I can do it with a broken heart
Grits, my mother, a small fire, and cooking for 20 with a broken heart
My mother used to set off the fire alarm when she was cooking–all of the time.
I would climb up onto the counter and try to take it down, asking her why she kept putting it back in. I learned how not to light things on fire by watching her. Both the kitchen but also my life. I watched her torch the people around her, burn them. Now, in a fight, I do the thing she did when I was a toddler screaming in Dayton’s. I get really close and I say so, so quietly, “We don’t need to shout. I could hear anything you tell me anything that you need in a whisper, I promise. I’m listening.”
My father used to scream at her in the kitchen. He asked her why she was so stupid that she was never able to figure out how not to start the smoke alarm. She would scream back, “You try cooking then.” I learned how to say that to men by watching her, too. Not just about the cooking, but about everything men think is easy. The giving, the bending, the shifting, the dusting, the hosting, the remembering to get gifts for their mothers, the sleeping alone at night when you want them there so bad.
Sometimes, I would put my body between my parents and stare down my father. I still fight like that, too, like I will stand in front of you and dare you to keep shouting by the look in my eyes. My eyes then said, “Shout at me, not her.”
He would. With his whole body.
My eyes now say, “Keep shouting, watch me leave.”
Being a woman means one day you wake up and you’ve been yelled at enough for a whole lifetime. Being a woman means one day you wake up with loneliness and it’s not enough to send you out for looking for the wrong love. It’s enough to make you heal it.
My mother was a flawed woman. She had a sharp tongue and her eyes set on looking for flaws. But in moments in which she started a fire in her own kitchen after she left my father, she would yell, “We are going to handle this calmly!!!!!” into the ether and then somehow magically, she became calm.
When the fire alarm went off in my kitchen and I had a broken heart and a list of things to do for a party that I did not do yesterday because I was sobbing over a man who made promises he wasn’t ready to keep, even though I am so sure he wanted to, I did the thing my mother taught me.
I screamed, “I am going to handle this calmly,” into the ether and then I became calm. Not just calm, but I laughed. Like, this cannot break me.
Like, I must feel something other than broken. I put the fire out. I looked at my list and the clock. I said, “I can still make it all.”
When the firemen came to my house, I told them that I’d handled it. One of them asked me if I am hungover. I know why–I looked rough. With greasy hair and an outfit covered in flour and no bra on. I said, “Not hungover. Heartbroken.” He asked me if I wanted a hug, which, yes, I did. I do.
I figured it out. I adjusted oven temperatures. I took shortcuts. I got it all made. Then, 15 minutes before people were set to arrive, I went into the basement and did the other thing my mother taught me to do when you feel so impossibly sad. She said you take the hottest shower that you can scrubbing all the way down to the nails, the scalp. And as you are doing it, you imagine the sadness leaving you.
The people coming over to my house for a party were going to be eating late. Just 30 or 45 minutes. People don’t really mind, not really, which is what I tell people all the time about hosting.
It doesn’t have to be perfect.
People are just happy to have meals cooked for them with a table set for them and hours of conversation with loved ones and strangers. They will not mind the smoke or the lateness. Most of them won’t mind your dusty bookshelves, either, or the fact that your coffee is bad.
One of the people coming asked me if I needed anything, anything, at all and I said one word. I said: Grace.
People arrived one at a time. One of them went to my favorite coffee shop and said, “There’s a woman with pink hair who comes here and I think this is her drink,” and they gave her my drink. Five of them bring flowers, unprompted, unasked. Someone goes into the basement to get vases, cuts the stems.
20 people hell bent on holding me in their arms and saying, “You are so loved.”
You can still be sad while they try to love you so hard like that, but it’s harder, you know? When you’re being loved like that.
I forgot the water pitchers. Someone finds them. People run dishes from my kitchen to the table. They grab non-alcoholic mimosas from the bar. I wrote this essay while drinking Copenhagen from the bottle waiting for the china to dry, because I am a woman who likes nice things, but to hell with perfection. If it will survive the dishwasher, it goes in, real gold and all.
We talk about food, mostly, then someone asks me about my heart. The entire room goes quiet. I tell them.
I look at the flowers they brought, the way they tell me how much they love me. I say it out loud. I wasn’t going to, but I do.
I say, “I’m heartbroken.”
I say, “I love him so much.”
I say, “He is a good man.”
