I Want To See You Full

I wrote this essay towards the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic to be read aloud for The Racket reading series. The prompt was “Hunger” and I immediately turned to soups. I love cooking for people and I miss having folks over for dinner desperately. My favorite thing to cook is soup, any soup, all soup, and most thing resembling soup.

I have been cooking since a very young age. My Mom had two jobs when I was growing up and that meant I needed to learn some home basics pretty early on. Necessity is the mother of home economics and my mother was at work. Just tankard stuff really, how to do laundry, how to use the stove, how to scare away strangers that might knock on the door, how to beat Ultimate Weapon in Final Fantasy VII, etc. Nothing wild or too demanding, but responsibilities, you know? Big kid shit. 

Cooking quickly became a favorite hobby of mine; I also love doing laundry, which I know is weird, but that’s a whole other essay called “The Right Way To Fold Towels.” 

Turning disperate ingredients into a meal is something like close up magic. I’m struggling at this moment, because something deep inside of me wants to turn this brief simile into a long winded periphrastic analogy using the plot of The Prestige, but no one needs that. 

In the writing of this, I turned to my boyfriend and asked him how that sentence worked out loud, and he misunderstood that I simply wanted him to say I sounded smart. Magic. When you cook, you transmute matter. It’s alchemical, it’s science that you get to eat. Every plated meal should be accompanied by a loud and regal “Ta-Dah!”

I’m proud to say that during this health crisis 75% of my meals have been some permutation of soup. The most versatile and ever evolving vector of nutrients, primordial and present in every culture. I love soup. Some folks ride or die for a nice steak, and that’s great for them, but I’m out here stanning soups. Blended to bone broth, noodles to rice. I’m here for all of the soups. 

Soup was the first meal I was able to cobble together for myself in the earliest days of my latchkey childhood. I lived for Top Ramen, the first babysitter, the popper prince whose affordability was matched only by it’s limitless potential. One packet of ramen with it’s gloriously MSG rich flavor packet could be stretched out into 3 after school meals by my delicate hand. Flavors for days, noodle the house down. When I Zhuzh’d it up with leftover chicken and frozen peas, all of the sudden I was a child chef wunderkind, a young Julia Child in shorts and an X-Men t-shirt. I could be told nothing. 

Instant Ramen was invented by Taiwanese-Japanese inventor Momofuku Ando in 1958, about a decade after the scrappy businessman was jailed for tax evasion.n Ando was inspired by the continuing food shortages in post-war Japan, after seeing a large group of people huddled around a Ramen cart, Ando set out to develop a method of producing pre-cooked noodles with a longer shelf life then that of fresh or frozen noodles. Momofuku has a lot of great Zen Koan quotes like “Peace will come when people have enough noodles to eat” and “mankind is noodlekind.” The concept of “Noodlekind” is kind of terrifying and Lovecraftian but what are you going to do. 

When I got older, I discovered that cooking for others multiplied the pride I felt when cooking for myself. My Mom says you can’t make soup for just one person,  you get started adding elements to it and all of the sudden you’ve made enough for a whole army. My Mother’s hyperbole tends towards the military, one of her two jobs was the National Guard. Tortilla Soup was her specialty when I was a kid, she would make a giant pot for just the two of us, and then freeze it for future meals. 

I especially enjoyed cooking for my friends who didn’t know how to cook. With $15 I could feed a whole apartment full of roommates and that included a cheap bottle of wine. I started hosting budget dinner parties in my early twenties and those lead to annual Friendsgivings and Friendsmases which in turn became larger and larger each year. I realized I love seeing people full, being able to witness that sort of direct cause and effect so clearly on people’s faces. I made food, you got full, things aren’t so bad. 

Cooking a meal became an accomplishment that I could achieve even when everything else in my life felt unstable and confusing, which was too often. I couldn’t control so much in the world but I could manipulate ingredients into magic. I learned that I could make people feel good in a very real, universal way. I may not be able to fix everything, but I can feed people. 

I’m lucky, I still get to cook for my boyfriend through this ordeal. Sometimes we cook for each other, sometimes we do the cirque du soleil act that is cooking together in a tiny kitchen. My favorite times are when he’s busy with something else, and I get to cook for him in relative secret. I might tell him what ingredients I’m going to use, but he doesn’t know exactly how they will end up. 

It’s always so exciting to see a meal come together after an hour of tinkering away in the kitchen, spices strewed about the counter, vegetables asunder. And then suddenly, as if by magic, its final form: A radiant bowl of soup, steam rising from the surface like the cartoon energy emanating from a super saiyan, what could be more perfect. I look forward to my boyfriend’s reaction every time, and when I finally pull back the curtain, beaming and shout “It’s ready,” what I really mean is “Ta-Dah!”