Cooking for the dead

tw: old grief, talking about the dead and those who died violently

It’s a rainy afternoon in New York today. The gray-washed sky has left everything a little desaturated. There’s a dull shine to the bricks of the nearby buildings, to the pavements, and on my stove, I have andouille sausage browning the way an ex taught me: low and slow and careful. The air smells gorgeous. For some reason, I’m thinking about my dead today.

I’d like to cook for them today, these people I’ve loved and lost. I’m making red beans and rice because one of them —Glen, his name was Glen— grew up in New Orleans, and I hadn’t learned yet to make Cajun food when we first became friends. I was very cross at him the first year of our friendship. He’d mistakenly decided one of my books was written by another Asian writer, and I gave him shit about it for about a full year: I’d happily announce his mistake at every opportunity and Glen, in his infinite kindness, would sigh and go, ‘yes, well, sorry again.’

And he meant it each time.

(I dropped it after that first year and told him I’d stop, that he was better than me, that I respected how he rolled with my constant calling out of his behavior. He’d laughed. He was a damn good human being. Probably one of the best I’d ever know.)

I wonder how he’ll react to my version of red beans and rice. I think he’d appreciate how much care I’m putting into the crisping of the sausages, although I think he’d be appalled, maybe, by the fact I intend to stick collard greens in there eventually, just to add more nutritional value to this. I suspect he wouldn’t complain outright but I think he’d give me such a look.

No collard greens yet, though. The next step is the holy trinity. I’m going to sweat celery and peppers and onions in the rendered fat; it’s a process I’m excited to start as there is already fond accumulating in the pan. It’s going to be so good. I wish I could waft the smell over to you, dear readers.

I don’t know why specifically I want to make red beans and rice for my dead today (especially since I don’t know if it’d be red beans and rice by the end of my experimentations or a nutrition-dense bastardization of dirty rice, instead, we’ll see). My suspicion is that it’s because it’s an easy thing to send my dead home with, because it’s warm and I imagine the underworld to be cold. Because it heats up well, as they say. And it’d be even better the next day. I can’t imagine the afterlife, if there is one, adheres to our concept of time and physics so maybe, just maybe, what I send them home with will be enough to eat forever.

I lost someone this year. It’s weird to say I did because in some ways, he wasn’t really mine to lose: he was someone I was in the process of becoming a friend with. I wonder if we would have become actual friends eventually, or if our differences would have ensured we were politely courteous towards one another but nothing else. But one day, I had mentioned I was interested in learning how he made roast chicken and the next day, he made it a point to show me.

I think he’d be annoyed at the food I was making today, though. He liked his recipes. Like, seriously liked them.

But he would have eaten a serving, I think and gently offered to show how to do it the right way instead.

(And I’d have said yes because he wasn’t someone terribly adept at talking about his feelings, because all of his care for the world and his family came out as stiffly offered acts of service. I have a memory of him that I need you to carry for me: one Sunday morning, after he brought in the paper, he amiably told me that it was his duty to ‘fillet’ the New York Times and remove the ads as his wife hated encountering them, and he wanted to make sure the paper was ordered in a way that’d make for an excellent morning for her.)

I have thrown in some okra into the pot and I don’t think I can call it red beans and rice any longer. I’m not sure I can call it anything but a hideous bastardization of the original recipes, but the apartment smells fucking divine. Thirty minutes later, I add the beans: a can of red beans at first and then, in a fit of lunatic power, a can of black-eyed peas.

I’ve never cooked for my father. By the time I learned my way around the kitchen, he’d vanished out of my life. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t offer food to someone who had caused so much hurt in my life but for some reason, today I’d like to feed him. I’d like to sit him at my table and serve him food. (He was an amazing cook, my dad. He could make anything and often did.) I want to ask him what he thinks, tell him about how the places I’d been and then at the end, when he was close to done, I want to say, I wish you made the choices I’d be made. I wish you’d been better. I wish we were in the timeline where you’d left my mother alone and I wasn’t born because that would have been the kinder outcome for her and the nobler life for you. But we aren’t. So, I need you to know you taught me what monsters are and because I survived you, I won’t let anyone else face theirs alone.

I have the pot on low right now. It’ll be simmering for hours. I have designs of eating my way through the pot over the course of the next week, but I suspect I’ll do what I’ve always done when I have excess: offer it to the people I love, to the people who are here.

I wish badly I could have cooked for my dead who’d died of violence, the ones I lost contact with, who surfaced in the news as topics of discussion and subjects of tragedy, who I knew when we were all starving for money to buy a sandwich the next day. Of all my dead, I wish I could cook for them most. What I wouldn’t give for an evening to ply them with charcuterie, with cheese, with ginger beer and great slabs of jamon iberico, with paella, with char siu, with peppermint patties, with anything they could ask for.

There’s a certain comfort in knowing how many cultures and people feel precisely the same, in knowing how many strangers have sat at a grave, pouring a cold one out for a dead friend. The year is thinning to a memory, a string of days so slim, you can look through them like a ghost. In less than a week, we’ll arrive at the shortest day of 2024 and after that, on the birthday of my Mouse, we will see light come back, minute by minute, until honey-hot summer comes flooding the earth.

I’ll cook for my living when the holidays end and the world thaws a little more. It won’t be the same as cooking for my dead, but it’ll be just as good in its own way. The poet Merrit Maloy wrote,

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away

And so I will do that with my cooking. I’ll take that love I had for those I’ve lost, however small, however strange, and I’ll put it into the work of keeping my living fed and happy. What I can’t do for the dead, I will do for those who are still here. And I will love them as I love my dead, love them like they’re miracles, like they’re only the true magic in this universe.

My cooking for the day is done. I’ll do my other chores now.

As always, a cat photo. I hope you’re warm and loved this holiday season.