Blog

The mania of spring is infecting our hermetic little threesome. Dingo has been bounding around outside all day like a humpy rabbit, barking at snow drip-melting off the roof and fluffing his suddenly-shedding fur in the breeze and sunlight. After an uncharacteristically studious, intent winter of hard work and concentration, Brendan and I have reverted to our punchy and goofy and amorous selves. I’m scattershot and addlepated with unfocused disorganization: what am I working on, again? Eight different things, it turns out.

All night last night, the full moon blazed in through the bedroom window and lit up the long fields of snow and dark, shaggy woods with its silver, dramatic glow. The fact that wild solar flares were hitting Earth made sense; my dreams were absurd and rich with peril, upside-down logic, and Loki hilarity. And this morning, the air had turned suddenly warm, up here in the frozen north.

I woke up very early, let Dingo out into the sunny snow-blind morning, and fed him. While I drank an enormous cup of strong coffee, I sat blinking over my correspondence, unable to write anything coherent to anyone. Later, I made custardy, fluffy French toast — Rudi’s gluten-free multigrain bread soaked in beaten eggs, cinnamon, and light cream, slowly fried in butter till it was crisp and tender, then drenched in puddles of New Hampshire maple syrup.

At 11:00, creatures of clockwork habit, we three took our usual 4-mile fast walk up and down the hilly dirt road, which today was melting, streaming with runoff, muddy. We came home with wet feet; Dingo’s entire undercarriage had to be toweled off. While I rubbed the grit and sand and snowmelt from his stomach and legs and hindquarters, he smiled goofily at me and panted in my ear and leaned against my shoulder in a manner I can only describe as flirtatious. (It has occurred to me to adopt a female dog to be his companion, but that’s as far as I’ve ever gotten with that plan.)

For much of the morning, I went back and forth with a friend who’d sent off a message far and wide that he would mail packages of freshly gathered Cape Cod oysters to anyone who could offer a good trade. Within seconds of seeing this, I leapt, ponying up a signed copy of “The Epicure’s Lament,” since I don’t jar pickles or grow fresh herbs or grind my own sausages. My friend Beau agreed, then added slyly that delicious wild mushrooms grow  in the White Mountains. Suddenly part of the bargain were the mushrooms I now evidently intend to gather this spring.

I reclined in the sun on the porch with Brendan and Dingo for a while, then came inside and wrote down all the things I didn’t seem to be working on today. Seeing the list made me feel paradoxically better. With so much work to do, how could I be expected to accomplish any of it? I ask you. It was now 2:00. I looked over my ludicrously long list and recognized that there was nothing for it but to open a cold bottle of pinot grigio and slice some strong white cheddar and call it a day.

Every year when spring comes, I go through a similar period of adjustment. Sometimes it’s traumatic, sometimes it’s euphoric, sometimes a little of both. The best thing to do in these transitional seasons is to give in to animal instinct. This means acquiescing to any and all seductive urges, sleeping a lot, drinking all the wine you want and plenty of water, and going outside into the sunlight in short sleeves and moving around. It’s good to eat lightly but decadently, food that’s good for you (because the change of seasons is a shock to the system) but which also satisfies a sudden intense itch for variety, change, novelty, adventure.

Instead of deeply flavored stews, root vegetables, and potato-based fry-ups, my appetite is suddenly laser-focused on ruffled fresh green lettuces and – it pains me to say this out of compassion for my vegetarian friends – baby lamb. It’s a frank hunger for the sweetness of new life — little leaves shaking off dew and standing upright, the tender savory flesh of very young animals.

Popcorn Cockles with Asparagus with Fenugreek Sauce and Mango Salsa

This is another made-up recipe from “The Great Man” that looked so good on paper, I had to try it in real life. It turned out to be better than I’d imagined. And it is the perfect antidote and accompaniment to spring fever.

Cockles are better than clams for this dish, but very small, tender clams will do if no cockles are available.

Steam 20 young asparagus spears until just soft. Plunge into ice water, remove, and pat dry. Drizzle with the following mixture: 2 tablespoons mayonnaise, 1 tablespoon lime juice, and 1/8 teaspoon ground fenugreek.

Steam 3 dozen very fresh cockles in their shells just until they open. Remove the cockles from their shells (they will be wet with their own liquor) and immediately coat them in finely ground cornmeal. Heat 1 inch of peanut oil in a skillet until it spits when you flick a drop of water at it. In batches that just cover the bottom of the pan, fry the cockles, covered to minimize spatter, for several minutes, till their crusts are golden. Remove and arrange alongside the asparagus. On the other side of the cockles goes a mango salsa:

In a bowl, mix1 ripe mango, chopped small, 1-2 tablespoons finely minced cilantro, 2 tablespoons lime juice, 1 minced medium or large garlic clove, and 1-2 jalapeno peppers (depending on how hot you want it), minced.

