How I learned to cook
A prayer at the countertop
Our friends gave us some sugar apples from their tree. Sugar apples are similar to a soursop, to which they’re closely related. Like a soursop, their flesh has a custardy texture, and they’re filled with many seeds in a jacket of fruit pulp.
You can eat them by breaking them open, popping an individual seed in your mouth, slurping off the pulp, and spitting out the seed. My husband and I did that with a couple of them, but one sugar apple is actually a lot to eat that way. The remaining sugar apples were going to spoil if I didn’t figure out what to do with them pretty soon. I didn’t want to throw them away; as our priest reminded us at church this Sunday, wasting food is stealing from the hungry.
So I asked myself, “What would my uncle Glen do in this situation?” Well, step 1 would be to get usable fruit. So I pondered this question further while separating the sugar apple seeds from their jacket of pulp, one at a time.
When I lived in the United States, I used to think I was a good cook. I had a library of fancy cookbooks, in addition to the recipe cards I had inherited from my uncle Glen. I would go to the kind of grocery store that sells 25 different varieties of peanut butter, and purchase the right ingredients, and follow the instructions, and my culinary creations would turn out pretty okay.
Moving to this island taught me how little I know about cooking. It’s one thing to cook when you can just buy whatever ingredient you need whenever you need it; it’s another thing entirely when the ingredients you have are the ones you can find, or grow, or are given to you by friends. The groceries that are shipped here have been filtered through a gantlet of other, bigger islands, which get first choice of items shipped from Europe or the Americas. Almost all of the locally harvested seafood is sold to resorts on bigger islands, or in America. There’s a limited supply of locally-grown produce sold sporadically at a farmer’s market. Imported groceries arrive on Wednesday, and they’re a hodgepodge of brands and items. The small stores here do their best, but they will never be the kinds of places that stock 25 different varieties of peanut butter.
Living here made me learn how to make yogurt, because I couldn’t reliably find it at the store. Once, a few years ago, there was purple cauliflower for sale at the grocery store, and I was so happy I almost cried. I haven’t seen purple cauliflower since then.
According to some recent market research, only 16% of American adults consider themselves to be “capable cooks.”1 This is a statistic I learned from a recent essay by
, who offers this explanation:The issue many Americans have with cooking is our total insecurity about it. This insecurity is not overblown. For many, it stems from a) lack of domestic skills transmission after the 1960s (when Home Economics faded away in public high schools) and b) our worship of culinary celebrities who intimidate/fascinate us and c) our over-indulgence in menu diversity in America’s restaurants that have taught us that we can not possibly endure living inside a rotating list of 4-6 meals, but, instead, we must constantly seek “variety” often in meals we have no idea how to cook at all.
I have little sympathy for this excuse. I graduated from high school in the 1990s, and while home economics was still offered when I was in junior high, the skills it taught were minimal—things I already knew as an child, like how to boil water and make toast. But I still learned how to cook—and well enough that the idea that home cooking means “living inside a rotating list of 4-6 meals” seems insultingly dismissive of the creativity of even the most uninspired home cook. And you know what I have no idea how to cook at all? Sugar apples. And yet, here we are.
Glen would know what to do.
More than half of Americans’ food expenditures are on food eaten in restaurants2—a figure that does not include increasingly popular delivery or takeout restaurant-prepared meals. Of food that is cooked at home, individual serving, ready-to-serve packaged food that just has to be re-heated is increasingly common. There are many reasons that have been proffered for this: Convenience for those so stressed by modern life that the cognitive burden of what to cook for dinner is too much; individualism demanding that each eater be able to consume exactly what she prefers, without any deference to her dining companions’ food preferences in a social setting.
And I can’t be too judgmental. After his funeral, we went to Glen’s favorite restaurant instead of making his baked crab fondue. For Thanksgiving, I make mashed potatoes out of a packet, even though Glen would be mortified.
Cooking is about a lot of things besides nourishment. It’s also about making others happy by providing them food that gives them pleasure to eat, and it’s about pride in being recognized as a good cook. It’s about the satisfaction that comes from making something with your hands—another source of human meaning that modern Americans have increasingly forgotten.
But cooking is also about memory, history, and our ties to the past. “Comfort food” is often the food of one’s childhood, and it’s comforting not just to eat it, but to make it. Among the groceries I miss being able to buy here is the classic package food Rice-A-Roni, the basis of one of my favorite meals my mother made when I was growing up.
My mother never especially enjoyed cooking, but she indulged my interest, buying me ingredients and plying me with the fancier cookbooks she didn’t care for. And of course it’s through her that I knew her brother, my Uncle Glen. Glen was an artistic cook, with an intuitive understanding of which ingredients would pair with others, and a studied knowledge of the physics of cooking. My best recipes are ones he typed on his Selectric, replete with phrases like “or similar” and “to taste,” that for those reasons turn out different every time. Whenever I make those dishes I think of him.
But it’s not just when I’m following one of Glen’s recipes I think of him, and it’s not just cooking that I think about. I think of him when I’m stirring a roux or mulling what the “or similar” would be among the ingredients I do have. When I think of him I think of his cardigans, his twinkling eyes, his laugh, his droll sense of humor, his hospitality. I think of his adventurous spirit, an Oklahoma boy who made a life in New York—an example that helped give me the courage to move from the United States to the faraway foreign island I now call my home. A palate that pairs with both savory and sweet like nutmeg, one of his favorite spices.
And that, I realize, is what I need to pull this sugar apple pulp into a suitable dessert.
Cooking can be a chore for feeding yourself, or it can be an act of reverence, something like a prayer. It can be a way of honoring the people of your past who made you who you are. It can be a reminder to be grateful for them, and a promise to keep their memory alive.
That can be accomplished no matter how erratic your grocery supply, or how limited your skills. And that is how I have tried to learn to cook.
What a great post! Sugar apples have always fascinated me because I’ve been told about them by friends, but I’ve never tasted one myself. Our family of seven has so many dietary issues (medical, allergy) that we only go out to eat on a birthday, and it’s to the same restaurant because it’s the only one that can handle our needs. That means I am constantly cooking and baking, therefore, I have had to become very capable in the kitchen. Though it’s been a trial, it’s saved us money and made me more creative.
In Australia we call this fruit "Custard Apple", My mum used to love them. Like most things, they are easier and cheaper to get at asian fruit markets/grocers.