How I used food as a healing mechanism
Sometime around June of 2020, about three months into the pandemic, my mental health began to plummet. The overarching stress of the lockdown - job uncertainty, being half a world away from my family, the complete lack of meaningful social interaction - compounded with some earlier life stresses and began to stack up, like a teetering pile of books, just waiting for that final novel that sends the whole thing catapulting over your living room floor.
It would take another six months before I sought out a therapist. Being the daughter of a psychiatrist, I always felt I was sound enough in my mind and reasonable enough with my inner voice that I could tackle anything life threw at me. But mental health isn't quite that straight forward. It's like having termites - slowly chewing away at your foundations, its presence only becoming apparent when it's just a little too late.
“Rather than seek professional help, I turned to cooking to help quiet my internal chaos.”
What started as a desire to fill time and a yearning to recreate dishes I could no longer have made for me by someone else, turned into a pilgrimage of sorts. Daily exercise would be taken to Broadway Market to source delicately wrapped packages of squid, translucent prawns and flaky loins of cod from Fin and Flounder, or ruby-red steaks and fat-marbled lamb shoulders from Hill & Szrok. Golf-ball sized tomatoes were carefully counted at the greengrocer, the brown paper bag crumpling around them in some sort of nostalgic ASMR. When everything else was crumbling around me and life felt increasingly out of control, food was always certain, recipes were always structured, and the finished product was always something I could control.
The more complex the recipe, the better. It's hard for unwanted thoughts to penetrate your consciousness when there are onions that need sweating, garlic that needs finely slicing, or prawns that need delicate deveining, taking great care not to splatter the kitchen with their burnt-orange guts (although, if you do, it's ok - the stomach-churning site of it might just cause your first belly-deep laugh in a while). The day of my birthday marked almost two and a half months of being locked inside, and so the obvious answer was a day-long, multi-course feast that started with lightly fried calamari, and ended with pillowy piles of Tiramisu with just a little too much booze.
During the first heatwave of summer, when the air was so sticky it made breathing feel like an impossible task and the sweat simply wouldn't stop coming, the only answer seemed to be dad's kokoda - a pacific-island take on ceviche. Water tracked salty rivulets down my back as I marinated fish in lime juice, finely diced red onions and chopped juicy red peppers into thumbnail sized pieces, all the while dreaming of the reprieve the ocean would offer - as many miles away from the four walls of my Hackney flat as it was.
In her book, Midnight Chicken, Ella Risbridger discusses the soul-soothing power of a bubbling pot of water. How it can provide a feeling of comfort when it feels like life is coming down on your shoulders. And so, on the day we found out my sister’s cancer diagnosis, I made puttanesca. Red onion, anchovies (don’t forget their oil), capers, olives and tinned tomatoes. It’s food that requires no thought, but quietens the ever-growing ringing inside your head. It’s food that lines the pit in your stomach - the one that formed that morning and doesn’t seem to ever go away (will it ever go away?) The bubbling of the pasta water won’t take away your sister’s pain, but the ingrained comfort of cooking a dish that always feels like home helps make the two of you feel a little less alone.
“In amongst it all however, remained the constant reprieve that cooking offered. The meticulous, methodical tasks that require just enough thought to drown out that incessant ringing, but not too much that it weighs upon your already heavy brain. And at the end of it all - there is food. The purest source of joy - one that cannot be taken by a life limited to the four walls of my home.”
Puttanesca (serves 4, best eaten with a glass of red wine)
One packet dried spaghetti (although, really, any pasta would work)
One onion (it doesn’t really matter if it’s white or red, this recipe is mainly about using what you have on hand)A few cloves of garlic (I tend to go for four)
Olive oil
A whole jar/tin of anchovies
A jar of capers
A jar of pitted kalamata olives
Chilli (fresh or flakes, it doesn't matter too much)
Two tins of chopped tomatoes
Put the pasta on to cook as you please. Finely chop the onion and crush the garlic and add both to a frying pan with olive oil. Get it cooking then add the chilli. Cook til softened, then add the anchovies and the oil from the jar and cook til they have started to disintegrate. While this is happening, roughly chop up the kalamata olives (if they come with the stones, remove them. It’s kind of a faff, but nothing interrupts your meal more than having to spit out an olive stone). Add the tinned tomatoes and olives and capers and let it bubble away til it’s thickened slightly and the red colour has deepened. Drain your pasta once it’s al dente (cooked through but still retains a bit of bite) and add to the sauce and serve with ground pepper and grated parmesan on top. Sit. Breathe. Probably go back for seconds.
Words — Molly Codyre
Image — via Pinterest