This recipe serves 4 as an appetizer, in theory, but has been known to serve 2, just barely.

When I was 18, after I’d been living in the French countryside for about a month, I was asked to make mincemeat for the family I worked for. “I’ll show you how,” said Vivian, the lady of the house, a tiny Englishwoman in her late 30s with a coppery, loose bun and dark red-brown eyes. “It’s an English tradition. My mother taught me.” In the kitchen, she stood at my elbow while I roasted and chopped beef heart and liver and mixed them with minced apple and dried fruit and spices and nuts, then bound the whole thing together with beef suet and a staggering amount of brandy.

A vegetarian at the time (for wholly experimental reasons), I found this whole exercise disconcerting but exciting. The resulting mixture looked like a psychopath’s murderous aftermath — small, firm chunks of organ meat interspersed with luridly moist nuggets of fruit and fleshy nuts — but it smelled, frankly, amazing. I packed the redolent, dense mess into a large glass vacuum-sealed jar and didn’t see it again until just before Christmas, when I baked it into two pies under the supervision of the indefatigable, perennially amused, cinnamon-colored Vivian, whom I had grown to adore.

The pies, when they came out of the oven, seemed magnificent. I couldn’t eat them, due to my vegetarian status, but I could smell them. I stood over them, filling my nose with the steam that rose through the vents in the top crust, a dark, rich smell that I remember now, 31 years later, as strongly as if those pies were right in front of me: after the heady brandy updraft came a fierce admixture of currants, apples, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon, with pungent meaty bass notes.

Although mincemeat was nothing I’d ever eaten before, and although I couldn’t eat it then, I was comforted by its smell, which, although exotic and decadent, also reminded me (in my state of by then near-hallucinatory homesick longing) of cinnamon-raisin toast, that  dessertlike staple of American childhood breakfasts — on winter mornings, I slathered margarine (it was the 1970s) on toasted raisin bread, then reached for the cinnamon-sugar bowl my mother always kept full and sprinkled a teaspoonful, then another teaspoonful, and then another final heaping teaspoonful, onto the hot “buttered” toast. The cinnamon-sugar got dark-wet from the margarine, and it all melted into the hot toast, and as I ate it the sugar crunched between my teeth and the raisins melted into my molars and the earthy, sweet, warm, zingy taste of the cinnamon made me half-crazed with satisfaction.

Cinnamon is the sweetest of all smells, the most innocent and adorable, but also the most vixenish, alluring, and tempting, the Lolita of spices. It goes particularly well – as befits its nymphet status — with booze, meat, and fruit, and is generally associated, warmingly, with various cold-weather holidays and occasions. It fills houses at Christmastime on wafts of mulled wine, elevates Thanksgiving pie to ambrosiacal melt-in-your-mouth debacles of post-feast gluttony, and warms all the various cockles – heart, loins, and psyche – on winter mornings in humble applesauce or oatmeal or muffins.

In Perugia, Italy, I had pears simmered in red wine with cinnamon; by the end of the poaching process, the pears had absorbed so much wine and spice, they had taken on a new identity – that mealy and wholesome fruit was now sluttish, intoxicating, and had become firm in the mouth, muscular as a surfer girl. In Oaxaca, I got sick on mole, I ate so much of it – I glutted myself on tender Mexican chicken bathed in glossy, complex chocolate mud spiked with cinnamon and so many other mysterious things.

Chicken Tagine

I invented this recipe by describing it on the fly in the first chapter of my novel, The Great Man, in which a 74-year-old woman half-seduces a 40-year-old man with food, and then I made it in order to test my imaginative culinary instincts. There is no modest way to say this: the apricots melt into the broth and sweeten it deeply, the olives give it brine, and the almonds and cilantro and lemon bring it to life. And it contains cinnamon; it is, in a word, delicious.

On low heat, saute a chopped red onion and 5-6 minced garlic cloves in lots of butter (or ghee) or oil. Add coriander and cumin, about a tablespoon, yes I said tablespoon, of each (feel free to use already-ground; I like using a mortar and pestle, but some people don’t), a teaspoon of cinnamon, half a lemon’s worth of grated fresh lemon zest, a generous pinch each of saffron and cayenne, a teaspoon of paprika, 2 bay leaves, and a thumb-sized lump of grated fresh ginger. Keep heat low, stir constantly, and make sure nothing burns or sticks; add more ghee or oil if necessary.

