The best purchase I ever made
Reflections on 30 years in the kitchen
My first major purchase was a knife from the now-defunct Chef’s Catalog. I saved up my babysitting money in 1998 and spent almost $100 on a Henckels 8-inch chef’s knife. If we measure spending by cost per use, that knife is the best purchase I ever made. After 27 years, I still use it every day.
I planned to become a chef when I grew up. I devoted hours to studying the admissions information and course catalog for the New England Culinary Institute. I eventually gave up that dream because I didn’t know how to reconcile a career with the expectation that I would get married and give birth to multiple children.
I began baking bread when I was 8 years old. I would measure the ingredients into our bread machine and press start. As the family grew, one loaf of bread from the bread machine couldn’t feed the whole family. I would pull out the large stainless steel mixing bowl from the restaurant supply store and knead the dough for 6 loaves at a time.
I stopped baking bread for many years after leaving my parents’ house, but I picked it up again in 2020 as the walls closed in on me. One of my colleagues gave me a tiny container of sourdough starter right before the world shut down and I dedicated myself to keeping that starter alive as cities used refrigerator vans to hold the dead bodies that overflowed the morgues.
I measured time by feeding and rising cycles. Every time the anxiety rose inside me, I retreated into the kitchen to stretch and turn my dough. I perfected a drying method for the starter and sent the flakes out in envelopes to friends around the country.
I lost myself in the kitchen. I found myself in the kitchen. Cooking was a form of therapy, a shortcut to my parents’ approval, a distraction from the chaos, an outlet for creativity, and the one thing I could do better than anyone else.
Food can be a form of care and community. Or, as my husband observed when we started dating, it can be a platform for cruelty. He watched as my family went around the table and critiqued every aspect of the food I had prepared. I assured him this was normal for our family, so I didn’t mind. But his outsider’s eyes spotted what mine could not—my family’s habit of tearing people down as a means of control.
I don’t have to prove anything with my husband—he will eat almost anything I make (although he put down his foot over a disastrous recipe with radicchio). He teaches me that food is an exchange; a gift that is prepared and accepted. I know that when he is home, mugs of hot tea will appear beside me. “I’m putting on water for tea—would you like some?” means “I love you.” He knows that the smell of tuna fish triggers my panic attacks and saves his tuna for days when I’m out of town. This is a gift. Sometimes he sharpens my 27-year-old knife. This too is love.