Recipes

 Recipes for food that can be served at book club meetings for The Feast of Love.

Did you know that Marlene Dietrich was a great insomniac?

No I didn’t.

Do you know what she did to keep herself occupied at night?

No I don’t.

“She baked cakes,” he tells me. “I read this in the Sunday paper. She baked angel food cakes and then in the daytime she gave them away to her friends.

She must have thought she loved me, too, because she wanted to cook a dinner for me, which she did, a quick Stroganoff, and then afterward, while I was doing the dishes, she was still sitting at the table, and she started to sing.

She reached up and picked an apple and pulled it off the branch. She bit into the apple and smiled. Then she simply handed it to me. I held the apple in my hand and gazed down at the marks her teeth had made. I raised the apple to my mouth and put first my lips and then my tongue on the spot where her teeth had been. It had a familiar taste. The apple’s bright sweetness worried its way into me.

Chloe and Oscar.

“They met at that fast-food place, Dr Enchiladas’s. She quit that job. She said she went home smelling of guacamole and that the karma was bad.

My specialty is a beef burgundy, very tasty, you have to remember to cook it slowly, covered of course in the liquids so that the meat and the onions and the potatoes become tender.

This Bradley, an interesting man, invited Esther and me to dinner the second week he was installed in that house. A courageous gesture. He was not afraid of Jews. He served veal, which Esther will not eat. In the dining room, she picked at it delicately. She left small scraps of it distributed randomly around her plate. I said later: at least no ham, no pork, no shrimp mousse, no trayf. But Harry, she said, veal to me is like a frozen scream. I can’t eat it.

When you pour your first cup of coffee of the day, if you’re feeling crummy, put a dab of ice cream into it. It’s festive. Then you gotta trudge off like everybody else, like I said, but you got the ice cream with you. Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

He’d sneak the soup, carrot-leek being my favorite, out of his house in Tupperware containers, pretending he would serve it to himself for lunch.

The next time David came over—because peacefulness is insufficient —he brought wild rice chicken soup, along with a perfectly chilled wine he liked, a sauvignon blanc.

I’m going to give you a little refund. Ten dollars. Think of this as a refund on your future. You should stop and get a cheeseburger on the way home, honey. Get two cheeseburgers. And some fries. Take it all to Oscar. He’ll be so grateful, I can guarantee.

. . . you want something to eat? I’m making some meatloaf back there, in the kitchen.

I am not particularly hungry, but when the solicitous waiter comes by I order a plate of the local delicacy, a rolled pastry with honey tucked inside.

. . . they imagine about how they’d like to be with somebody else, or truly the person they’re actually with, sitting there on the stoop, accompanying them on life’s journey by talking, talking about nothing special, just talking. Or sitting in the kitchen, making turkey club sandwiches for each other.