When it’s all cooked into a commingled fragrant brown spice puddle, add a red and a yellow pepper, diced, a large carrot or two medium carrots, peeled and chopped small, a generous handful of cracked green olives, a handful of dried Turkish apricots, chopped small, one 15-16 ounce can of well-rinsed chickpeas, a cup of Pomi diced tomatoes, and a cup of hearty chicken broth. Bring to a gentle boil, then right down to a simmer, and cover.

Cut up 5 skinless, boneless chicken thighs and 3 breasts, more than 2 pounds of chicken in all, into big bite-sized pieces, the kind you have to cut in half to really eat, and grill them in a cast-iron skillet in ghee or oil till they’re brown just on the outside and still raw inside, then add them to the stew and stir everything together and gently simmer it, covered, for 4 1/2 hours.   Add more chicken broth as necessary.

Saute and slightly brown 1 package or 2 cups couscous or, if you’re gluten-intolerant, quinoa, in 2 tablespoons butter, then cook according to the directions on the packet. Serve with harissa or shug, along with bowls of chopped toasted almonds, lemon slices, and chopped fresh cilantro.

I always keep several different kinds of hot sauce on hand. At the moment, I have both regular and chipotle Cholula, Tabasco, chili-garlic sauce, Sriracha, Thai hot chili sauce, and a can of chipotle peppers in adobo. I consider this a paltry assortment, and I wish I had more. I need green chile habanero sauce, red chile habanero sauce, West Indian jerk sauce, Jamaican Scotch bonnet sauce, La Victoria, Crystal, harissa, Tapatio salsa picante, a few specialty small-batch hot sauces with names like Butt Twister and Viper and Slap Ya Mama and Pain is Good, Pickapeppa spicy mango sauce, Matouk’s Calypso sauce, Valentina, red chili oil, Sambal Oelek, and more. When the new kitchen gets renovated, I plan to put a Lazy Susan in the middle of the dining room table and stock it with hot sauces and avail myself of any and all of them at every meal.

There are those, I know, who sneer at people who cover their food in hot sauce. They think it wrecks the nuances of the flavors or something. I don’t care. In fact, I disagree. Nuance be damned. Hot sauce is exciting. It releases endorphins and cures colds and peps up blandness and augments deliciousness. It might be an aphrodisiac for all I know. (I suspect very much that it is.)  Everything tastes better to me with hot sauce: chicken soup, pea soup, lentil soup, Caesar salad, frittatas, steamed vegetables, steak, shrimp, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, corn fritters, meat loaf – I’ll happily shake big splashes of scorching pepper sauce on any and all of it.

If I had to go to some hypothetical desert island where you’re allowed to have only five things in addition to the most basic necessities, plain food and water and shelter, Tabasco would be in my shipwreck suitcase along with the collected works of Bach, rioja, Tres Generaciones tequila, and a clawfoot bathtub with unlimited hot water. Other, more distinctive hot sauces fill a niche, usually geographical – Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, Southern, and so on — but Tabasco is that versatile accessory that can go with anything, anywhere, uptown or downtown, black-tie or picnic, emeralds or bathrobe or both at once. Tabasco has a vinegary, piquant, clean, robust flavor whose clarity amps up subtler flavors without drowning them. It can go on anything, is what I’m saying, but I like it best on food that’s bland and plain and simple: red beans, scrambled eggs, chicken, polenta, steamed broccoli, boiled potatoes, cooked lentils. It also makes bad food edible, mediocre food good, and good food even better. There’s a good reason it’s the most popular and ubiquitous hot sauce on the planet.

Last fall, when we were in Louisiana, Brendan and I made a pilgrimage to Avery Island. We toured the McIlhenny factory, which meant we got a 10-minute tour of the Tabasco Museum, then we looked through a long plate-glass window at the assembly line, and then at the end we watched a short video about how Tabasco peppers are grown and harvested and packed into oak barrels with vinegar and left to cure, then tapped, bottled, and sent far and wide all over the world. It was a quiet day there, and we were among only a handful of other visitors. After the unintentionally hilarious promotional film, we collected our tiny little bottles of all the varieties of Tabasco – regular, jalapeno, habanero, chili-lime, chipotle, buffalo, garlic-pepper, and sweet & spicy. Then we went over to the gift shop to try the free Tabasco ice cream. It was damn good, but I wouldn’t want to eat it on a regular basis.

After we were done with the factory and gift shop, we took a little hike over the grounds. We wandered through the “jungle garden” (which resembled neither a jungle nor a garden but was rather a sort of bare wild expanse of trees and shrubs) by a bayou and wended our meandering way through little paths to a huge Buddha shrine on a hill, then to a lookout tower over a swamp where in the proper season one can evidently watch a massive group of snowy egrets going about their birdly business. On that overcast, almost-chilly, windless October afternoon, there was not bird one. The only wildlife around were a vast and aggressive population of gigantic mosquitoes who dive-bombed us and bit the hell out of us and a sudden startled pack of deer who sprinted like one being in several long, muscular pulses away from us into deeper cover.

