What Carla Lalli Cooked After Her Divorce
In 2012, the poet Sharon Olds published a collection, which would later win the Pulitzer Prize, about the dissolution of her thirty-two-year marriage. She called it “Stag’s Leap,” after her ex-husband’s favorite wine label. In one poem, “Attempted Banquet,” she describes a summer meal they’d hosted not long before they split—“lugging of shellfish in coolers, boiling / and bouillabaissing”—and her realization, later, that behind his “joyless labor / in the heat” and the salmon that “undulated out the kitchen door in its / half-slip of thin cucumber scales” lay the fact that he’d been planning to leave her. Too few guests attended, she writes,
In Olds’s poem, food is both poignant metaphor and quotidian backdrop, evidence that life happens even as it’s falling apart. It plays an analogous role in Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel “Heartburn,” a seminal divorce text which appears to fictionalize the dramatic end of her marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein. Ephron’s narrator and alter ego, Rachel Samstat, writes cookbooks and hosts a TV show. Even as she divulges the humiliating circumstances that lead to the breakup—she discovers that her husband is cheating on her while she is seven months pregnant—she expounds matter-of-factly and almost cheerfully on food, weaving more than a dozen recipes into the narrative. Some encapsulate wistful memories (bread pudding eaten on a romantic trip to New Orleans); others Rachel’s efforts to comfort herself: “Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin cold slice of butter to every forkful.” She includes instructions for the Key-lime pie she throws in her husband’s face the night she realizes that the relationship is unsalvageable, and for the vinaigrette she teaches him to make on the surprisingly tender night before she moves out.
In the literature of divorce, food is often marked by its absence—by the rupture of routine, the disappearance of appetite, and the sudden weight loss that is almost inevitably framed as a morbid silver lining. “Maybe it’s God’s way of gearing you up to go back into the dating world,” the actress and writer Isabel Gillies suggests in her 2009 memoir “Happens Every Day.” Gillies’s book, a tale of Waspy spousal desertion, was, perhaps, ahead of its time; it didn’t capture the Zeitgeist in the way that Belle Burden’s “Strangers” did this year. (Which is a shame—Gillies’s book is vivid, funny, and self-aware where Burden’s skews grim and self-serious.) Burden, too, grew thinner after her husband left. “I can see how you’re suffering,” she remembers an acquaintance telling her.
Yet the newly single woman—it’s almost always a woman writing a divorce book—is also prone to culinary epiphany. In many stories, the end of a marriage prompts the rapturous rediscovery of tastes, habits, carnal desires. Gillies recounts being miserable at brunch with her children and soon-to-be ex-husband until she takes a bite of a dish that seems to demand, she writes, “a culinary leap of faith”: pancakes made with asparagus, ham, and Gruyère, topped with fried eggs and served with maple syrup. “It was sublime,” she writes. “I called out, ‘Sweet lord, these are incredible!’ . . . At that very moment, my life was being saved. I thought if I could get such a kick out of these pancakes, I hadn’t died.”
Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love,” the defining divorce memoir of the early two-thousands, is animated by a similar evangelism. If Gilbert’s soliloquy on Neapolitan pizza is insufferably cute—“I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return”—a passage about needing larger pants is genuinely moving. “I came to Italy pinched and thin,” Gilbert writes. “I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don’t fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late—through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures—into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago.”
This month, Carla Lalli, a former Bon Appétit editor and a best-selling cookbook author, will publish “Food Is a Feeling,” a cookbook-as-divorce-memoir. Though it resembles her other two books, “Where Cooking Begins” (2019) and “That Sounds So Good” (2021)—bibles of technique and inspiration for the busy yet ambitious home cook—Lalli announces, in the introduction, that she’s trying something different. Throughout her career, she’d been advised to maintain a consistent and upbeat writing voice, but she’d recently gone through a metamorphosis, prompted by the end of her twenty-four-year marriage. “With due respect to my former self and to anyone who has cooked my dishes before,” she writes, “it didn’t feel right that my recipe voice should stay the same, because I am not the same.”
