in question was researched to a conclusion. As all of these discussions took place in an era before Google, my parents kept a bookcase of current encyclopedias in the dining room. My brother and I would assist by retrieving the volume needed and practice our future researching skills by looking up the entry required and reading it out loud at the table.

The second scenario in which their competition with each other was rife would be in the kitchen. Long before Hell’s Kitchen or Top Chef was ever pitched to a network, my parents would focus on the particular part of the meal they were making to ensure it was fantastic, and especially was more fantastic than the other person’s portion of the meal. This adversarial approach in the kitchen was one of the reasons that, although my parents cooked at home all of the time, my brother and I never learned much about cooking from either one of them. My brother and I were delegated only the most remedial of tasks (trimming green beans was one of my absolute least favorites)–any of the actual cooking was only executed by my parents, because it had to be done right.

Sometimes circumstances would dictate that only one of them cook a meal, in which case things were more laid back in the kitchen, although tasting notes at the table were frequently administered, particularly by my mother.

The cooking mattered to my parents because the food mattered. The food mattered because good food was a true joy. This joy was often parlayed into the people, my friends, who would eat this food with us. Despite the stress I sometimes felt about their meal-prepping turned sparring sessions, their passion and the cheer it brought to our house made me a devotee of good, home cooked food for life.

And so of course I fell in love with Basil, who takes the time to make everything from scratch, from the best ingredients possible, in portion sizes that my parents would be proud of. Unlike my mom and dad, I had nothing to prove to Basil in the kitchen. While we took turns cooking for each other at first, Basil told me early on he would prefer to do the cooking–not as a comment on my abilities in the kitchen, but because he wants to be the one to cook. Any remaining doubts I had were erased when Basil suggested I should read a book and have a drink while he made dinner. I was sold.

Not every day can be a roman feast, but even simple breakfasts made for me of hummus and avocado on toast feel heart-warming and luxurious. I look forward to the chance in revel in each bite when my old man cooks. Each meal is a chance to reflect on my good fortune to have a man who loves me so much that he makes me the best food he possibly can every single day.