Avery Island, as I recall from the tour and brochure, is an enormous deposit of rock salt. There are salt mines on the island, the oldest and deepest in the country; the salt is used in the production of Tabasco to seal the lids of the oak casks. One McIlhenny brother, the enterprising one (and I’m betting the firstborn), invented the hot sauce and planted the pepper fields and built the factory, and the other, dreamy, artistic, spiritual (I’m betting younger) brother designed and created the gardens, the paths, the Buddha shrine, and the bird-watching tower and sanctuary. Tabasco chiles are harvested when they turn a particular shade of red: when the workers are in doubt, there’s a red stick they use as a gauge, painted the proper shade, a literal baton rouge.

Just before it all closed for the night, we left Avery Island and drove to the nearby town of New Iberia, where Brendan lived for a couple of months in 2007. He was hired to shoot the behind-the-scenes footage, the “making of” In the Electric Mist. He lived with his father, who was the film’s producer, and the editors in a large, airy house on the Bayou Teche. After a driving tour of the town, we had a manifestly unspectacular dinner at a restaurant on the main drag. I took one look at my plate of steak, potatoes, and broccoli, and then I reached for the Tabasco and gave everything a red, savory, hot bath.

Cupboard Jambalaya

The other night, when I thought there was nothing in the house and it was time to rustle up some dinner, I found a package of Andouille and a package of boneless skinless chicken thighs in the freezer, unearthed some wild rice blend and a box of chopped tomatoes from the pantry, and discovered most of a box of chicken broth in the fridge, and then it was obvious what had to be done. (I’m not an enormous fan of shrimp in jamabalaya, so I didn’t care that I had nary a one.)

Saute a Cajun mirepoix in plenty of peanut or sunflower oil: chopped garlic, minced onion, celery, and Bell pepper. Add salt, cayenne, cumin, smoked paprika, a couple of bay leaves, black pepper, oregano, and thyme. Add a dash of Worcestershire sauce, a cup of chopped tomatoes, a cup of wild rice blend, and a package of Andouille sausage, chopped into half-discs. Stir until the rice is well-coated and it all starts to smell really good. Add 1 ½ or 2 (depending on the rice directions) cups of chicken broth and bring to a boil, then cover and lower to a simmer. Meanwhile, run 3 chicken thighs under the broiler in a broiling pan. Broil until just cooked and very tender, then turn and broil the other side. Cut up, reserving juices. Stir the chicken and its juices into the jambalaya. Taste and adjust seasonings. Cover and continue to cook. When the rice is perfectly done and has absorbed all the broth and chicken juices, serve heaping platefuls with a big bottle of Tabasco, and sprinkle it on every bite.

When I was a kid, I felt as passionately about the food I hated as I did about the food I loved. My mother, who otherwise fed us stuff we liked or even adored, had the occasional  sadistic spell during which she dished up the most disgusting things on the planet: smooth but granular chunks of fried calves’ liver that tasted the way cat poop smelled and had, I imagined, a similar texture; frozen okra that she boiled into sluglike tubes with creepily crunchy guts held together by strings of snot; Brussels sprouts both soft and coarse that tasted bitter and gaseous; and wretched heaps of foul, mealy, slimy Lima beans. I could tolerate broccoli and spinach, barely, in a stalwart mood, but otherwise, they made me gag. It was the 1970s, and meat was expensive, so my mother sometimes bought cheap steaks that came with pieces of gristle embedded in them; these likewise caused me to retch and want to spit them out.

These rare but intensely memorable awful meals were the occasion of much subversive drama amongst my sisters and me, silent antics, because we weren’t allowed to complain about our food. We were expected, like most kids, to eat it. So we mastered the near-universal childhood table arts of the wadded-up napkin containing half-chewed bites, the under-the-table palm-off to the cat, the pushing-food-around-the-plate maneuver into patterns that minimized volume. We also all developed our own, other means of avoiding  hated food. Emily, the youngest, who unlike Susan and me was given to histrionics and wild displays of rebellion, could always plausibly throw a tantrum and be sent to sit on the hamper in the bathroom (her usual punishment), thus escaping the horrible item in question. Susan, the middle sister and the most sly and resourceful of the three of us, would excuse herself to go to the bathroom and sneak an entire napkinful of liver or okra with her and flush the whole thing away, never to darken her life again.

