I Didn’t Marry Her For Her Cooking

It’s said the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but trust me, my stomach was the last organ involved when I fell in love with my wife.

I married her for many reasons. Cooking was not one of them. In her family an adventurous gourmet experience was to roast a chicken for Sunday dinner. To defrost a frozen Sarah Lee cake was an exercise in rocket science. Daring international cuisine was a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti. Sandy didn’t know what pizza was until her teens. She, like her mother before her received no instruction in nutrition or food preparation. When we met she had no idea about what most vegetables even looked like let alone how prepare them. She recounts long standoffs at the dinner table over slimy, overcooked spinach, battles that she invariably won.

And fruit? Had Eve the same aversion to fruit as Sandy, we’d all still be in the Garden of Eden. “What? You want me to eat THAT? Get lost, you creepy Serpent.” Her aversion to fruits and veges, as well as several other healthful food groups, fortunately, was gradually overcome after our marriage. I patiently demonstrated how delicious foods that she formerly wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole could actually be. For example, I sliced a tomato so thinly you could see through it and hid it in her tuna sandwich, then gradually made the slices thicker. Soon, she became a lover of the excellent Jersey tomatoes available to us in Philadelphia. Veges were lightly cooked, not cremated. It was a revelation. Fruit was a little more challenging. It took some time for her to stop having a kind of puckered up look on her face when she ate it. I affectionately referred to it as her “fruit face.”

Shortly after our marriage, she came home from work to the smell of homemade, from scratch, chicken soup. “Mmm, smells good,” she said, “what is it?” ” Chicken soup,” I told her. Perplexed, she looked around the kitchen. “Soup? But where’s the can?” she asked.

Sandy picked up some decent chops in the kitchen over the years, but she always preferred to spend her time making art. Often dinner prep waited for my return home from work, which was fine with me. When I retired, I took over the cooking completely. That went on for 15 years. Then ALS happened and robbed me of that pleasure and her of her cherished studio time. By then her cooking skills had become, let us say, a bit rusty.

Wanting to continue healthful, homemade cooking, we embarked on the process of collaboration, with Sandy at the stove doing the physical work while I provided directions from my seat at the kitchen table. Initially this led to a little friction. There were a few obstacles we needed to overcome, including Sandy’s general aversion to taking orders, and her preference for following recipes slavishly and measuring everything meticulously. I cook from the gut, improvisational style. I had to estimate how many measures of this or that ingredient to add so she could use her measuring devices. Because I had become skilled at using an efficient order of steps and a minimal number of bowls, pans and utensils, I, sometimes to her annoyance, micromanaged each step. But she started seeing the method in my madness and now is automatically being more efficient. She still needs to measure, though.

Compounding the challenge is the havoc my disease has wreaked on my tastebuds and a general reduction in my appetite. We thread the needle between what I can tolerate and what best serves our nutritional needs. It’s not easy, but as in all the other things my disability has demanded of her, my dear sous chef has taken on the challenge without complaint.

No. I didn’t marry her for her cooking, but what I did marry her for shines through every day in our kitchen; her devotion, caring and commitment. I must have seen a glimmer of these qualities even while blinded by her youthful beauty. They remind me every day of how lucky I was to have found her.