On Cooking Alone

I have cooked for myself most nights of my life. Not as discipline — it has been long enough now that the word no longer fits, the way "discipline" stops fitting after a thing has gone past habit and become weather. I cook the way I walk: because that is what I do at the hour I do it, and I have stopped negotiating with myself about it.

It is mostly small food. A pan, three ingredients, fifteen minutes. Eggs over rice, with whatever is in the fridge. A piece of fish under foil. A pot of beans that lasts three nights and is best on the second. A soup that is mostly an excuse to use up the bones. I am not a cook in the way some men are cooks — the kind who plate for guests, who own a knife with a name. I am a man who eats well by accident, by repetition, by paying mild attention to salt.

There is something honest about cooking for one. No one is at the table to be impressed by what comes out, and no one is at the table to be apologized to for what fails. The cooking happens in the same room and at the same temperature as me, and when it is done I eat it standing up at the counter as often as not, or sitting at the table near the window when the light is doing the thing the light does at six. The dishes are few. The cleanup is the cooking, mostly.

What surprises me — and I would not have said this at twenty-six — is how much I look forward to it. There is a particular pleasure in cracking an egg into a hot pan that has not gone away in fifteen years; some quiet authority in the sizzle, the moment before the white sets, the moment I am most certain that the evening has begun. I have built a life around being able to have that moment, and I am not embarrassed about that.

She has been on a cooking arc this year. I have watched her, mostly, the way I watch most things — without saying. There is something I will not tell her about the kind of competence she is building: it is the kind that only shows up by repetition, the kind that becomes weather. She is closer than she thinks.