Tasting Menu

Written by Kara Hildebrand

pappardelle | brown butter | roasted beet | goat cheese | manuka honey served with a glass of cabernet sauvignon and house made ciabatta icelandic yogurt | orange blossom honey | granola wafer served with cafe au lait and bourbon caramel dandelion greens | raspberry basil vinaigrette | candied walnuts | braised carrots served with lemon and cucumber water pan-seared chicken breast | parmesan truffle frites | roasted tomato puree served with lemon sorbet and chantilly cream

I murmur prose in my sleep and wake up hungry. I’m twenty one years old in the deepest trenches of winter, curled up against a lukewarm breeze. Nothing hangs in the air but a breath of roasted garlic, lingering as last notes trail into whispers. I write like I have something to prove and find myself frequently caught between an idea and a platitude. A friend tells me they could never find the time to cook like me and the backhanded compliment aches a little, like a necklace clasped too tight. It’s not about time, I want to tell her. A meal is deliciously straightforward, unlike sentences that dissolve somewhere between my mind and my keyboard. I remember it all in bite-sized portions. How crumbs turned into boxed noodles and canned sauce turned into rolling out homemade pasta with a wooden spoon (because I didn’t own a rolling pin). Stir the sauce, knead the dough, dice the onion; trivial things that seem essential amongst Very Important things. I’d never reveled in my food before. Now, I eat until I’m full, and I type until I’ve run dry.

I am sixteen and I believe my body is permanent—something that will be there when I have time for it. It rests its head against the bedroom window, blinking away a tangerine sunrise so private it almost feels like it belongs to me. The morning air has a sublime crispness to it, like the first bite of an apple. Dawn is saturated with newness, and I’m in the business of newness. I never say no to a party because Adult Things are the newest thing I’ve discovered, and I suppose I find myself boring because I am the oldest. I make time to do my makeup in the morning because I think being pretty will make people like me, I make time to study at night because I think good grades will finally make my parents proud of me, and eating is an act of compassion stuck somewhere in the middle. For the first time the hours in my day feel like a finite resource, and I spend them on anyone but me. I remember it all in bite-sized portions, when every meal was intentional. I fuel myself instead with shallow bonds because loneliness is an empty room with white walls and white floors, and sometimes I lose myself to the alabaster nothing.

I go vegetarian in seventh grade because my favorite Youtube vlogger tells me I need to slim down for the summer. I want to control my body the way one controls their breathing to stop a panic attack, and I trade out diet fads like one would sample a flight of wine. A boy in class says I look anorexic and only then do I give up trying. Too much, too little, too something, too nothing. My legs are tucked under me, stamped with the texture of wood panels from a person-sized set piece. The silence of a mostly-vacant theater is fractured by low murmurs between friends. I’m convinced I want to be an actress, but really I’m just enamored with the concept of remolding myself. Everything from my glossy lips to my studded ballet flats has been sampled from a celebrity, a TV character, an influencer. Food is something added or subtracted to shape my figure, to parse out an identity among cobblestones. I remember it all in bite-sized portions. When I had scraped knees instead of these blisters on the backs of my heels.

I like packing my own lunch for school. I like sitting tucked away in corners of the library with a book, and I like the boundless stream of printed letters that can carry me anywhere. I like writing in my diary about how I’ll never love anyone the way I love my fourth grade square dancing partner. These are the only things that matter to me, the only things that I know. They’re like the syrup that pools at the bottom of a snow cone, that perfect last sip that you stomach mouthfuls of flavorless ice just to get to. I learn a lot of things from watching my parents’ favorite sitcoms. I learn that lazy men date beautiful women. I learn that women care a great deal about not eating their food. I ask about this and my mom tells me I’ll understand when I’m older. I think she’s wrong. My body is something that sprints and leaps and rolls, that turns pages and grips a pen in a stubborn fist. It simply is what it does: that’s the only thing I know. And food is just food, absent from all other things.