Recipe development can be a self-effacing task, obliging the writer to anticipate the appetites and routines of her imagined reader. Lalli’s new recipes, interwoven with essays, are proudly idiosyncratic, tracing the contours of a “tumultuous, pensive, painful, joyful, transformative, celebratory, solitary, and exciting time in my life.” The book begins with a dish that Lalli improvised for dinner with her sister on the night that she moved into a sublet apartment: “Greens, Garlic, and Mom Rice,” with the rice cooked in butter, as their mother prefers. She shares the “Separation Pork Chops” she served after she and her ex-husband broke the news to their children, and the heart-shaped chicken cutlets she made for herself and her younger son after their household cleaved in two. Lalli’s ex hated tomatoes, especially raw ones with their “gooey guts,” she tells us, before pointedly providing a trio of recipes that accentuate their “amniotic” juices and “messy, pulpy” flesh.
In her solitude, Lalli was “flooded with memories” of cooking and being cooked for, and felt inspired to eat whatever she felt like, whether that was popcorn for dinner or a spontaneous glass of sake (against the advice of her therapist). She told me recently that she bucks against the idea that “eating your feelings” is negative, because cultivating a reader’s emotional connection with food is part of her job. “As food writers, we talk about how great it’s going to be when you make this meal for other people, and how lovely of a time you’re going to have—I love these feelings,” Lalli said. Why, she wondered, have we remained attached to the image of “someone creeping down to the freezer at two in the morning to eat Dove bars in secret”?
Rather than feel ashamed of her private bedtime snack, Lalli canonizes it in an arch recipe for “Night Cereal”— a chic Brooklyn mom’s alternative to Liz Lemon’s “night cheese.” It’s made with ice-cold rice milk, a “heaping cup” of crunchy cereal, frozen blueberries straight from the bag, “a few whispers” of maple syrup, and a pinch of flaky sea salt. “The extreme coldness of the milk makes it hard to eat the cereal quickly, stretching the experience—layers of flavors and textures, the spoon, the bowl, the crunches, and the slurps,” Lalli explains. “Night cereal had the power to turn my mood around.” “When I finished,” she adds, seeming to relish the innuendo, “I felt content, taken care of.”
To sell the book, Lalli had to convince her editor and publisher that “the conversation had changed around divorce,” she told me. They worried about portraying food as something other than “the fun bits”; her aim to convey “that food exists in hard times, and as a form of coping” seemed to freak them out. The book’s tone can be frank and disarmingly raw, occasionally veering toward the woo-woo: “Breathe so your belly rises. Commune with animals,” Lalli intones in a list of mantras for anyone feeling out of sorts. “The thing about spring is that it always comes back, you just have to wait,” she recounts saying in a toast at a vernal-equinox party, which, she notes, moved one or two people to tears.
I didn’t cry reading “Food Is a Feeling,” though I felt validated, and a little relieved, by Lalli’s account of grieving a version of herself. After a close friend died earlier this year, I experienced some of what she describes in the book: a powerful, if painful clarity of want and need; a heightened, nearly euphoric bodily awareness. At first, I’d given myself a hard time about my sudden yen for my children’s chicken fingers and French fries, and my impulse to order a second margarita; through Lalli’s lens, these simply seemed like the things that I required. Luckily for the rest of us, what Lalli required was typically inventive and satisfying: caramelized Japanese sweet potatoes with labne, black vinegar, and chili crisp, to help her build muscle while strength training; a “personal pot of beans and greens,” seasoned emphatically with anchovies, fennel and coriander seeds, turmeric, and Aleppo pepper.
A few years ago, I adopted one of Lalli’s kitchen maxims, “always be downsizing,” or A.B.D.—she recommends continually moving the contents of your refrigerator and pantry to size-appropriate containers as you make your way through them, to keep the shelves uncrowded. As I read and cooked from “Food Is a Feeling,” the slogan started to seem, too, like a metaphor for life. “Every time you finish what you need to do with an ingredient and relocate it,” Lalli wrote last year in her newsletter, “You create space for yourself.” ♦