Dinner in the Time of Covid

 

    

            Wash hands. Turn on the frying pan and line it with olive oil. Chop the onion. Start dinner. Repeat. And again. And again.  The pandemic has stopped us from going out for the casual meal, but I have always cooked dinner regularly. It is the transitional ritual from work to home.

                My mother was a traditional daily cook. Every night, she made dinner—meat, potatoes, veg. Some nights it was pasta. Some weekend nights, it might be a roast. But she cooked from scratch (except for an occasional can of tomato soup for the top of the meatloaf and frozen veggies), every night. When we were traveling across the country in a camper, she cooked. We ate dinner on Fisherman’s Wharf, with the tourists walking by peering in. We ate dinner perched on the Western edge of the country, in rest areas in the Southwest, every night. Even when she worked full time,  it’s not like there were a lot of options in Hampstead New Hampshire—pizza and meatball subs, a fried clam bar in the summer,  a Chinese restaurant in the strip mall that held the grocery store ten miles away.  But everyone cooked. It was what you did.

                 When I was in college, cooking was my job. My roommate woke up at six AM on Saturday morning and cleaned the bathroom while I slept in until eight. I planned the meals, made the Friday afternoon grocery list, and cooked. We washed dishes together, harmonizing along with The Doobie Brothers “Black Water” and the Beatles. Even when I lived alone, for years, I cooked dinner. The menus shifted away from meat and potatoes and more to soups and bread, pastas and rice, mounds of local and seasonal  veggies, cooked and uncooked. On the road, I became the master of a finicky Coleman stove, slow cooking pots of beans while reading in the late afternoon at a campground. I kept the wok under the shelf. Even now, I make flatbread and farls, soups and stir fries when we travel. Mark jokes that he thought he might stick around when I handed him a hot dinner on a real plate in the back country off China Hat Road on an early road trip.

                So the pandemic hasn’t really changed much for us around dinner time. I cook. Mark washes dishes. We miss going out to dinner, not because of the food, but because we can just let someone else do the work and, more importantly, because you always see someone you know when you go out to eat in Corvallis. We are just not that big a town.  And I think that is what I am missing, far more than the break from cooking. The casual interaction with my neighbors—the parents of an old student or the table with a newly minted ninth grader eating with her family and wondering—do I say something?  Nod and smile? Or just announce it in class on Monday?  Eating at home every night breaks those delicate bonds that hold a community together, even as it strengths the ones that keep a small family close.