In the pilot episode of HBO’s hit series Six Feet Under, funeral director Nathaniel Fisher Sr. is hit by a bus while driving home on Christmas Eve. Receiving news of her husband’s untimely death, Ruth Fisher hurls first the phone, then the Christmas dinner she is in the midst of cooking, to the ground. A tray of roasted meat and vegetables clatters to the floor. Amidst staccato shrieks, she sweeps jars, pots, knives and plates from the worktop, then sits hunched against the oven, the dismantled debris of a feast around her feet. A ladle, slicked with grease, lies redundant on its side. ‘Your father is dead,’ she tells her son. ‘And my pot roast is ruined.’
The preparation of food is so often framed as an act of care and devotion that scenes like this are all the more unsettling by contrast. A nourishing love language that conflates heart and stomach, cooking a meal for someone is a means of making manifest our regard or affection. It might be a way of saying the unsayable, or a gentle reminder of our enduring fondness. It might be a grand gesture, or the simple daily ritual of ensuring those we love are ready to face the day, or slay the monsters under the bed, on a full stomach. Love is not, usually, throwing food on the floor.
But for every abundant feast prepared for those we hold dear, there are also a series of shadowy, truncated doppelgangers: the meals that never were. The Christmas feast abruptly overturned in a frenzy of grief. The romantic diner à deux that soured before it even started. The wedding cake order, unfulfilled when someone changed her mind. The self-care supper whose ingredients never made it to the counter as their exhausted purchaser succumbed to the sweet oblivion of sleep in the midst of crushing depression. The quesadillas, instantly unmade when their intended recipient suddenly found herself in the urgent pangs of labour. The misshapen quinces languishing in a bucket outside a front door somewhere on a mountainside, never to soften into syrupy russet tenderness and fated to remain as bitter as the goodbye that saw them left behind.
As with love, food is also inescapably intertwined with stories. I know I’m not alone in finding the notes and anecdotes that preface recipes in cookbooks the most enjoyable part of the package. But sometimes I think about the spectral existence of all those food stories that never were: recipes that never coalesced into concreteness; feasts that never materialised; meals unexpectedly annulled by the wild vicissitudes of life. We hallmark the big occasions through food - the wedding breakfast, the Christening cake, the funeral catering - but so often the fraught journeys to those milestones scupper the best-laid culinary plans. Death, birth, grief, all-consuming love: food can be a vital component of all such moments, but sometimes a roiling tempest of emotions sits uneasily on the stomach.
It’s a cliche from medieval literature and Renaissance sonnets that one pines away for love, but sometimes the wings of a thousand frenzied butterflies really do beat too furiously in the belly to allow space for subsistence. We talk of comfort eating, but in the storm of abject grief, food is often little comfort. We measure out our lives in coffee, soup and dessert spoons, our friendships cemented and charted by meals and beverages shared, but what of those imagined but never brought to fruition, and the diners cruelly taken from the world before they could taste the food we planned just for them?
Recently, one of my close friends left us forever, taken senselessly by an extremely rare form of cancer. We met online as young teenagers, part of a group of misfits who found solace from the bitterness of adolescent existence in a Harry Potter fan forum, where we would chat for hours to people we had never met. We shared our joys and triumphs, our heartaches and frustrations, getting to know each other far better than the classmates we would see every day - and certainly better than our parents, mystified and concerned by our late-night computer activity, knew us at the time. Despite having been online friends for twenty years, she and I only met ‘IRL’ for the first time a few years ago.
As with so many people I have loved, my memories of her are threaded through with food. Cardamom buns savoured in the summer sunshine when we both found ourselves coincidentally in Stockholm. Photos of her lockdown baking projects shared over instagram, leaving me awed and envious. Tales of her culinary adventures in Korea. Platters of coconut bread, crisp samosas and treacly desserts enjoyed together amidst the petrichor of monsoon season in Sri Lanka. My first waffle as a new-found resident of Belgium, savoured as she gave me a crash course in life in this most underrated of countries, and a revelation as I learned that there are, in fact, two types of Belgian waffle (a cause of fierce cultural division). The apple and marmalade loaf cake I took to her as she sat, elfin and resilient, at home in her pyjamas after multiple rounds of chemo, Mary Berry cooking in the background on TV. Never in my wildest dreams did I suspect that would be the last time I would see her, that the next time I made an apple cake it would be to take to her funeral.
We will never cook that Korean feast together, nor enjoy the best pizza in Brussels, just over the road from her old workplace. I will never recreate our favourite Sri Lankan dishes as she sits at my dining table, regaling me with her latest dazzling accomplishment, language learned or self-improvement project completed. There will be no return to the gelateria in Antwerp we stumbled upon together as she kindly accompanied me on a quest to buy a new sofa, nor a repeat of the crêpes with warm cherries she so rhapsodised over as she visited me for the first time in Ghent.
Our food story ends here, then, and yet it also goes on. I will think of her, with a pang deep in my chest, every autumn as I fold chunks of apple and bittersweet shreds of Seville orange into Nigel Slater’s marmalade cake. I will reach for my phone to share with her the latest Asian-inspired baking craze, before remembering she is somewhere beyond the reach of social media now; and perhaps I will bake it anyway as a tribute. I will pour every ounce of love I hold for her into the wedding cake I make for our mutual friend in May, trying to capture in elegaic confectionery a tiny fraction of the beauty she always so insistently saw everywhere in the world. I have a hard preference for the richer, denser Liège waffle, as opposed to the airy, grid-like Brussels variety, but in honour of her I shall revisit that cafe where we sat together and treat myself to a feathery lattice of dough as light and fleeting as her undeservedly short life. Now, I must savour every morsel of this wild, wild world for the both of us.
Somewhere, I like to imagine an ephemeral archive of food stories that should have been, could have been, but never were. While tales of cooking for our loved ones are uplifting and important, the chaotic patchwork of life is littered with unmade meals that tell their own, often fraught, stories. Stories of extremes, of ruptures, of shattering grief and blinding joy. Stories so visceral, so literally hard to stomach, that they often defy our attempts to put them down in words. Perhaps we need those stories too, in our darkest times, to remind us that we are not alone.
For Miruna. Rest in peace.