A History of My Exes As Bowls of Risotto

Because I am a sucker for love, archives, and good food, I write in my cookbooks—and ask those I feed to do the same.
Bowl of risotto on a plaid tablecloth.
Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Taneka Morris

This is All on the Table, a column featuring writers we love sharing stories of food, conflict, and community.

The first partner to write on my risotto recipe was Al, and I was in love with him. I was also in love with the Ina Garten cookbook from which the recipe came. Al signed in 2011 (spring training, a rainy day) and 2012 (moonshine baby flights @ Sycamore Bar). Most nights Al and I drank infinite beers and cooked while fending off my roommates’ cats, who wished for nothing more than to sit in our mise en place. I told Al what to chop or stir (cold butter, broth) and he did so with a charming absurdity. He was a man playing the role of a man chopping vegetables. I loved these domestic feints and I think he did too, even as he felt the need to put a little distance between himself and the action. If there was a reason we broke up it was this: He was more afraid of becoming domesticated than I was.

A year later, when a new partner went to sign my risotto recipe, he paused, then asked: Who is Al?


Listen, my risotto gets around.

Or maybe if a person dates for 20 years it is inevitable that many people will become intimate with her risotto.

Sometimes it feels pretty hard to see it all laid out there on the page: a note from Joey who claims my risotto ruled (and I’m glad because he was vegetarian and I’d substituted fake bacon for pancetta). One from my ex-fiancé, Nick, saying I left a box of arborio rice on the back burner and set it on fire. I remember how stressed I was that day, how I suddenly understood Al, afraid of domestication. How haunted I felt by the looming word: wife.

I write in my cookbooks because my grandmother, Maureen, wrote in hers. She made recipe adjustments, but sometimes personal flotsam rose to the surface: Too spicy for Ed but I liked it fine! Her archives of cooking for my grandfather live in the margins of The Joy of Cooking, The Tortilla Book, and, especially, The Bride’s Cookbook, written by Myra Waldo, a family friend.

Of Myra in real life, my mother has this memory: At the beach she would shove her bosom in their faces. “This is what happens when you don’t wear sunscreen,” she’d say. “Men don’t like wrinkled cleavage. Block up.” My mother gave the same advice to me from the time I was a little boyish girl running around the lake in my underwear. Back then I couldn’t care less what men might like or about pleasing anyone other than myself. How unlikely that I was once such a creature.

Now I am prone to gratifying others. Have lost myself in the act not a few times. And Myra’s recipes are all about that. The Bride’s Cookbook is “dedicated to the proposition that a well-fed groom is a husband forever.” It encourages the bride to use food as Scheherazade used stories in One Thousand and One Nights: to keep the sultan happy, to preserve her life.

I cook for people because I love them. I am sure my grandmother, a minx of a redhead with a filthy mouth, cooked because it gave her pleasure too. But I have nearly lost my freedom enough times that these days I understand Al, chopping vegetables as Charlie Chaplin might, turning meal prep into a bit of gendered playacting. Trying to protect us from an outdated history. Preserving the wildness we fell in love with in each other.

My grandmother loved wildness too. She also annotated Audubon bird guides, penciling in her sightings. Some are smug. An arrow pointing at the rufous-sided towhee says: 1967: A pair all winter. Ours were plumper. Some are rapturous, like the one about the indigo bunting: First appeared next to river eating dandelion flowers. He was almost iridescent. At night she’d call down the barred owls with their own song—who cooks for you?—and feed them. It does me good to remember her both at the stove and the window, binoculars at the ready.

In the marginalia of my cookbooks there are the exes I cooked for, yes. But there are also notes from days of freedom and community among friends. Like the time Erin H. and I made the risotto for someone’s birthday even though we couldn’t afford the saffron the recipe calls for. (Erin later fell in love with her husband, Said, in Al Jadidah, and brought me precious little vials of the red threads from the Moroccan spice market.) Or the post-election dinner party for 15, where Cate roasted a chicken, Erin M. made perfect macarons, and I made my risotto in the style of political consultant John Podesta, whose recipe had been leaked along with the rest of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

There’s also a note about the time visiting friends Erik and Sheela refused to let me make risotto for them, instead insisting on cooking for me. When a blizzard hit the next day, I still had all the unused ingredients in my house. I had only ever made the risotto for others, but I spent that day cooking it just for myself, a half bottle of leftover wine for company as the snow buzzed outside. I will give Myra this: In a chapter called “About Wines” she writes, “Wine has a definite place in your everyday life,” and indeed, this is wise.

What a pleasure to cook for oneself and know Scheherazade need not please the sultan. What pleasure to cook for beloveds but not lose oneself in the process. What pleasure to be cooked for. What joy in being called down from the branches to eat, and then returning aloft.

CJ Hauser is the author of two novels, ‘Family of Origin’ and ‘The From-Aways.’ Her first full-length work of nonfiction, ‘The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays,’ is out now.

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Bowl of risotto on yellow floral tablecloth.
Risotto has a reputation for being fussy and laborious, but a few tips will get you on your way to a pot of creamy perfection (no constant stirring required).
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