From Dessert First to None at All
But I still have leftovers
I was planning the meal pretty soon into our first date. We were sitting drinking beers in a little Belgian restaurant, the conversation was going well, I asked her if she liked game, and she said she was up for trying. I started listing off possible menus.
“And what will you do for dessert?” she asked.
“Well,” I replied. “I suspect we will be able to figure something out.”
“Dessert” became our inside joke.
Three days later, she was sitting in my cluttered apartment as I put the finishing touches on our first dinner. I had decided upon buffalo rib-eyes from my neighborhood supermarket, which I presented pan-seared and served with sautéed wild mushrooms and an arugula salad, lightly dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and a sprinkle of Parmesan and pine nuts that I toasted in a skillet. We shared a beer and resumed our banter. I poured a complex red wine, improbably local, and suggested a day trip out to the vineyard. She enjoyed the steak, and after we finished eating we settled on my battered sofa with tumblers of aged Cuban rum.
Our dessert that evening was long and delicious.
A few days later, we were in her sprawling suburban kitchen. I had arrived with a bottle of Oregon pinot noir and she was preparing fish. We may have started that meal with dessert.
Our romance quickly became a relationship. Or rather, I was pulled into it, unexpectedly, surprisingly, partially against my will. But I was happy to find myself dating a similar omnivore with a passion for wine and a fabulous kitchen.
In the mornings, I would receive screenshots of recipes she would discover, and after some back and forth she would decide on one of the options for the next dinner. A few hours later, I’d show up with my aging dog and a bottle of wine, often something I had been saving for a special occasion.
The day’s shopping would be laid out on the counter, and she would print out the recipe she had discovered while I opened up a bottle of wine (she preferred a white or rosé to start, and I tried steering her away from California to France), and get to prepping. As a longtime bachelor, I found it easier to do everything myself than try to sort out the work between us. She appeared content simply to keep me company as I chopped onions and diced garlic (always more than the recipe called for) and measured out spices and seared or sautéed or set up the braise.
She had a habit of taking the chopping boards from the counter and placing them in the dishwasher before I was done with them. I’d complain about the sorry state of her knives. She worried about my liberal use of butter. I’d shake my head when for the umpteenth time she forgot to get the shrimp deveined at the store. (“You know you really don’t have to do that,” she’d reply, standing there with a glass of chardonnay in her hand, as I would grumblingly work on the shells.)
But then, when whatever we were preparing was close to done, I would call her over for a taste and to adjust the seasonings, and she would furrow her brow in consideration — maybe a little salt or a couple of grinds of black pepper, a dash more of cumin or coriander or red chile flakes? And then she would taste whatever it was again, sprinkling in things until the dish was to her liking, and, when satisfied, handing me a spoonful for confirmation. As I finished up, she would put together a salad (which I regarded as unnecessary but she always had to have) and call me over to toss it in an improvised dressing, or would decorate a bowl of rice or couscous with a fistful of parsley or cilantro.
And, at the end of the dinner, stuffed and a bit drunk after some two bottles of wine, we would settle down on her sofa and negotiate a movie or Netflix series and, exhausted from her day, she would veer off to sleep. After a while, we skipped dessert.
Summer came, and with it her fear that we were eating too heavy. She texted me pictures of roasted branzino with fennel, squid ink pasta with cherry tomatoes and garlic, seafood stews. Nevertheless, for my birthday, she presented me with a cookbook specializing in game and a serious bottle of bourbon. My kitchen stuff, too, began to migrate to her place. The Instant Pot that I had purchased on a whim and had never before used found a place on her counter. Various spices and oils and vinegars and the elements of Asian sauces took their rightful place in her cabinets.
In time, her kids got to know me through the leftovers. She had a tendency to overcook (“What can I do, I’m Italian,” she would say, when I asked her why she had bought so much, as if that explained it all), so before we had even met in person, they were enjoying the remains of our pasta and Instant Pot curries, and, occasionally, something a bit more special, like the bacon-wrapped scallops or the ragù di cinghiale over a patiently stirred, buttery polenta.
“They want you to cook for them sometime,” she said one evening as we were well into our first bottle.
“Um, OK,” was my cautious response. I took a significant sip of white Burgundy. “And what do you think we should make?”
As it happened, we settled on game.
The fact that she was a mother of two was something I had more or less tried to bracket out of my mind. Our time together had been shaped by the contours of her shared custody, and I appreciated the distance this provided. But her kids joining us at dinner would add another dimension to our relationship. Things had become more serious.
I was anxious, I admit, about becoming a real presence in her children’s lives; it was one thing to be known as their mother’s friend, a name occasionally mentioned and the unseen force behind the sometimes exotic victuals they would discover in the refrigerator, but quite another to be sitting at the table among them, attempting to make small talk about their junior high school classes and baseball games. And I thought how I might model, in these occasions, some idea of manhood, and the partnership their mother and I were working to establish.
She procured the meat at a local butcher, two slender strips, beautifully red. Rubbed with salt and pepper, seared exactly two minutes a side, perfectly rare, served with a pan sauce of shiitake mushrooms and shallots, butter, and a touch of port. For sides, spätzle and a slow-roasted Vidalia onion confit, the recipe I picked up from my brother-in-law years ago. It was a very serious meal.
And it was a hit in the household. The venison they consumed in minutes, not at all disturbed by its near bloody interior. The older one seemed to regard the confit as a revelation. There were no leftovers that evening.
Other dinners soon followed. The younger one requested tuna, so we came up with wasabi-crusted seared steaks served over a bed of seaweed salad with a side of rice noodles in a peanut sauce. Another time, as a starter for the roast duck we had been talking about for weeks, I attempted to construct dumplings stuffed with minced shrimp and water chestnuts, and had to shoo the older one out of the kitchen as he tried to grab them straight from the steamer. He was obsessed with the onion confit. After that, whenever he would find me working away in the kitchen, he would invariably ask, “Are you making onion confit?” That soon became a part of our repertoire.
She once called just to tell me that when she told the younger I was coming, he asked who was doing the cooking. When she asked why, he replied, “I want to know how excited I should get.”
“Isn’t that so funny?” she said.
And at the table, I would be sure to remind them of their mother’s participation in what we were eating, even as their faces registered skepticism.
Over time, though, our dinners weren’t enough to sustain us. Perhaps cooking served as a distraction from fundamental problems that we could not in the end escape. Our once hot and fast romance quietly mellowed into something more platonic.
I still receive pictures of potential meals every now and then, and I still text her back requesting the recipes of the ones that seem most appealing. But our dinners have become, predictably, less frequent. These days, they are more likely than not to include her boys. We no longer have dessert.
If there happen to be leftovers — which there often are, even with two voracious teenagers at the table — she sends me home with containers filled for the coming days.
I return to my apartment and stuff these leftovers into my refrigerator already cluttered with so many others, some to be consumed and others ignored, and set to drift off to sleep alone, instead of with her on her sofa, thinking about the recipes that she sends me, all the ones we will probably never make. The Instant Pot still remains in her kitchen, my spices and oils and elements of sauces mixed among hers in her cupboard, where I suppose they belong. I intend to take the cookbook back home with me someday.
Jerome Copulsky reads, cooks, and writes in Washington, D.C. He is a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown University.
