Women, Men, and Dionysus

Cooking in another person’s kitchen, no matter how well equipped and enticing that space may be, is a momentous challenge. Somehow I don’t feel the same smooth confidence and panache, but am constantly searching for utensils and sparring with the unfamiliar stove. Furthermore, while at home I always cook with the contents of my pantry hovering at the back of my mind, this is not possible in a foreign kitchen. That dash of smoked Spanish paprika is not there when it would lend the final touch to a dish; and those good old standby jugs of chicken stock are conspicuous by their absence. It is as if the cook is a violinist and the kitchen an unfamiliar instrument.

Yet despite this handicap, and with the help of the gracious Danielle (who calmly suffered me charging into her kitchen armed with a huge cast iron skillet and causing a decent amount of mess and chaos), we managed to whip together a passable meal. I say only passable because of my own silly mistakes. Instead of long-grained white rice (the proper base for a paella), I grabbed aborio from the supermarket self, so that we had no choice but to make a slightly clumsy Italian-Spanish mutt of a dish: a sort of bastardized paella-flavored risotto. (These sins are necessary to confess in the hopes that I shall be given absolution by the gods of gastronomy .) Yet the contents of my skillet were decently edible by the time the four of us gathered on Danielle’s patio for dinner. The stock and wine thickened grains of rice providing a bed for flash fried jumbo shrimp, paprika dusted squid, and steamed mussels. It’s hard to completely bugger it up when you’re working with fresh, high quality seafood. And although It wasn’t true paella, by any stretch of the imagination, neither was it a total disaster.

So we sat munching our meal on the rooftop deck, looking across as the sun set behind Green Lake and its industrious power walkers. Aleah was leaving. This fact, combined with the crisp tang of fall in the air, lent a slightly subdued tone to the evening. We ate, chatted a bit, drank a little wine, and parted: Aleah to finish her packing, the rest of us to get on with our daily lives. And I couldn’t help concluding reluctantly on the drive home, that this farewell girls night was a meal. It was a decent meal rather than an authentic feast.

Later, I mused on the secret ingredient in a feast. What is it that turns ordinary food into a sort of communion? I know it cannot be reduced to the quality of the meal, as I have eaten exquisite dinners in decidedly frigid, un-feast-like settings, and conversely I have dined on the most basic of food in an abundantly festive environment. No, food alone does not make a feast. Perhaps, I though jokingly to myself, men are the secret ingredient? After all, this girls night was the first of my fifty-two feasts that has not felt like a true feast. Yes, I continued thinking, more seriously now. It makes sense, in a deliciously politically incorrect sort of way. Men tend to have bigger appetites. They tend to worry less about calories and demolish food with more abandon. They also bring a sort of subtle balance to a gathering, a grounded solidity that I somehow feel is lacking in a purely female environment.

Of course, perhaps I have simply outgrown girl’s night, shocking as the thought may be. Last time, I wrote about the unique nature of this ritual, of how it sustained me through the trials of high school and beyond. Perhaps I have finally grown up; familiar enough now with the landscape of my own femininity, so that I no longer need the sisterhood of fellow explorers constantly by my side.

I am not sure what the secret is (so don’t get too cocky, you men out there). Yet there is an intangible difference between a meal and a feast. The latter has a sort of magnanimous flavor, don’t you think? It has an epic expansiveness about it. I guess it takes a while to seduce Dionysus, the god of wine and abundance--but that’s the quest I’m on, friends.