Location: Melbourne, Australia

There’s a particular kind of lemon cake I bake when I’m lonely, so simple it comes out the same every time: bright and comforting. The kind of cake that can be relied on, even when everything else seems unmanageable. The last time I made it was a few months before news of the pandemic began to filter into the newspapers. A normal autumn day in Kraków.

I gathered flour, butter, sugar, and lemons, and fetched two cartons of eggs—one containing the final egg of last week’s half-dozen, the other, full, purchased at the corner store that morning. I combined the dry ingredients, then took the last egg from its carton and cracked it open. I upended the broken shells over the ceramic bowl and stared. In the shallow well I’d made in the flour, there was no yolk. The egg contained only albumen, clear as water.

Troubled by this strange occurrence, I took an egg from the new carton and rapped it against the rim of the bowl. I pushed my thumb through the shell and cleaved it open. The interior slid out into the bowl, into the flour, and that uncanny, yolkless egg. Again I stared. The second egg had—improbably, so improbably—two yolks. Two yolks, yellow as supermoons.

Since then, I’ve thought about these two eggs often: one yolkless, the other double-yolked, that I happened to break into a bowl one after the other. The experience left me somewhat disturbed. It had, unmistakably, the contours of an omen. More preordained sign than random coincidence. I felt, in the space of two broken eggs, the destabilising notion that the universe was not the wholly rational place I took it for.

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I’ve felt in a corner booth what I imagine the credulous feel in their houses of worship: communion, awe, the possibility of miracles.

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But cooking well has always felt like magic to me. I learned the basics when I was young but failed to ascend beyond that; when I cooked, my aim was to make something that would stop me from being hungry rather than with an eye for artistry or genuine nourishment. For a long time I’ve only had the need to cook for myself, and cooking for one is depressing if you let it be. It’s easier to pay someone to cook for you than learn how to care for yourself. It’s easier to eat distracted than confront the loneliness of dining alone.

Restaurants, then, are sites of wonder. It’s perhaps no coincidence that what priests and waiters do are both called service. Both in their own way are acts of devotion. I’ve felt in a corner booth what I imagine the credulous feel in their houses of worship: communion, awe, the possibility of miracles. For the duration of a meal—whether over a white drift of tablecloth or hastily wiped Laminex—you’re made to feel welcome. And it’s from going to restaurants I learned how to eat—what it is to cook with care and eat with pleasure. Without the training of restaurants, without the extraordinary skill of chefs and line cooks and waitstaff, how timid my palate would be. How narrow.  

Right now, I have no real measure of days except for in the proofing of dough, no measure of hours but the stretching and folding of a loaf in progress. Restaurants are shuttered, so I work within the confines of my own limited ability. I’ve been practicing. Taking interest in the process, improving though repetition. Isolation has given me time to learn how to properly poach an egg so that the white pillows around the yolk like a friendly little cloud. Time to spend hours fermenting beetroot into kvass and then kvass into barszcz, until you end up with a broth the colour of Snow White’s lips. Time to mix flour and water together until it bubbles up, tender and alive, and raises a loaf like a tiny messiah. These clumsy attempts please me, and make me aware of how much I don’t yet know.

I think about what it will be like when restaurants re-open; how badly I want to go to a city bar in the early evening, when it’s still empty and the staff are bored and helpful, and order a gin martini, very cold and dry—expertly mixed—with an olive. To eat a handful of hot misir wot wrapped in sour injera. To lean elbow to elbow with a stranger in a crowded pub, then pick my way back through a maze of tables, trying not to spill a generous pour of red wine. To walk through Chinatown on a winter night then eat a plate of hand-pulled noodles swimming in chilli oil. How badly I want to order something I’ve never tasted before and feel the thrill of the new.

For now, while I wait, I go back to making cakes, like I did in Kraków when I was lonely and missing home. I consult recipe books, bookmark the things I hope one day I’ll have the skill to make. I bake another imperfectly proofed loaf and eat a crust, still hot, with a curl of butter. That I can do this is its own kind of magic; the sweetness in the bitter.

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By Nadia Bailey

Location: Sydney, Australia

In the first weeks of lockdown, I wanted to cook with ingredients that sparked kinetic reactions. I wanted to make food that contrasted with the hush that had fallen across the world outside.

