What Carla Lalli Cooked After Her Divorce
Yet the newly single woman—it’s almost always a woman writing a divorce book—is also prone to culinary epiphany. In many stories, the end of a marriage prompts the rapturous rediscovery of tastes, habits, carnal desires. Gillies recounts being miserable at brunch with her children and soon-to-be ex-husband until she takes a bite of a dish that seems to demand, she writes, “a culinary leap of faith”: pancakes made with asparagus, ham, and Gruyère, topped with fried eggs and served with maple syrup. “It was sublime,” she writes. “I called out, ‘Sweet lord, these are incredible!’ . . . At that very moment, my life was being saved. I thought if I could get such a kick out of these pancakes, I hadn’t died.”
Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love,” the defining divorce memoir of the early two-thousands, is animated by a similar evangelism. If Gilbert’s soliloquy on Neapolitan pizza is insufferably cute—“I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return”—a passage about needing larger pants is genuinely moving. “I came to Italy pinched and thin,” Gilbert writes. “I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don’t fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late—through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures—into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago.”
This month, Carla Lalli, a former Bon Appétit editor and a best-selling cookbook author, will publish “Food Is a Feeling,” a cookbook-as-divorce-memoir. Though it resembles her other two books, “Where Cooking Begins” (2019) and “That Sounds So Good” (2021)—bibles of technique and inspiration for the busy yet ambitious home cook—Lalli announces, in the introduction, that she’s trying something different. Throughout her career, she’d been advised to maintain a consistent and upbeat writing voice, but she’d recently gone through a metamorphosis, prompted by the end of her twenty-four-year marriage. “With due respect to my former self and to anyone who has cooked my dishes before,” she writes, “it didn’t feel right that my recipe voice should stay the same, because I am not the same.”
Recipe development can be a self-effacing task, obliging the writer to anticipate the appetites and routines of her imagined reader. Lalli’s new recipes, interwoven with essays, are proudly idiosyncratic, tracing the contours of a “tumultuous, pensive, painful, joyful, transformative, celebratory, solitary, and exciting time in my life.” The book begins with a dish that Lalli improvised for dinner with her sister on the night that she moved into a sublet apartment: “Greens, Garlic, and Mom Rice,” with the rice cooked in butter, as their mother prefers. She shares the “Separation Pork Chops” she served after she and her ex-husband broke the news to their children, and the heart-shaped chicken cutlets she made for herself and her younger son after their household cleaved in two. Lalli’s ex hated tomatoes, especially raw ones with their “gooey guts,” she tells us, before pointedly providing a trio of recipes that accentuate their “amniotic” juices and “messy, pulpy” flesh.
In her solitude, Lalli was “flooded with memories” of cooking and being cooked for, and felt inspired to eat whatever she felt like, whether that was popcorn for dinner or a spontaneous glass of sake (against the advice of her therapist). She told me recently that she bucks against the idea that “eating your feelings” is negative, because cultivating a reader’s emotional connection with food is part of her job. “As food writers, we talk about how great it’s going to be when you make this meal for other people, and how lovely of a time you’re going to have—I love these feelings,” Lalli said. Why, she wondered, have we remained attached to the image of “someone creeping down to the freezer at two in the morning to eat Dove bars in secret”?
