A Pound of Flesh

I used to hate the smell of garlic on my fingers. I thought about this Sunday night as I was making lentil soup for me and my upstairs neighbors. It would seem like the smell would last for days. I wish I could describe it. It's difficult to define it aromatically, but I always thought of it as a sticky sort of smell. It stuck to my fingers as a smell, yes, but it was also a smell with a very particular texture: the tiniest of dense, sticky ridges on my skin. I knew the smell itself obviously wouldn't bother me on Sunday, but I rubbed my fingers with dish soap to remove any trace of smell or texture anyway.

This is relevant, I think, for many reasons. For one, smells are never only smells: they emanate from something, they have a texture even if we don't explicitly touch them. (Lilacs smell sweet and dense. Mint is thin, airy; it's more of a veil, whereas lilacs might be something like a chenille throw.) And then when I do smell these days, I believe I smell through my skin. I wish I could make it happen – rest my elbows in lemon dish soap (a trick my friend Nicole learned from a fashion magazine and included in a story) and then smell the lemony scent. Or better yet, put my elbows in lemon halves (doesn't Susan Sarandon's character do this in Atlantic City?) so that the aroma wafts not through my nose, but into this other invisible neurological space where I sense it.

Sunday night was the first time I made dinner for guests in so long that I can't possibly remember the last time I did it. I've lost confidence in my cooking, and I'm just not sure if the things that I have grown to like will taste good to anyone else. I trust my cakes and pies -- partly because of texture (cake is about texture, after all, as well as the proper ratio of ingredients, and at least I know if something is too salty...) and partly because I've determined what pies work for me (apple, lemon meringue, blueberry and lemon curd, chocolate and peanut butter). But savory things are something else; since I can't taste herbs and most spices myself, I've given up using them. Cooking in my head has been helping me of late: I imagine combinations more than specific flavors. I can imagine a complexity that's born out of a few simple ingredients. And in an attempt to please others, I try to bear in mind Julia Child's approach to butter.

So here is what I did:

I started cooking dry French lentils in boiling water. Meanwhile, I fried four slices of bacon left over from my Thanksgiving cornbread-bacon stuffing. To that I added a couple tablespoons of butter and then an entire white onion, chopped into relatively small pieces. Once they began to become translucent and bacony, I added two lovely diced Yukon gold potatoes to begin to cook and to take on the flavor of the onions, bacon, butter. At this point, things became complicated for me. Since I had decided on a one-dish meal (along with cheese and fresh bread on the side and a tiny apple pie for dessert), I worried about the heartiness of the stew, but I hadn't wanted to add in too many additional vegetables because I had a particular, simpler flavor and texture in mind. So I had gotten two pieces of sausage to increase the heartiness (seemed it might be nice with the potatoes, and I thought my guests would like it). In opening up the casings and adding the meat to the mix, I realized once again why I do not cook with meat and why, in fact, I often don't want to eat meat. Texture. It is unmistakably flesh. I can't make an ethical argument here, as my own habits are wildly inconsistent and largely dependent upon a balance of desire and denial (remember the bacon). But my relation to meat since the surgery has had everything to do with texture; I cannot taste particular meats as they specifically taste. They function as delivery apparati for other flavors, but I know meat in and of itself mainly by texture. The sausage in my pan did not look like a particular piece of an animal (as do chunks of beef or a bite of chicken), but -- well -- it looked an animal all ground up, and my powers of denial could not stop me from thinking about it until I threw the lentils into the pan, added the vegetable broth (I said I was inconsistent!), and allowed the ingredients to come together as one big stew. I turned my attention to the more virtuous kale at this point – simmering it a bit before tossing it into stew. Gaining just a little distance – and I'm not proud that I needed it, my vegetarian friends – I began to think, again and again, "I need to go whole hog vegetarian."