I do not mean exotic locations where they light fires from aromatic twigs to grill insects and eat them whole.

I have cooked in many strange places.  I do not mean exotic locations where they light fires from aromatic twigs to grill insects and eat them whole.  Nor are we talking about wilderness expeditions or a palm hut in Samoa.  I mean hotel kitchenettes with a single flimsy pot, or my own basement in an electric frying pan during a renovation.  There was a beachside casetta with a stove that rocked and one square foot of counter space, or the converted altar of a tiny country church turned ski chalet.  A recent dingy Barcelona kitchen featured: 4 forks, 4 knives, 2 glasses (one Batman, one Minion), no bowls and few utensils of any kind. 

In all of these places the goal was not to produce anything special, but to get people fed and to turn what might have been foreign or lonely into something resembling home and family.  When my stepsons were small, we spent a lot of time in hotels, on visits or taking trips.  Hotels – even ones with swimming pools and make-your-own waffle breakfasts – are not usually where children or their parents want to be, even if they want to be together.  So, making a meal is a way to pull everyone close.   We often made waggon wheels and chorizo – spoked pasta with Portuguese sausage smuggled from our Montreal neighborhood to the kids’ hometown in Vermont.  Chorizo has a vivid aroma of paprika and garlic that we were sure the border agents would pick up more quickly than pot smoke when we rolled down the window to show our passports.  That sausage perfumed the rooms we slept in and the kids’ clothes when they went to school next morning. 

In a rented house in London I made “Bananas Foster” after a long day of wandering when everyone was tired of castles and portraits and the Tube.  It contained nothing but caramelized sugar with pats of butter stolen at lunch, over-ripe bananas from Tesco and a tub of vanilla ice cream.  There was no cinnamon, no rum, no flambéing.  But the effect was magical.  Routine contentment was restored.  We ate it in pajamas in front of the television trying to make sense of British news and laughing at British commercials. 

I’ve also cooked in outlandish set-ups for ridiculous numbers of people.  As grad students, we made Thanksgiving dinner for two dozen in a kitchen with no heat located down half a kilometer of hallway from the barely furnished dining room.  We stole a cart from the lab and rolled the turkey from oven to table like the Queen of Sheba on her litter.  As the guests of guests at a rolling summer house party my husband and I hand chopped pesto for twenty after the belated discovery that there was no blender.  One year at Easter we barbequed whole suckling pig on a metal garbage can lid after discovering that a very small pig is quite large indeed.  The result was brown, tender and crisply delicious, although the long, closed eye-lashes and gently curled position made him look alarmingly like sleeping child.    

Right now even cooking at home feels foreign.  The utensils are battered in the usual way, missing a handle, blade blunted; they’re lost or found in the same drawers.  Pots are dented or shiny, the oven mitts still have burn marks, spices overflow the shelves.  It’s all the same and yet everything feels like it might be somewhere else, a lost hotel, forgotten island, or lonely valley.  The world and the people in it appear across an unseen gulf, moving past like fish in an aquarium, swimming in a different medium.  And the silence. No background traffic, no blare of fire trucks, no kids squealing on the way to school, no raucous joking of people heading home at 2 am, no muffled arguments on balconies, no giggling girls preening their way to the metro, no slouching boys following them with shouts and grunts of competition and pleasure.

To make the world home again, to shorten the distance between us and reality, we need concrete actions.  Peeling carrots, chopping onions.  Baking bread, roasting potatoes.  Soup on the table, cheese, bread, olives.  Pour some wine, drink it slowly. Wash the dishes, clean the counter, sweep the floor, wipe the table. Each act brings the world back into focus, makes time tick forward instead of expanding in all directions.