When I looked out from our balcony, our bustling inner-west street had become a theatre of one: a single car ambling towards Parramatta Road, a lone UberEats cyclist deliberating over whether or not he should enter an apartment building, a solo dog walker stepping on a growing pile of autumn leaves. I found myself foraging through the pink Tupperware container where our spices live in plastic packets with fading labels.

I scrambled fresh eggs bought from the café down the road with fried onion, green chilli and coriander. I toasted turmeric and mustard seeds in hot vegetable oil to make split-pea dahl, lentils turning obnoxiously thick and golden. Later I ate them in the sun with a tablespoon of good Greek yoghurt, knees covered with a crocheted blanket.

I delighted in the way the mustard seeds jumped up and down in the saucepan, the way they sputtered and demanded more attention, the way turning the heat up could make them a little crazy. They were awake, not inert.

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I once had a flatmate who taught me that crushing basil leaves between your fingers released the herb’s flavours, made them aromatic. You do this, he said, right before you add it to what you are cooking—like the lasagne that E baked for the first time this week, puzzling over, but then nailing the béchamel.

Since then, I’ve been obsessed with the idea that ingredients can possess a secret language, that they can do different things in different contexts. That they can lead double lives.

Two years ago, during an especially memorable family Christmas back in Perth—a brown snake made a surprise visit during dessert—my aunt and uncle gifted us a copy of my grandmother’s recipe book. Inside were handwritten recipes for prawns pattia and dal ghosh, techniques written in curly cursive, titles made grand by quotation marks. (My grandmother, glamorous in pearls and fifties dresses, always knew her way around an accessory.)

Underneath, my aunt translated the names of her spices from Hindi to English. Jeera referred to cumin. Cloves were lavang, and dhania equalled coriander seeds. Cardamom pods—maybe the best spice of all—were elaichi. These are words that I didn’t know but knew. These were words that tasted different in my mouth even as they pointed towards the same thing.

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“I try to avoid sentimentality and I try to avoid the easy cliché. I try to avoid any mention of mangoes, of spices and monsoons,” the Indian poet and journalist Jeet Thayil told NPR during an interview about his book, Narcopolis, set in the seamy underworld of 1970s Bombay, a city I was born in but barely know.

Thayil was onto something. When you’re Indian-Australian, cooking with—or writing about—spices is inherently risky. Spices can signify a readymade exotic. Too easily, they can become a symbol of immigrant longing, a means of enriching a narrow and neutered reality.

Thinking about this reminds me of a time, in my twenties, when I only wore Cheap Monday jeans, when I couldn’t bring myself to buy naan at the supermarket for fear that the cashier would think they knew me. A time when I was only too ready to tie myself in knots for people who didn’t love me, blasé—in the way of twentysomethings—of what I’d lose if I cleaved myself in half.

A few weeks into isolation, the actor Irrfan Khan died unexpectedly. I felt a grief that was inexplicable. We poured glasses of red wine and watched one of his films, Mira Nair’s The Namesake, based on Jhumpi Lahiri’s book of the same name. It follows Ashima Ganguli, a classical singer, who moves from Calcutta for her husband, an engineering professor, to the chilly suburbs of Massachusetts. In the book Ashima, missing home, combines “Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl.” She adds “salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper.” She wishes she could find mustard oil.

During isolation, I’ve found myself performing a similar kind of culinary tetris, scrambling for ghost ingredients to sate real appetites. Cooking with spices has shown me—more slowly than I’d like—that avoiding the sentimental, shirking the cliché in an attempt at self-preservation can be a way to erase myself, to kill the things that I truly want. 

On bad days, it feels like acquiescing to a culture that suffers from a failure of imagination, one that insists on our duality rather than our plurality, one that asks us to make a choice—immigrant or citizen, mother or lover, worker or human.

Over the last couple of months, the pandemic has rendered the lives and livelihoods of international students, new immigrants, gig economy workers precarious, untenable. All the illusions of protection have been punctured—the pressure to prove your worthiness, prove that you belong, prove that you can neatly assimilate, has been exposed as the scam that it always was.