As the oldest, or, in other words, as the people-pleasing rule-follower, the obedient one, the mama’s girl, I found ways to actually, literally eat whatever food I couldn’t feed to the cat or hide in my napkin. I taught myself to simultaneously disarm my gag reflex and block my sense of smell by lifting my palate up into my adenoids, or something like that. Then I’d fork a gigantic piece of liver or okra or gristly steak into my mouth, barely chew it, keep it off my tongue’s surface taste buds as much as possible, and take three big swallows of milk. And so, while one sister got herself banished to the bathroom and the other one snuck there to throw her dinner into the toilet, I stayed behind and powered through the vile stuff under my own steam. And presto, voila, my plate was clean, and I could have dessert. Revulsion gave me a certain shivery almost-pleasure similar to that of the most terrifying ghost stories. I was proud of my ability to overcome and control it.

As an adult, I learned to love all the things I couldn’t eat as a kid, or at least like them. Because there is nothing I am forced to eat now, revulsion has become a state of mind rather than an actual sensory experience. It still packs a psychological punch, even though the most disgusting things in my present-day life are vicarious, and generally come from books or movies or an account of another culture’s consumption of things that my own does not consider remotely edible — cats, dogs, grubs, worms, insects, monkey brains, horsemeat; reading or hearing about or watching people eat these things can feel as viscerally terrible as those long-ago dinners of childhood disgust.

In the book “Alive,” the true story of a soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes and who then turned to cannibalism in order to survive, there is one particular scene so graphically disturbing, so complexly disgusting/fascinating, I find myself thinking about it still, years after I read the book. It’s as viscerally memorable a scene as any of M.F.K. Fisher’s best food writing, but, in order not to be like the mother who forces her children to eat fried liver, I will refrain from inflicting a description of it on the unsuspecting reader. I imagine that anyone who has read the book might instantly know what it is (hint: it has to do with lungs).

Thinking about this scene, I have to lift my mental palate into my mental adenoids and keep the imagined taste as far from my mind’s taste buds as I can. But in a weird, perverse way, I also find it as interesting as any mouth-watering description of a feast. The things I consider delicious and the things that revolt me are still equally powerful. The shivery pleasure of eating something that could be disgusting but isn’t – like caviar, raw oysters, or sea-urchin sushi – is equal to the horror I feel when I think of something truly disgusting that others might consider edible, or even a delicacy. Apparently, nothing has changed since I was a kid.

Steak tartare

This dish of chopped raw meat and a raw egg is my favorite thing to order in a restaurant; whenever it’s on a menu, I ask for it. I’ve eaten it in various places in Paris, Rome, New York, Seattle, Montreal, and Portland, Maine. It varies in texture and quality as much as any dish. In Paris, I always get a professional, superior concoction. The Italian version is a fat disc of raw hamburger mixed with parsley and capers. In Seattle, the ground meat, egg, and condiments arrived separately in little dishes on a large plate, and I got to mix it all together myself. In Portland, it was very simple and coarse and almost tasteless. In New York, at Balthazar, it is always luscious and sublime, as good as it gets: an alchemy of tender, fine, very fresh, savory beef, a sweet raw quail egg, and just the right additions and flavorings.

I have never made it at home, but if I did, I would buy a pound of the freshest available beef tenderloin and grind it myself, fairly fine, and mix it with a rubber spatula quickly and lightly in a very clean glass bowl with just the right (small) amounts of minced anchovy filets, minced red onion, capers, minced parsley, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, mustard, olive oil, and hot pepper flakes. I would divide this mixture onto 4 plates, mold each with the spatula into a disc, press the back of a spoon into the top to make a depression, and crack a very fresh quail egg onto each.

I first moved to north Brooklyn in 1990 when I was 28 and just starting out in life. I lived on Graham off Metropolitan Avenue, above a Laundromat, in a small one-bedroom apartment with a skylight in the tiled bathroom, a parquet floor, and a roof deck outside my bedroom door. It cost $350 a month. I had hardly any furniture; the kitchen had no refrigerator, so I only bought whatever food I could eat immediately. It never occurred to me that refrigerators were cheap; everything was so provisional and tentative for me back then. I never planted anything on the roof deck.

I had no money and was consequently often late with my rent. My landlord was a ginger-haired, irascible, possibly borderline-psychotic guy who looked a little like a stupid Vincent van Gogh. He owned the Laundromat and was always there. When I came in to give him my week-late rent in cash (he no longer accepted checks from me; too many had bounced), I had to walk past the rows of washers and dryers, all the people sitting in the plastic molded chairs or standing at tables folding laundry. No one ever said a word in there; every pair of eyes tracked my hangdog progress to the little office in the back. It was my own version of the Walk of Shame.

