Culinary Eros

I wake up thinking about how to make the chicken relax. This is a science, and so I rewind my brain to how much salt I used, the acid in the marinade, the cooking time, the resting time. I am remembering when I have cut into tenderness and when everything comes apart much easier, and what I had done differently last night. It might have been the lime juice. These are things that plague my brain, not the piece I have to file or the fact I haven’t had three invoices paid, and I wonder if I should make food for a living, even though I’ve always found too much of a good thing turns it sour.

The doors are open again. I find myself dreaming about that breeze that travels between the front and back of the house, a welcome respite during dinners when the stove has warmed my body. I’ve been reading about kitchens and chefs and restaurants and I envy their heat and the purpose with which they move their bodies. There is eroticism in this type of cooking – the way a team of people move in tandem but in different ways, each move precise yet the goal collective. Like taking a deep breath in at the beginning of service and only being allowed to exhale the moment the last dish has left the pass.

Eroticism has been on my mind lately. That of a city, of a place, of a person, of a feeling. Something to do with the heat – the way it tempts you to shed layers. Marseille is a city shrouded in sex. London summers hold a similar heat – the way it rises from the tarmac. Cornwall feels less sexy. I ask a server at my favourite restaurant and she assures me that she thinks Penzance is sexy, which I believe because she is 29 and I am not; then we discuss by what measure we are judging this by and I say, ‘Well, I guess by how much sex you can have in Cornwall,’ and then she says, ‘ah, well then maybe not’, and we laugh.

I am discussing bodies and photos of them with my friend over WhatsApp and we agree that images are distortions and we shouldn’t trust them, but both of us cry over pictures of ourselves anyway. I say that it’s not natural for us to be confronted by our own reflections so much; that we have never been so self-observed than now. To another friend, I also say that I am embracing my body this summer. After buying two bikinis from a brand in France that actually fit, I try to observe the softness of my stomach, the deep tobacco brown of my skin, the little scars from sliding against rocks as emblems of eroticism, instead of zooming into photos that show double chins or uneven pigmentation, or eyes that look not Asian or white enough.

Domesticity can feel like the antithesis to sex. The word wholesome – one often ascribed to me – often feels sexless, limp, defeated. The fire of a restaurant kitchen differs to the soft breeze of one at home. Then I remember rolling meatballs in a shirt and nothing else with a man’s gaze upon me. Or cooking eggs at midnight after sex with my first lover, watching the flame red oil of chorizo pool in a pan. Rebecca May Johnson reimagines the kitchen as a site of erotic pleasure in her book, Small Fires: An Epic In The Kitchen. The tightening of apron strings cutting into soft flesh, the bringing of perversions to the table, the lust of tomato sauce splattering over white countertops.

How to harness the erotic? I suppose by cooking. Indulging in the senses. Speeding up and slowing down. Letting pots and pans pile up in the sink and for sauces to stain the splash backs for more than a moment before wiping everything clean. Letting things remain messy and imperfect for a while. It’s all so trite but possibly also true.