I say, “I tried.”
I say, “He will make someone else really happy.”
I say, “He made me really happy.”
I dab the corners of my eyes. When the conversation turns, one of them puts their arms around me, says, “You’re enough.”
At all my parties, I ask people what their favorite thing was. It helps me understand both what people love and what they don’t. It helps me get better.
Someone tells me they’ve never had cornbread like that. I tell them why—it’s the heirloom corn, not me. It might also be that it’s a recipe from a cowboy, but that’s a story for another time.
Someone else says they put the spicy sausage gravy on top of the cornbread and that was their favorite. Some people say they loved the peach rolls, even those who didn’t love peaches or sweets. People tell me that my pie crust is gorgeous. That’s the word they use, after a week of trying so hard to get close to that. Someone compares it to a kouign amann.
The rest of them? They almost all say the grits, which I made the way he made. Double boiler, Farm & Sparrow cateto orange flint, the top skimmed, slow cooked. When I tried them at the table, I thought they needed salt and an herb, a little more butter. I wrote it down in my phone. A reminder. For next time. I made notes on most of my dishes, how to get closer to perfect. I believe that if someone can spot where you miss in a dish before you do, that’s when you stop growing. It’s your job to be your toughest critic. It’s your job when someone asks you what it needs to know.
One of the people at my house says, “Those are the best grits I’ve ever had.” Someone else says, “Yeah.” They’re not mine. They’re his. I learned by watching.
I just hope he can feel that I tried to do him justice. Or tried to do right by him.
I did. Every day.
Sometimes, you can give someone your all and it’s not that it’s not enough, it’s that you are well, you, with all your flaws and all your hard things. Sometimes, when things end, it isn’t because either of you is a bad person or wrong—it’s because you are not the person who will complete them and it doesn’t matter if they’re the person who makes you feel safe and at home if you aren’t their person. Love doesn’t make sense. Love is both chemical and a choice. And sometimes you get one, but not the other. And me? I only want it if it’s both.
Not every love story ends up with forever. Some of them end up with you crying while baking pies, cursing the end and being so, so happy for the short time you got to believe in love again.
Nikki Giovani said, “Falling in love is fun,” but she didn’t date in 2024 with apps and social media and rosters and heartache after heartache. But I know what she means—in the end, we have hope for a new beginning, not now, but somewhere down the line.
I never meant for this blog to be about heartbreak and food–or love and food.
It sort of just became that because I am trying to bring the human to my writing and because so much of the food we make comes from love and because I’m dating, so that’s my life. Or: maybe it’s also because I spent much of my days editing a book that focuses on that, and once that passes, this season of my life will, too, and my writing will shift to other things.
I had booked a dog sitter to be able to go to his house for a couple weekends. Which means, I am about to do the thing I know how to do best. Move with sadness. It’s a lesson I hope I can teach you. When you are crying over your broken heart, do not stop the motion. Get out of town. Or cook a meal. Or clean your basement. Do something with it.
I emerge from sadness with something.
Head north to the woods for a night with no Wi-Fi and the Superior Hiking Trail. Or to Chicago to eat some of your favorite meals. Both places I’m headed shortly, not really out of choice but because I already had the time set aside and so I’ll go, like something higher than me was trying to prepare me for the fall.
I know one day I will try again, looking for someone who will love all of me. For now, I have a party to tear down. For now, I’m going to spend some time alone with my broken heart asking it, “What can I learn from you? What do you want to tell me?”
Writer’s note:
I hadn’t written here for a while because someone told me that food isn’t all that serious and that I’m just a tourist in the world of chefs–deeply critical of my writing and my work like there isn’t something to be learned and gained or understood about eating in restaurant after restaurant. It’s not that I’m tender, it’s that for a moment, I thought they were right.
That person said to me, “There’s a reason chefs only like Anthony Bourdain,” as if they didn’t know why Anthony was able to write the way he wrote. It was a woman. A woman who was never a chef. Whose name chefs might not know (MFK Fisher) but whose influence they feel when they read the food memoirs of their peers. I didn’t say that. I said, instead, “You don’t respect me and that’s fine, but I’m not writing for you.”
I am trying every day to believe that the things I want and the things I have to say are worth it. I’m trying every day to believe one day I’ll have the love story I want, too.
I’m getting better.
I’ll keep trying.
When I get there, just like with the grits, I’ll know.