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Last Friday, a few days after restrictions started to ease, I cooked butter chicken. The mascot of Indian cuisine in the West, the dish is a good metaphor for the dangers of believing any food is “authentic,” the consequence of a single story. When it’s good, it tastes like it was conceived for a 16^th century Mughal emperor, but was actually invented by a chef named Kundan Lal Gujral at a restaurant called Moti Mahal in 1950s Delhi.

I marinated the chicken in yoghurt and jeera, dhania, elaichi, the words floating into my head automatically. I simmered the chicken in cream and butter, ginger and garlic, relishing the way the way the spices sounded and smelled when they collided with hot fat. A friend came over for dinner and we gathered around our table, taking care to sit away from each other. We talked and laughed, listened to music from the nineties, savouring the pleasure of good food and good company.

The next morning, I stacked the dishwasher. I stuffed the packets of spice back into the Tupperware, taking care to wiping the residue off our counter. The light was changing. Outside, the street was quiet, but there were a couple more people crunching through the autumn leaves, the street no longer a theatre of one.

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By Neha Kale

Location: Cleveland, Ohio

The potatoes are ugly. Shrivelled, with powdery, puckered skins. Knobbed with ghostly growing fingerlike sprouts. In other times, I’d probably throw them away. But peeled and chunked, they look all right. I steam them until a poke with fork breaks them into fluffy clumps.

I am making rats—my great-grandmother’s name for a type of gnocchi, rolled by thumb into a distinctive shape, like squashed little pillows. As a child, I loved to horrify friends by nonchalantly telling them rats were my favourite things to eat. No one in our family has any real idea where the name came from. My mom and I, swapping Instagram videos of women in Italy making pasta, saw someone using the same motion to make raschiatelli—a different sort of rat?—but Googling revealed they are a type of cavatelli, and the recipe is completely different.

I haven’t made them in nearly five years; not since my son was born. Too time-consuming, too fussy. Now, of course, those negatives are bonuses—anything to fill the hours. And I was hungry for something. I didn’t quite know what. In the early days of the stay-at-home time, jittering with nervous energy and disbelief, I kept clicking on links to recipes promising comfort. How absurd, really, to think that some specific combination of ingredients could offer any sort of comfort during catastrophic collapse, but I couldn’t help it. And just as absurdly, the recipes made me irrationally mad. There was the obvious aggravation: food writers, trendily besotted with heritage beans and imported tinned fish, sheltering with optimised pantries stockpiled with magical semi-esoteric ingredients, were clearly living in an intensified version of their usual alternate food reality. I had plenty, myself, but I did not have what they had, and that gap—in other times something I find both aspirational and exasperating—had a newly bitter edge.

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A bowl of beans; a poundcake; endless loaves of sourdough bread. I felt like a small child, shaking my head no, no, no, irrationally wanting someone to offer me the just-right thing.

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But more upsetting was the fact that none of their recipes said comfort to me—me personally, me selfishly, me sitting in my house, reading articles about the average timespan between the appearance of a cough and intubation, the numbers of ventilators and ICU beds. A bowl of beans; a poundcake; endless loaves of sourdough bread. I felt like a small child, shaking my head no, no, no, irrationally wanting someone to offer me the just-right thing.

Rats were a treat. Gram made them for us in her shabby little kitchen. Always one potato per person (it was a cheap meal), but there were a lot of us, and it was an enormous amount of work. She peeled potato after potato with a plastic knife and boiled them in a big cheap pot, then pushed them through the ricer into a heaping, steaming pile. She’d dump in flour while the potatoes were still screaming hot, and put her hands in to mix it all into dough, impervious to the heat. Then she’d roll it out into long snakes, slicing it fast into inch oblongs we’d push with our thumbs on the floury boards she laid on top of the Formica counter. There would be tray after tray of rats, nested on floured cotton dishcloths, ready to drop into boiling water. As soon as they floated to the top, she’d scoop them out into the heavy ceramic bowl with its puddle of tomato sauce. I probably ate thousands of rats as a kid.

I rice the potatoes and let them cool a bit (I don’t have Gram’s asbestos hands). I start adding flour; I cheat and add an egg to help things come together. The flour is always a guess, depending on the potatoes. There has to be just enough flour for the dough to hold together when the rats are cooked. Too much makes them leaden. Too little, and they dissolve into a cloudy broth of potato particles. And you only get them right by making them again and again and learning what the dough should feel like—firm but soft, not sticky, but not dry.