Back in those days, Greenpoint was old-world Brooklyn, a profoundly local place. I was a stranger in a strange land on Graham Avenue. Italian guys sat in lawn chairs smoking cigars and drinking Peroni; black-haired women in cotton housedresses carried bulging shopping bags along the sidewalks. I felt very safe in that part of Greenpoint; all local crime was in the hands of the professionals – but I didn’t belong there. When I came up out of the L station, I was very obviously the only person to get off at my stop who hadn’t been born and raised within a ten-block radius. Graham Avenue felt very far from Manhattan, light years away.

There was an Italian deli on the corner between the L stop and my apartment. Because my apartment had no fridge, I did little cooking there, and so, on most weekday nights, on my way home from whatever menial job I had at the time, I stopped into the deli to get a sub, some chips, and a few cold bottles of Peroni. The deli subs were insanely good. I sometimes salivated like a dog, watching the guy build the one I’d ordered. On a foot-long Italian loaf, soft and white and spongy, he slathered about half a jar each of mustard and mayo and then piled a mound of shredded iceberg, greasy rounds of salami and ham, hot green pepperoncini, and rectangular slabs of provolone. At the end, he squirted oil and vinegar from plastic bottles, sprinkled it with black pepper and salt, folded it closed, cut it in half, rolled it in white paper and taped it shut and slid it into a paper sack between the beer and the chips. I took my dinner straight home. In warm months, I sat outside on my bare tar roof deck, staring at the sky. I always ate and drank every drop and crumb. Later, I went inside to my hot little apartment to lie in bed with my brain in a snarl of wonderment. I had no idea how my life was going to go, but I knew that no one was going to help me; it was all up to me. I was very worried about this, all the time.

Five years later, when I was working as a secretary in the World Trade Center, I paid $450 a month for a huge, high-ceilinged, beautiful place on North Henry Street just off Norman Avenue, way up near McGolrick Park and the sewage treatment plant. On my long hike home from the L train after work, I passed the Busy Bee Supermarket, a Polish grocery. I did much of my shopping there. The shelves were full of beer, hot mustard, pickled beets, herring in jars, canned meats, and sauerkraut. Behind the cash register were heaps of uncut loaves of fresh Polish rye bread. The register was next to a deli case piled high with cured meats, blocks of cheese, kielbasy, and cold salads. The cashier and the deli guy were one and the same person; the entire line had to wait while he sliced each customer’s bread, meat, and cheese. The inefficiency of this system drove me a little batty with impatience, but it also afforded me a certain amount of entertainment. It was easy to tell who was from the neighborhood and who wasn’t by the degree of irritation versus resignation they exhibited.

I got married a year later and moved down to Williamsburg, to my new husband’s huge industrial loft on Metropolitan and Wythe. In those days, he was paying $700 a month for 1100 square feet. Up on Bedford Avenue were two butchers, the “red butcher” and the “blue butcher,” so called because of the colors they were painted inside; they had official names, but no one used them. According to anyone who knew anything about the neighborhood, one of them was good and the other was bad. I could never remember which was which. I went into one and sniffed hard, then did the same thing in the other one, hoping to ferret out the bad one by any hint of putridness or rot. I never could tell any difference; they both smelled equally of garlicky sausage and the tangy stink of fresh meat. I generally bought kielbasy in either one and felt perfectly safe in both. Once, though, I bought a piece of beef from the blue butcher and brought it home and cooked it. It tasted gamey, and the texture was sinisterly stringy but tender; I was convinced that it was horsemeat. Now, both butchers are long-gone. One is a bubble tea place, the other a fancy ice-cream parlor.

I left Greenpoint for good in 2010, exactly twenty years after I first moved there. My fifth and final place in North Brooklyn was a top-floor railroad apartment on Monitor Street just off Norman for which I had been paying $1800 a month. This was considered a good deal.

In August of 2008, I flew to Guadalajara to meet my husband, who had gone down a week earlier to hang his work for a group show at the Ex Convento del Carmen. It had been curated by two Mexican artist friends, both of them named Carlos, who had a loft in the building where Jon had his studio. All the artists in the show were from Brooklyn, a South Williamsburg collective the Carloses had dubbed the Leonard Codex. Guadalajarans evidently take art very seriously; hundreds of people, maybe even a thousand, came to the opening. Afterwards, a group of us went out to a Cuban dance hall to eat roast pork with rice and beans and drink mescal and dance. Jon and I sat alone together at a table and leaned our heads against each other, smiling at everyone. “You two are so in love,” said the smart, serious Dutch girlfriend of one of the Carloses. I felt a lurch in my chest.

