The Apple and the Hermit Mother
When it was time to eat in my family growing up, my mother would ring the dinner gong which hung on a nail by the kitchen door. The four of us kids would appear; as well as Dad, the great carnivore; and the evening meal would proceed at the kitchen table, a passive-aggressive field of war. I was a child of few pounds and many stomachaches…
In my own house, the sound that announced it was time for dinner was the smoke detector going off. My kitchen wasn’t a passive-aggressive field of war so much as an actual field of war. The family would tiptoe in for dinner and mostly take their chances while I iced my burns and swept the shattered pyrex off the floor.
I think I may have made an incomplete adjustment to motherhood.
Loving my two babies was easy, playing with them, reading to them, clothing them, keeping them safe, all good. But the feeding, once we got past the Gerber jars… How was that supposed to work? Hot, homemade, ample nutrition—I could feel the directive. I just had no idea how to respond.
I’m quite sure that in one of my lives, I was a hermit. I lived in a cave, perusing interesting texts by candlelight and thinking about… you know, hermit stuff. Eating was low on my list. When I did find something to eat, I’m guessing it was an ascetic affair. Nuts and berries. Maybe a pizza left on a rock near my cave door by one of the faithful. I’m sure I never applied fire to food.
Because I am still this way. More social now that I have a family, of course. But mealtimes still sneak up on me. I don’t stock up; I hate to cook; and honestly, no matter how many cookbooks I pore over (preferring the illustrations to the recipes) or jocular blogs I irritatedly scroll through, my culinary skills refuse to improve.
The enemy I was always fighting in my kitchen was the fear of poisoning my family. Deep down I knew I was lucky to have them and that my culinary ineptness could conceivably take them away. Something was bound to burn, blow up, or boil over.
I never cared if I poisoned myself. I’d eaten some revolting things. But my little children in their tiny growing bodies, and my would-be gourmet husband who taught through the dinner hour so he couldn’t develop his (admittedly lazy) inner chef… All they wanted was something better (or better than last night anyway), but what they got was me.
And I’m here to tell you—I wished for something better too. Once, while whipping up a tuna noodle casserole, I grabbed the mustard powder instead of the garlic powder, and that was quite a flavor. I left that “dinner” on the stove for my husband with a post-it note stuck to the tin foil saying, “You can eat this—but I made myself a sandwich.” Underneath my honest assessment, my husband later drew a skull and crossbones.
I think the only time I wasn’t scared of feeding my kids was when they were still breastfeeding. All bets were off after that. And they knew it too. They wouldn’t even take a bottle from me.
My daughter, when she was little, would wait till I’d walked back into the kitchen to get something before she would gradually scrape the food I had put on her plate back into the serving bowl on the table.
My son, a true artiste, hid his vegetables in the back of the bookcase in the dining room, which I didn’t find out about until we moved. What were all these tiny orange things behind the encyclopedias? Those little bonsai beauties were the carrots he’d told me he’d eaten, now air-dried and perfect for his sister’s dollhouse, which she didn’t play with anymore because she was in high school and he was in college and is that how long these things have been back here?
We’re in a new house now, and the kids are off adulting in homes of their own. I’m not done with cooking, but now and then when my husband’s out I get to eat my favorite hermit dinner.
Get a pen, because you might want to jot down the recipe.
I give you… The apple. Round. Red. Full of forbidden knowledge (like how to cook?) Fleshy, juicy, it’s really a food and a beverage combined. After you eat it, your fingers are cleaner than they were before. If you have buck teeth like me you’ll cut it up so it won’t scrape the roof of your mouth and as you do so, even the sun slanting through the kitchen window and across the cutting board will tug at your heart. Apples are the perfect food. Pile the segments in a decorative bowl.
Now make a piece of toast. Hover directly over the toaster holes so you don’t miss the first plumes of smoke that tell you it’s about to be burned to a crisp. Pop that baby up and butter it on a plate.
Now grab an avocado. Cut it in half. Remove the pit by placing your LEFT hand carefully behind your back (you know yourself well), and thwacking the pit with a cleaver in your RIGHT hand, and then knocking the pit off the knife into the sink. Slice the avocado halves in your palm with an extremely dull knife to avoid yet another trip to the emergency room like that time you sliced THROUGH the avocado skin, INTO the skin of your hand, and then, after swaddling your paw like a catcher’s mitt in bloody paper towels, you left the kids with your husband and drove yourself with a stick shift to the hospital.
Drizzle the avocado slices you have artfully arranged on the toast with olive oil and lemon juice, picking off any seeds and tossing them over your shoulder vaguely in the direction of the sink. Sprinkle the plate and kitchen floor with salt and pepper to taste.
Now fry an egg. When the white no long resembles bodily fluids but the yolk is still liquid sun, slide the egg not onto but beside the avocado toast. In spite of what you have been served in restaurants, eggs are not to be sprawled on top of every damn thing. They are not hats.
Serve this perfect dinner with a glass of wine (or more) while streaming a British murder mystery.
Food. Who knew? We need it, we’re lucky as hell to get it, but the edible is endlessly complicated.
Pssst… want another course? Check out Jennifer Hayden’s new graphic memoir, Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook (IDW/Top Shelf)
About the Author
Jennifer Hayden is a graphic novelist whose breast cancer memoir The Story of My Tits was nominated for an Eisner Award and has been translated into three languages. The French edition, Nénés Chéris, was shortlisted for Elle France Magazine‘s 2022 comics grand prix. Hayden’s first collection Underwire was excerpted in The Best American Comics 2013. Her new graphic cooking memoir is called Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook, and she hopes to use the proceeds from this book to hire a personal chef. She lives with her husband in New Jersey.
