My first foray into the kitchen was a disaster of epic proportion. Think gastronomic Chernobyl. Julia Child would have fallen into a fit of palpitations; Martha Stewart would have surmised that Felicia Sullivan in the kitchen was not a "good thing." Mine wasn't your casual egg-curdling snafu or beef cooked to the texture of shoe leather, so believe me when I say that after the Brownie Incident of 1989, I'm privileged to own a whisk. I'm relieved that my local cable company has not denied me The Food Network.
At thirteen, my culinary acumen consisted of dredging chicken cutlets into breadcrumbs and slathering mayonnaise on canned tuna. Desperate for my mother's affection (she preferred locking herself away in her bedroom with vials of cocaine and cases of Budweiser beer, self-medicating), one afternoon I raced to the supermarket and purchased a package of brownie mix. My mother adored chocolate, and I was determined to be a culinary goddess in the kitchen. I would make her love cocaine less, and me, more.
At home, I studied the ingredients -- how hard could it be? The recipe called for eggs, oil and a cup of water. And then I paused -- what constituted a cup? Should I use mug? A Dixie? Ignoring the directions, I filled the mixing bowl with tap water. The batter looked promising until I realized that we had run out of eggs. Ever resourceful, I decided to use leftover hard-boiled eggs because eggs were eggs, right? I diced up not one egg, but five, and added it to the lumpy mix -- shells and all.
The oven is a terribly cruel and deceptive appliance; sweet confection wafted through the rooms, offering no warning of my pending doom and I beamed at the cooling tray on the stovetop. However, when my mother came home from work, she sniffed the goods, spied the bits of shell that had punctured the surface, and pushed the plate to the other side of the counter. She regarded my brownies with such disgust that I nearly collapsed in tears. I wondered why she couldn't just say she loved them, why she couldn't eat just one? Instead she snapped, "You're wasting your time. I hate chocolate." Turning her back on me, she tore into a bag of chocolate chip cookies. She ate them in front of me, taking small, meticulous bites. I was devastated. When my father came home, he made a joke of it. He even wolfed down a crunchy brownie for good measure. Defeated, I realized I wasn't a baker. I had no place in the kitchen.
That was until 2002. When a brownie, a springform pan and a culinary goddess nearly saved my life. By then, I had a decade of binge drinking under my belt, and I was recovering from a two-year cocaine addiction. During that time, I led a life of a successful project manager returning from a leave from graduate school. Friends and designer shoes surrounded me. Everything on the surface appeared normal. But inside I was spinning. I had become the image of my mother, locking myself in my apartment -- my only solace was cocaine. Soon my work started slipping; I was losing my edge. Friends stopped returning my phone calls. I was volatile, cold. My heart was a landmine. My drug dealer was on speed dial. The ground underneath me had given way. And it was one evening, huddled in the tightest ball that I could imagine, that I realized that this wasn't a way to live - this was a way to die. I decided then that my addiction needed to end and my life needed to begin.
Ours is a culture engulfed in mantras and catch phrases, and Alcoholics Anonymous was no exception. I wasn't ready for one day at a time or it works if you work it. Back then I was frightened and judgmental, I wouldn't have even considered confessing my countless humiliating experiences to a roomful of strangers -- how could I tell people I didn't know how ashamed I was of my upbringing, how angry I was with my mother, when I couldn't even tell my closest friends? When I couldn't even admit these things to myself? I imagined a dimly lit basement filled with hacking coughs, bad coffee, and tales of bankruptcy and abandon -- the clichéd images of movies, and I wanted no part of that picture.
Instead I turned to my kitchen -- the one room of my apartment I had always avoided. Leaving the clinking wine glasses and spacious coke-friendly bathrooms of bars and East Village apartments behind, I watched The Food Network for hours at a stretch. Sara Molton, Martha Stewart, Ina Garten -- on weekends I remained transfixed in front of the television watching these chefs until the early hours of infomercials. Something about the cacophony of voices, the methodic measuring of ingredients, the sumptuous meals -- maternal things -- comforted me. It was as if I had been asleep for a long time and suddenly I woke up. Maybe I could bake. Maybe I could make something instead of destroying everything.
I purchased measuring cups, bowls, and a food processor. My first cookbook was Nigella Lawson's, How to Be a Domestic Goddess, and I set off in pursuit of Madeira loaves and pumpkin cheesecakes. But it wasn't all magic in the kitchen. There was the cracked cheesecake where I used icing sugar instead of granulated. There were the burnt cookies, the hockey puck scones. Yet baking became my passion. It was tactile, rewarding. Part of the journey was about making mistakes and learning from them, but realizing that even with all the finest ingredients, precise measurements, the perfect cookie might fail to materialize. There was humidity, how the particular brand of flour was milled -- many things beyond one's control. Then I realized that many of the tenants of the AA philosophy made sense, that you needed to make the complicated simple. For me, recipes were my building blocks, measuring cups were my tools -- and baking a cake became a metaphor for something greater. I made for myself a new life, a sober one, made from scratch, adopting the twelve steps in a way that worked for me.
As the months passed, I thought of cocaine less and of making brownies more. It wasn't about acquiring impossible affections; it was about making me happy. Realizing that just the effort worthy of love and applause.