The next night, Paco, the gallery director, invited a few of us over to his beautiful, strange, dark house, where every wall and surface was crammed full of small paintings and artifacts and his own work, an assemblage of eerie, mechanical, Victorian wind-up toys and boxes. Three guinea pigs and two reeking, semi-savage dogs had the run of the place. Paco played 1950s Mexican cha-cha on his old record player, and we all drank large quantities of tequila and danced. Jon and I sat close together on the couch, and then we danced together, by all appearances a devoted, affectionate couple.

Very late, all of us drunk and starving, we went out to a restaurant one of the Carloses knew would still be open. At his urging, we all ordered the house specialty, pork-skin and pig-feet tostadas. They were borderline-vile if I thought about it, and perfectly edible if I didn’t. My mind went back and forth as I ate them. I awoke at dawn, savagely thirsty, and drank all the bottled water we had in our hotel room.

That morning, Jon and I rented a car and drove to Cuyutlan, a tiny town on the Pacific coast, for two nights. It was the off-season. We were the only guests in the huge, crumbling, formerly super-mod hotel that must have been very swank about forty years earlier. It was like “The Shining” set in Brasilia, a long-gone architect’s modernistic sci-fi dream, rooms built around the inner wall of a huge curving shell, the lobby set within, with internal free-standing rooms, the now-closed bar, restaurant, and dance floor as grand as an MGM movie-musical set, now all falling to pieces, with chunks of concrete breaking off and plaster sconces detaching from walls. We were given the room on the top floor at the very end; we perched up in the furthermost corner in a little box with a tiled balcony that looked out over the black volcanic beach and the ocean. Except for the two of us, all seventy or so rooms were empty.

The main street felt like a movie set, too, waiters standing idle, music playing futilely, a hot ocean wind blowing across empty chairs and tables, ruffling placemats and napkins. Everyone eyed us with hopeful yearning as we strolled up and down the street, studying menus and consulting each other. We finally chose the restaurant directly across from our hotel. As we seated ourselves in the centermost of the empty tables, we could feel a collective sigh around us. Our waitress was a young girl, all merry smiles at having been the lucky winner of our business. She encouraged us to order the fish special, and so, of course, we did. We were served plates of well-fried whole sea fish with heads and tails intact, alongside yellow rice and a limp salad.

Although we had been passionate fellow eaters from our first date all through our fourteen years together, neither of us had much appetite. We didn’t discuss the fact that we both knew that I was leaving the marriage. We didn’t talk about the terrible summer we’d just had, during which Jon had worked night and day in his studio to get his photographs ready for the show, and I had gone very obviously insane with grief, longing, and panic. We sat over our dinners, trying to eat our fish, making quiet, grim jokes about being the only game in town.

After dinner, we crossed the street for a drink, because there seemed to be another customer in the outdoor bar attached to the hotel, a man sitting alone, hunched over his laptop, wearing headphones. He turned out to be the owner and local expat; he was American, and he had married the daughter of the previous owner. He was a chain-smoking, shambolic, entertaining, obsessive music buff who mixed drink after drink for us – Herradura mixed with a weirdly delicious neon-blue soda – while he played us choice, rare old R&B and jazz he’d downloaded into his computer. At about 2 in the morning, we got up to go. He begged us not to leave. There were so many more songs he wanted to play for us.

We crossed the street to our dark, cavernous, vast hotel and climbed the stairs to our room. Its tiled floor was slick with condensation, and the air was stuffy and humid. We opened the window and went to bed. I lay awake for a long time, listening to the wind blowing steadily off the ocean.

In 2007, my then-husband and I went down to Mexico City for our friend Janice’s show in an art gallery there. We stayed at our usual place, the Hotel Isabel in the historical center, a colonial hotel built around a balustraded staircase and three-story courtyard with a huge skylight. The Isabel has enormous, cheap rooms furnished in basic-sixties drab with floor-to-ceiling casement windows that open onto the loud, heavily trafficked, cobblestoned streets.

There’s a bar downstairs off the entryway, a long dim room with wobbly tables and a TV. We drank our tequila there without sangrita because, instead of mixing tomato juice with spices and fruit juices, they poured a premade mix out of an industrial-sized jug that looked, and tasted, like neon cough syrup. Off the Isabel’s ornate lobby, with its leather brass-studded couches, oil paintings, stained glass, and giant fish tank, was a small restaurant where we went every morning for chilaquiles – that insanely delicious dish of fried tortilla strips simmered in salsa verde with scrambled eggs, pulled chicken, queso blanco, and refried beans.

