A Lone Chef, But Not a Lonely One, At Home and Abroad

I lived in the spare room of a Parisian family’s apartment for the majority of the fall semester, and though I had a number of reasons for wanting to leave, being unable to cook for myself was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The family’s apartment was immense and elegant, in a neighborhood that has been described as the Upper East Side of Paris, but I was far from comfortable there. I felt like an intruder in the home of my host family, which expressed no interest in getting to know me and went days without speaking to me. When I was at the apartment, I burrowed away in my room, trying in vain to ignore the parents’ latest screaming match on the other side of my thin bedroom wall.

But the thing that made it truly unbearable was not being able to cook. I had been told I would have access to the kitchen to prepare meals on the four nights a week that I wasn’t eating with the family. However, I never knew when the intimidating, high-strung matriarch would be in the kitchen, and the square foot of refrigerated space that she begrudgingly gave me at the beginning of my stay slowly shrank as the family’s stores infiltrated it. It was rare during the semester—only during those occasional weekends when they took off for their country house without telling me in advance—that I breathed a sigh of relief and dared to slip into the kitchen to make myself an omelette.

When I moved to my own place in a neighborhood that has been described as the Queens of Paris, I felt a great sense of relief. I also found myself suddenly, for the first time since coming to France, faced with the pleasant obligation of preparing food for myself.

For inspiration, I read Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone, an anthology of personal essays and occasional recipes edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler. The authors featured in the book don’t seem to agree on much—they range the spectrum from Amanda Hesser, who prepares herself “glorious feasts” (a typical meal includes truffled eggs, fresh butter lettuce with chive vinaigrette, a glass of sherry, and a dulce de leche ice cream sundae), to Ann Patchett, who subsists on saltines with salsa when she lives alone. The consensus among the book’s motley crew of solitary eaters, if there is one, is that eating alone is a deeply personal act. Cut off from the expectations and demands of others, we are left with only our own appetite to appease, whether it be extravagant or crude.

But, as I’ve realized since I moved, even when we cook for only ourselves and eat alone, we don’t do so in a vacuum. A solo cook doesn’t conjure up meals just to his liking out of thin air. We must obtain ingredients from the outside world, and, in doing so, we allow the place where we are living to have some say in how we feed ourselves.

In New York, the meals I cooked for myself in the grubby communal kitchen on the fifth floor of 600 W. 113th street were based on produce from the Greenmarket and the wholesome ingredients that could be found, if not at Morton Williams, then certainly at the Garden of Eden. Dishes that could fit into a large-ish, one-serving bowl were my specialty—a base of brown rice or pasta, some tofu, tempeh, or canned chickpeas for protein, and canned chipotle peppers or curry powder for character. Though I wasn’t conscious of it, the meals I made for myself were a reflection of the international, fast-paced, and health-conscious personality of New York.

In Paris, I find myself drawn not only to French ingredients, but also to a more typically-French style of eating. I still buy the legumes and vegetables I have always liked, but now I enhance my lentils or cauliflower with preserved lemon from the Moroccan stand at the Sunday market, roasted chestnuts bought in a paper cylinder from the street vendor, slices of thick creamy chèvre from its doorknob-sized crottin. I serve my creations in smallish portions, and I like to round out my meal with salty cornichons, a simple salad, baguette, wedges of fatty cheese, and dried figs. My solo eating in France does not always take the form of Amanda Hesser’s “glorious feasts,” but it has quietly taken on the character of my new home.

To say that my solo cooking endeavors have been influenced by my place of residence is not to say that I am making something other than what I want to eat. What I eat when I am by myself comes from a mix of my own identity and that of my surroundings, but my identity has been colored by my surroundings. Eating alone is a deeply personal act, but, like all eating, it is a communal act, too. Cooking for myself makes me feel more connected to the rest of Paris than living with a French family ever did.