The Joy of Reading About Cooking

The Joy of Reading About Cooking

There were at least two cookbooks by the actor and author Madhur Jaffrey, whose clear, confident voice I latched on to immediately. A pink-and-blue box was filled with recipe cards in different people’s handwriting, crusted over in places, stained. I sifted through this box, pretending to reorganize its contents, reading the old newspaper clipping that had gone fuzzy and soft, my grandfather’s notes in the margins in runny blue ink.

Maybe I would have learned this reading anything, but I learned it reading cookbooks: Words can be used to make an idea more precise, or more vague, to make something clear or to blur its edges. Some writers are good at imagining people who don’t live a life exactly like their own, and others seem incapable.

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A small, peach-colored copy of “The London Ritz Book of Afternoon Tea,” published in 1986, became my comfort reading. There was no explanation for it being in the house. It was filled with nostalgia for Edwardian London, and its recipes mercilessly enforced all sorts of snotty rules, including that when baking one should use “only the best quality chocolate” and that tea bags were “never a good idea.” But I liked the sentences, and it fit in my school bag, so for two months I took it everywhere with me, reading a recipe for tea cake or meringues on the bus, or between orthography classes. Finger sandwiches at a posh hotel seemed like such a fantasy, reading about it would kick in like a sedative, immediately soothing. Foreign cakes, the tea book told me, held “a frisson of wickedness,” but won over the English with their “delectable foreign ways.”

I started the recipe for rose petal jam, collecting a liter of rainwater in a dirty bucket and snipping the roses that bloomed along the stone wall between our house and the neighbor’s. I covered the washed, shredded petals in sugar overnight, but I never made it to the next step.

Before the end of the year, my handwriting changed, the language in my dreams, everything. I made friends, watched French cartoons, read only French books and comics. I wrote my name with an accent on the e, showing people in advance how to mispronounce it. Marielle was my best friend, and she came to school on Wednesdays, which were half-days, with wet hair that smelled like lavender. She’d laugh and correct me if I got something wrong â€" a gendered article, usually â€" but it wasn’t that often anymore. And after I had slept over a half-dozen times, Marielle’s mother stopped fussing, stopped asking me what I would and would not like, stopped talking to me delicately, like a thing that might break. “Come downstairs,” she’d shout, when dinner was ready. “Wash your hands. Eat.”

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