The gallery showing Janice’s work, La Refaccionaria, was on the ground floor of a 17^th century building in a narrow mews. Janice was showing a series of deliberately ugly-beautiful life-sized latex heads that bristled with knobs, wens, moles with sprouting hair, squinty heavy-lidded eyes, and thick lips, all the things plastic surgeons are paid a lot of money to change or eradicate. She had created an array of these grotesque, disembodied, colorful, funny, strangely gorgeous heads on pedestals. A crowd of people, most of them old friends, since the art world of Mexico City is a tightly-knit community, stood around drinking tequila out of small plastic cups and smoking and yakking.

Afterwards, a group of about fifteen of us took taxis to Covadonga, an old traditional dominos hall in Roma where men in their shirtsleeves sit tersely around small tables and keep score for decades on end, or so it seems. The art world of Mexico City seems to like to descend there after openings, for reasons possibly having to do with the historical clack of dominoes. We ordered plates of Spanish food, their specialty — fabada asturiana, a stew of fava beans and pork; potato, onion, and egg tortilla; and pulpos a la gallega, octopus with paprika, garlic and coarse salt.

The day after the opening, we met Janice in the Zocalo, and the three of us went into the Catedral Metropolitana de la Asunción de María, the biggest cathedral in the Americas. We wandered around the aisles and chapels and naves, gawping at the shadowy vastness of the place, struck through with shafts of light from faraway high-up windows. Near the front, we peered through velvet ropes at the enormous plumb bob hanging straight down from the ceiling, tracing elliptical lines in a layer of sand to show the movement of the stone floor, settling through the years, sinking and shifting with each earthquake and caving-in of the land it’s built on, a former Aztec sacred site.

We left the cathedral and bought plastic sacks of tepache, fermented pineapple juice with a chunk of ice, with straws sticking out of them, from a street vendor. Although we’d been to Mexico City several times before, it was fun being there with Janice. She’s Eastern European Jewish, born and raised in New York City, but she looks very much like a Mexican of Spanish descent – she is tiny, with hazel almond-shaped eyes and long thick wavy black hair and pale, creamy skin. She lived in Mexico City for 7 years, in the 1980s and early 90s, and she speaks Mexican Spanish fluently. Walking with her through the streets of D.F., we felt as if we were in the hands of a native guide.

She led us from the Zocalo over to the famous Bar l’Opera, with its bullet hole in the ceiling, legendarily made by Pancho Villa, galloping through on a horse. While we sat at a small wooden table in the bar area with a couple of rounds of tequila, Janice ordered caracoles en chipotle. The snails were small and garlicky and surprisingly tender. We sucked them out of their curly little shells and watched the afternoon crowd come and go and talk and smoke and drink and eat under the high, gilded, baroque ceiling, all of us reflected in the old beveled mirrors.

Back in New York, about a year later, after Jon and I had split up, Janice and I found ourselves single and lonely at the same time. We cooked for each other or went out for dinner at least once a week. She can’t eat gluten, like me, and, to make things even more complicated, she also can’t eat dairy, so our meals were of necessity limited and proscribed. When we went out together, we felt like special-needs, high-maintenance nudniks, interrogating the waiters, deliberating over menus, sometimes even sending things back, but when we cooked for each other, our meals were relaxed and luxurious-feeling.

I loved going over to her top-floor walk-up apartment in the East Village and sitting at her  wooden table, drinking wine and talking, while she bustled around. She put on Mexican music and set out bowls of freshly roasted pepitas with sea salt, rice crackers with rich goat cheese, pulpo in garlic sauce, and red pepper-spiced green olives. While she cooked, we drank the wine I’d brought, and then we opened another bottle to drink with dinner.

Dinner could have been pescado en achiote, fish baked in banana leaves, or fish and scallop ceviche, or pollo pipian, chicken in pumpkin sauce with green chili. Whatever it was, it was always so perfectly cooked and savory and fresh and interesting that we were temporarily, happily unaware of our irritating dietary restrictions. We dined together like normal people, like people who could eat whatever the hell we wanted.

Fish in Banana Leaves

For 2 people, buy one pound (2 good-sized filets) of very fresh, firm ocean fish, such as red snapper or grouper.

Peel a head of garlic. Blend the cloves in the blender with enough olive oil, about ¼ cup, to make a thick paste.

Rub this olive oil/garlic mixture into the fish on both sides and then cover the fish with dried leaves of the Mexican herb hoja santa (available at Mexican specialty stores).

Wrap each filet in a banana leaf and tie into a packet with cooking twine. Bake the packets on a cookie sheet in a preheated 350 degree oven until done, about 20 minutes.

Serve with basmati rice with roasted corn, and kale cooked in olive oil with garlic.

For dessert, serve chocolate or coconut goat’s milk ice cream and glasses of a light dessert wine like vin santo.