My rats are not perfect. A few dissolve; the water clouds. Some are gummy. But a few are just right—tender and pillowy. I eat them with my mom’s tomato sauce, another beloved food I can’t quite replicate, because she uses different ingredients every time and adjusts it by taste according to whatever best suits our moods and noodles, and add a small heap of grated parmesan.

As I eat, I think about recipes. The recipes I click on, even now, are written by people who have everything they need, and most of what they want. They can let five bananas brown for banana bread, use a pound of premium chocolate for cookies, spend whatever to get the wild salmon or the tin of imported tuna to eat on seeded crackers. Even the beans are a luxury item. But I don’t want those things right now. The food that comforts me was made by people—women, mostly—who lived within hard limits. Within those limits, they mastered the sort of cooking a recipe can’t help you with, and that was the comfort: knowing that you could take sprouted potatoes and flour and a few tomatoes and time, and turn it into something that fed the whole family, that held them until the next meal.

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By Stephanie Madewell

Location: Canberra, Australia

It comes to me while I am crossing my living room: the yellow crunch of fried batter surrounding a white fillet, the tang of vinegar, licking salt from my fingers.

In usual times, there would be somewhere in Canberra I could go to eat fresh fish and chips: I’ve heard that Snapper on the Lake in Yarralumla is good. If I were feeling zealous about it, I might have driven to the South Coast. In Eden last winter with my family, I ate battered flathead on a slatted wooden table near the port, in view of the flat, grey sea. But no-one is driving anywhere. Eating in public places is dangerous. In the evenings, I boil brown rice and eat it with something from the fridge: a cube of feta preserved in oil, last month’s pumpkin curry I defrost and eat, begrudgingly.

The newspapers say that during lockdown, people are having wilder dreams. I can believe it. The physical restrictions on my body cause desires to strain outwards against their confines. Subtle longings for food balloon into jagged urges. I don’t just think of the food I can’t eat; my mind begins to drip with the people, locations and landscapes I associate with particular meals.

When I think of fish and chips, I’m reminded of the year I lived in Norwich while I was studying towards my Masters at the University of East Anglia. Norwich is a small place—many of its streets are wandering and medieval. At the intersection of Pottergate and Lower Goat Lane, right at the heart of this cool, sweet clutter, sits the Grosvenor Fish Bar. Here, people eat their fish and chips on metal chairs in view of a nail bar, a pink-lit bohemian pub, and a 14th century church called St Gregory’s.

My usual order was cod or haddock and chips—lemon sole or rock if I was feeling adventurous—with plenty of lemon for the fish, and salt packets and sachets of tomato sauce for the chips. I listened with curiosity to the orders ahead of me: mushy peas, curry sauce, toad in a hole (a kind of sausage in the middle of a Yorkshire pudding), fish cakes. I came to delight in the weekly specials: the ‘Five Quid Squid’ (crisp hoops of squid with a pot of pale yellow, creamy garlic aioli), the ‘Big Mack’ (battered mackerel, lettuce and tartare sauce pillowed in two halves of a white roll) or the ‘Wako Taco’ (steamed cod frilled with lettuce, cheese, salsa and sour cream, trussed in a wrap).

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The physical restrictions on my body cause desires to strain outwards against their confines. Subtle longings for food balloon into jagged urges.

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In the quiet evenings, people would gather in the street outside Grosvenor’s. Some tore open their packages of butcher’s paper to eat the hot contents under the eaves of the pub; others bundled them into their coats to take to family at home. My favourite time to eat fish and chips was in the evening. I loved breaking open the batter to flake apart the fish and look at the sky over the church as it clocked through pale shades of blue, orange, pink and violet, somehow joining with the food to become part of the experience of the meal.

When people from Australia came to visit, I took them to Grosvenor’s. The place gained the approval of my Mum, as well as two friends from Sydney, each of whom ordered things I had never considered before: scampi, which came out battered and large, and grilled fish with fried green tomatoes. My friends and I would go there before nights out and eat our fill before kicking off to wherever we were headed, the headlights on our bikes blinking.

