It was a feeling from day one – a feeling indescribable in a single word. So many different words came instead; words that came and come to mind looking into wandering eyes with wondering eyes like hers in clothes she had borrowed from my closet.
“I want something to eat. And if there isn’t anything leftover when we’re finished, we’ll simply make more.”
When things were still withheld and unsteady. When our imaginations ran wild and unchecked. When tension that could be cut with a knife was used to make noodles instead, and prepare dishes we knew would taste both different and the same, familiar and new, every time we sat down to eat.
When words fail it is fingers and toes, breath and heartbeats, inexhaustible passion and heat of the kitchen that reminds us why we stand so close to each other. Why we fall asleep intertwined, all knees and cheeks and sweet words left on the pillow.
Feeling and flavor are inextricably linked. Some people don’t need much to be happy. They don’t need decadent meals, or the time spent over stoves and ovens.
A recipe for candied orange peel
Ingredients:
- 2ea large oranges, 1/4in cut off top & bottom
- 4 cups sugar, in 4 different cups
- 3 cups water
Directions:
- Cut the peel of each orange vertically into 4 pieces
- Remove each section and cut into segments 1/4in thick
- Cook for 15min in a pot of boiling water. Drain, rinse, then drain again.
- In a medium saucepan, bring 3 cups sugar and 3 cups water to boil. Stir to dissolve sugar.
- Add your peel. Return to boil.
- Bring down the heat and let your peel simmer until tender (45 minutes). Then drain.
- Toss peel and 1 cup sugar on a baking sheet. Separate strips. Gently move your peel from the sugar and place on a soft bed of foil.
- Wait, leave it, until the coating is dry.
There is an understanding about what this means, and maybe it is the same people that would never experience passion the same way that don’t understand this and have no need to: The clawing and needing and wanting that translates the kitchen into sheets pulled taut across the mattress.
Our feelings start the morning with espresso kisses and buttered toast with fresh fruit and champagne. Together lost completely. Why breakfast in bed maintains the allure that it does: There are no clothes necessary to dine this way.
It starts with a feeling deeper inside. A low rumble, asking to be satiated. This leads to the heat of the fire on the stove. This sets the mind and body in motion. It creates a shiver. The blast of the refrigerator and all the colors inside. The sound of cupboards opening, closing. The faucet running, the sun behind us. The skillet on the stove getting hotter, rings of fire, sizzling, sending smoke into the air. The cold metal of silverware that makes you wonder, for a moment, if it might be better to just eat with your hands. Reach for salt and sugar, the table covered in mixing bowls and melting butter.
There’s a German word that helps to describe this particular brand of anticipation – one which has no real English equivalent or translation:
Vorfreude
{n.} The joyful, intense anticipation that comes from imagining future pleasures.
We stay this way. And then it ends with a taste. Something familiar. The taste of sugar, but not only, the smell of something so sensual cooking in butter but not always, the corks of champagne bottles shooting toward the ceiling and then back to the table covered in chocolate, flour, cream, candle wax.
But these are just words. These words pale in comparison to the actual feelings they are meant to capture, unworthy of the the feelings they describe. How these words fail to tell the world what it is we actually want. To capture the reason we fall in love. The reason we crave the taste of strawberries in summer.