Somebody else's one pot spaghetti

May 12, 2020

Let me make three confessions, right off the bat.

First, I'm not a historian, just a storytelling psychologist. Second, I'm not Italian, though I did grow up in an inner-city Italian neighborhood in Massachusetts.

And third, I'm not exactly cooking my past here. To be sure, my French-Canadian mother knew how to feed our family of 10, and her spaghetti with meat sauce was nourishing and tasty enough. But it never would have won a neighborhood cook-off, if only for the fact that she didn't use garlic.

Ever. I know: it's unthinkable. Garlic was simply not a part of her past, nor a part of my Irish-American father's past.

But unless we're true culinary innovators, any time we prepare a meal we're cooking the past – a past – even if it's not our own. The brain might go to the very word repast: to feed oneself; to feed others. But maybe the heart spins its own definition: to re-past, that is, to re-engage with the past.

Months before stay-at-home orders went into effect, the New York Times published a collection of meals for people who hate to do dishes, and the one-pot spaghetti recipe simply spiraled off the page. It turns out there are many recipes online for pasta meals that can be made in just one dish, and the technique wasn't entirely new to me. A friend's killer chipotle mac-and-cheese with bacon is made this way. But this recipe promised something. Perfect this method, it seemed to say, and the future is yours.

* * *

Pre-pandemic, my sweetheart and I made it together once, and we liked it. I filed it away, perhaps to be revisited – repasted – someday. And then, March 2020 happened, with all of its upheaval, and all of its topsy-turviness.

My own version of the upside-down life is this. Before March, I lived half the time in my sweetheart's home in Cambridge, and half the time in my 880-square feet condo several miles away. Sometimes he and I were together; sometimes I was alone. I taught in college classrooms; I wrote. I kept up with friends and with my church community. I rode my bicycle every chance I got.

I stayed connected with my children on a regular basis, mostly virtually. My daughter Hannah is a marketing strategist in Manhattan; my son Liam had been doing a semester abroad in London. Hannah and I had plans to visit in mid-March. As the pandemic closed in on London and on the Northeast U.S., the trip gradually disintegrated from solid plan to potentially risky to increasingly doubtful to impossible.

So Hannah decided to come to Melrose for a staycation, and Liam's program directed the students to go home. In a matter of days, the three of us were living together in those 880 square feet. My building sits 50 yards or so from commuter rail tracks which reminded us regularly that we weren't commuting anymore.

The trains are still running, but they appear to be empty, at least here in the suburbs. In daylight, it's hard to tell whether anyone's on board. But at night, the windows streak by in yellow strips like masking tape, bleakly uninterrupted by workers' heads.

Maybe this is the pandemic version of a test for optimism. Is the train half empty? Or is the train half full?

Living together like this, post-divorce, is something the three of us have done over holiday seasons, but just for a day or two. Normally, the house in which they grew up is their home base when visiting. But their grandmother lives there with their dad, and age and underlying conditions precluded a self-quarantine there. He may get most of the holidays, I've chuckled to myself more than once, but I get the pandemics.

In our first several days together (immediately post-Europe and post-NYC), I grew to love the irony that doing dishes had become somewhat of a gift. It offered some semblance of control, as we psychologists like to say. The world is a mess, but look how clean I can get these dishes! And in one of those moments, I remembered: the one-pot spaghetti!

This is the recipe: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018322-one-pot-spaghetti-with-cherry-tomatoes-and-kale

I've read the comments. I've improvised. I've experimented. And here is where I've landed.

I now begin by adding some olive oil to the empty pot, then lots of chopped garlic, about a half tablespoon of anchovy paste, a mix of dried herbs, and some red pepper flakes. Once that mix is sautéed together for a few minutes, I follow the recipe pretty closely, making sure to add lots of fresh herbs (when I have them) at the end.

The grounding brininess of the anchovy paste and the zingy uplift of the lemon seem a perfect pairing for this moment: a light amid darkness kind of thing; a yin-yang, if you will; a "no mud, no lotus" situation.

The variations of this recipe/method seem limitless to me, more open-ended and full of possibility than much else at the moment. I've used kale, then chard, then spinach: all great. What other greens might work? What about adding a protein? Some pine nuts or walnuts? Chicken sausage? White beans? Tempeh or seitan?

Some of the recipe comments refer to this one-pot technique as the authentic Italian way; others beg to differ. I'll leave that to the people whose story it is to tell.

For me, I'm cooking a past – someone's past – about which I know little. And I'm okay with that. I'm cooking the present because … well … because I have little choice right now, and pantry dinners are a blessing.

And as for the future, who's to say? In her song Knight Moves, Suzanne Vega sings about a woman "challenging the future with a profound lack of history," and I guess that describes me now, in my tiny, newly crowded kitchen.

But I'm not exactly challenging the future, am I? I'm more squinting at it curiously and nervously: head slightly cocked, train and glass half-full; cautiously optimistic on my good days; despairing and anxious on some; optimistically cautious on others.

Anne Noonan is currently pursuing publication of her essay collection (Youngest of Eight, Named by Sibling) and writing a psychology textbook on social class.