Attending Grosvenor’s took on the tenor of a ceremony. I remember the warm smell of beef shortening—oddly cosy—which I have since come to associate with other fish and chip shops I encountered in England: usually on the Norfolk coast or at wound-down Victorian seaside towns. In Norwich, we went to Grosvenor’s in all seasons: during summer, when the evenings were long and humming; during winter, our hot mouths blowing steam and filled with chips. It was cheap, comforting food.

Some kind of fish and chip shop has existed on the site of Grosvenor’s for 90 years. I deduct decades in my head: it would have opened sometime in the 1930s. The fish shop, then, has seen the phases of twentieth century history—wars, the blossoming of the sixties, the turn of the millennium—and it is still standing. In these restricted times, not only are my memories of Grosvenor’s a reminder of the world’s richness and expansiveness, but the shop proper, when thinking about it, is a kind of stalwart reminder that no phase of things is final.

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By Jacinta Mulders

Location: Melbourne, Australia

So many of us work hard to want for different things. Whether it’s resisting that second glass of peaty weeknight whiskey; or the promising glow of a dating app (when you should really be sleeping); or the lift of a sneaky cigarette, long after you’d promised your partner you’d quit; we all focus—sometimes obsess—on a redirect. Food, for me, was something I had to learn how to want, and to need, healthily again.

During the first few days of restrictions I picked up an extra packet of short-crust pastry for our freezer—along with an extra brick of salty, silver-foiled butter for the fridge. Our cupboards were neatly stacked with tins. I have been thinking about how this food stockpiling, along with the alone unknown of restrictions, for many—stretching out ahead—gives extra space for disordered eating and obsessions to bloom, along with other things.

Thankfully healthy for almost a decade now, I have been reflecting on my seven years of bulimia—about the white-noise crackle and rush of those days that turned into nights, then weeks then years. I know I wouldn’t have been okay if I’d have still been sick during the pandemic, and that so many people—right now—aren’t.

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Sometimes seen as the gluttonous sibling-disease to anorexia, bulimia is too often portrayed as a vanity illness, a vice, even: something to be guilty of, rather than something to have suffered from. There is little discussion of the blood and the debt, the tightening chests or the sugary vomit. The scars across the first two knuckles of my right fist are a reminder, though: purging, it’s a violent thing.

It still feels like a small wonder that I keep forgetting my bulimia—about my almost destroyed teeth, or how my bones had started shifting to chalk. I don’t think about broken vessels and endless bloody noses, about all those drains I vomited into: hours, weeks, months, years. The hospital cocoon, which—in the end—saved me, has become a distant blip. It’s as if it all happened to a different person, someone who once bleached her usual terracotta hair into nothingness, who couldn’t quite look passersby in the eye.

But, as Lucinda Williams sings, “Who I am now / [Is] who I was then.”

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That first buttery first bite of a weekend croissant; a sip of chocolaty stout on a tired June afternoon; hot, salty chips eaten straight from paper: isolation has encouraged me to think about how big it is that I can quietly—openly—again enjoy these things. There are no jacket pockets of hidden crusts, calorie maps, or flashing bathroom (bedroom and living room) scales. There is not the constant hum of hungry highs and sugared veins, of stomach bile and bathroom shakes.

I love toast the most, now. Bread. I love pepper on corn, and the crack of fridge-cold peppermint chocolate. I love that last spoonful of soy-cereal-milk from the bowl. I love eggplants roasted in garlic oil. I love being able to sit with a feeling of fullness without guilt, without a crackly existential fear.

This. This is maybe the best thing.

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Wants bloom—sometimes take over—during quarantine. Maybe, like me, you feel the pull to turn to them to numb other things: boredom, worry, loneliness, self-doubt, fear. Usually okay with alcohol, since lockdown I’ve found myself craving a warming glass of shiraz at 3pm. Swiping on Bumble and longing for connection—I feel loneliness rush in. Food, it’s not so much of an issue anymore but thoughts do, sometimes, surface.

As Leslie Jamison writes in her book on alcohol addiction—along with her own strained relationship with food—Recovering:

“Sometimes my sister-in-law and I went to the grocery store and loaded our shopping carts with sweet things—boxed coffee cake, mint chocolate chip ice cream, pink champagne—and binged on it all, just for the relief and escape of total indulgence, putting things into our bodies to remind ourselves we weren’t anywhere near dying.”

I’ve been there. Maybe you have too?

Maybe you’ve been there with alcohol or, like me, with spending money I really don’t have. Maybe you’ve been there with a rush from meeting strangers and sharing everything—but also nothing—too soon, with with tinsel-shining friendships that’ve long since left? Maybe, like me, you’ve been there with the softness of getting high—endless Sundays—on an ex-boyfriend’s navy-blue couch. Maybe with Netflix, or the false promise of packet-hair dye? Maybe you’ve been there with credit card debt.

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“Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire,”  Patti Smith says. But I’ve had to let that forest-fuelled firefront burn down to a glow. I try, now, to channel that hunger into other things: into short stories and essays, gardening and fresh sheets. Into listening and sharing, taking notice and saying no and also—yes.

Instead of a whole block of cheap cooking chocolate—eaten secretly, hungrily in some Coles carpark—I’m well enough to now focus on just two simple squares, sitting with the softness of cocoa butter lining the roof of my mouth.

Maybe, instead of waking up next to a stranger, Southbank, after midnight—furry-teethed, dusty-headed—you’re at home, soaking in the comforting warmth of an after-dinner bath. Maybe, instead of sugar-free soft drink and endless pale pink packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low, your new snack selections actually nourish you.

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For me, being well again—I can now enjoy the things I loved, before I got sick. Lockdown because of COVID-19, and being always so close to the kitchen, hasn’t been a stress but a comfort. Instead of rushed transit lunches—shitty Coles salads eaten at my desk—I’ve loved:

• Vanilla ice cream, scooped by a dishwasher-warm spoon
• Slices of pear eaten with crumbling chunks of sharp cheese
• A teaspoon of crunchy peanut butter straight from the jar

Ruby Tandoh, of initial Great British Bake Off fame—in one of her many works on eating, health and guilt—recently quoted the Ellyn Satter Institute:

“Normal eating is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food. Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad or bored, or just because it feels good. Normal eating is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way.”

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I don’t always look at my body in the mirror now and feel something salty rise in my throat—hardwired into my bones through my younger self’s commitment to turning myself into something else, someone different: smoother, smaller, yet somehow still more.

When I take my clothes off in front of someone new, now, I barely remember the years in which I couldn’t even look at myself—hiding my body in deliberately fogged bathroom mirrors; under secondhand floral Savers dresses, sizes too big; wrapped up in towels, doonas; or under the fog of too many beers.

I know seven years of illness and disorder, for some, is just a blip. But there were many years where I thought recovery was some distant shoreline glitter—a place I would always look out to, yet never reach.

But I’m here now, and it’s a relief.

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Again, though—and of course, as with any rear-view recovery—there are still moments which creep in. Feeling lonely and peeling two eggs in the sink, I catch myself counting the calories of each sun-yellow yolk. After a long bath one night I look at my soft body in the bathroom mirror a little too critically—extra time, for me, can sometimes turn into this. But self-talk has been better to me lately:

“No, this is not who you are now. This is not what you do.”

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Since lockdown I’ve have been cooking more—roasting blue-cheese potatoes in the oven for my flatmate, Mim. She’s been preparing garlicky cream dips, lentil soups and pies with words plaited into the crusts. Our small apartment smells like roasting onions, and wintery soups—7pm.

A wedge of a friend’s delivered lime-cream pie, buttery crusted, sits in its plastic container in the fridge. We share small creamy bits of it after dinner, along with cups of tea and a cooking show we both like to yell at—some kind of ordinary release.

“When this is over let’s not change this,” we say to each other, “let’s keep cooking for each other: proper meals.”

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Bulimia is not a word I used to be able to even say aloud, but after being well—for almost a decade—it’s lost its teeth.

Maybe isolation means you’re struggling with that old dusty whiskey bottle—looming gold from the top of your fridge. Maybe you miss the rush of someone new; the lift of a shared cigarette, then a chest-to-chest night and a good morning kiss. Maybe you’re trying not to eat a whole family packet of salt and vinegar chips, or an online shopping cart is emitting a low hum of hope you know—soon—will morph into a guilty dread.

We’re all working a bit harder on our wantings during this unknown—living them, reflecting on them. But we’re human, it’s what we all do; and together, talking about it, we’re more likely to get through.

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By Alice Bishop