A Gastronomy of Girlhood - Rachel Roth Tapling

1. Strawberries
 
There was a time when it was acceptable to let berry juice drip down my soft belly, unbothered. I ate with gusto, fistfuls of whatever was within reach, with glee oozing from my little fingers. I read this in my baby book, bent over it like an ancient text. 
My grandma serves us strawberries from a farmstand to dip in powdered sugar, which turns pink as the juice spills over our fingers. I adopt them as an important feature of mine. I’m a strawberry person. My hair, being red, fits this narrative. 
Around age seven, I look down at my lunch in the hallway that serves as a cafeteria in my tiny school. I’ve pulled a thermos of stewed, cinnamon apples out of my pink My Little Pony lunchbox. I’ve been thinking about them all morning while struggling through handwriting in my slow, stumbling cursive.

I can picture my mother leaning over a hot stove, creating sweet and sticky apples for me the night before. I wonder whether a cookbook was propped up next to her as she worked, likely holding the phone with her shoulder as she stirred. She’d often talk to her mom like this, hours of long-distance in the kitchen.

“What IS that?” a girl across from me asks. “That’s disgusting,” the other girls agree, eating their Lunchables. I am already the quiet pastor’s kid who doesn't get most cultural references. For me to also be the weird girl with wheat bread sandwiches and mushy apples was too much.  I mumble something and quickly close the thermos, pretending to be disgusted too.

2. Weight Watchers 
 
I join by proxy, as nearly all women in my life pull little books out of their purses with points and calories. My mother works hard to not say anything about my weight, but I can feel when she comforts me as I cry that my jean shorts won’t button, that she knows that feeling all too well and that this space is charged. The fence is electric and wrapped around us both.
“She ate so much pumpkin she started to turn orange,” he says. My dad recalls one of his aunt’s failed diet attempts with a chuckle. I swallow this story like a stone, shoveled whole into my belly.

I watch my mother gag her way through recipes from a diet cookbook, hear my aunt apologize for not keeping ice cream in the house because she “cannot have it around,” and even my elementary school friends compare their weights. I measure my thighs and pray to be less. I am angry that my dad can recall those details of his aunt’s diet without seeing the heartbreak in it. It's just a story to him. 

My mother joins and loses weight, buys new jeans just in time for doctors to find cancer lighting up every part of her body, like rogue electricity from a live wire. 

I watch her open a gift from a friend while lying in the hospital bed in our dining room, chuckling darkly at a silk negligee that she held up with her soft, thin arms.   

What do you give a dying friend who has four children? In the 90’s, when your entire life and probably most of your conversations have been about appearances, about thinness, what does it mean to joke with her about fitting into the smallest size, with her body wasting away? I am probably the only one alive who remembers this event, as the quiet 4th-grader who was there, leaning against the rails of the bed. I turn it over in my memory like you check peaches for bruises.
 
3. Casserole
 
Our freezer is so full of casseroles that we eat little else for months and months, stocked into next year by the ladies of the church. They poured over us like gravy, compelled and honored to protect the pastor and his motherless lambs. 

They are not good but they are heavy, and help to settle the emptiness of a sunless sky, an aching gut, an empty dining room-turned-hospice. I equate the fullness with a kind of an ersatz safety. We are neither hungry nor satisfied. 

For my birthday that year we have a cake shaped like a lamb. It’s got black jellybeans for eyes, licorice whiskers, and is covered in coconut. I don’t have much attachment to lambs, but this cake was ready-made, unearthed from the depths of our freezer for the occasion. This particular cake was designed for Easter, but Easter had come and gone. 

I wonder if, when defrosting it, my dad noted that my name actually means “lamb” in Hebrew. I’d like to imagine he did, and that choosing this cake was a deliberate choice instead of a last-minute excavation.

A few years before, my mom had made me a cake that looked like a cat, because they were my favorite. It also had jellybeans for eyes and licorice whiskers, and I’d posed with it for photos. 

But the year I turn 10, no one takes pictures of the cake.
 
“Bonnie Taub-Dix, a spokeswoman for the ADA, told USA Today, “We eat [comfort foods] not because they taste so fantastic, but because of what they represent.”  

4. Strawberry Poptarts
 
I’m 18 and eating Poptarts in a practice room in the basement of my university art building. I’m supposed to be practicing for my vocal lessons every night and don’t mind because I can be alone. Set free from household rules around snacking outside of mealtimes, avoiding junk food and making it to church every Sunday, I find myself in a Christian College, studying hymns and eating from packages. 

I’m untethered and desperately lost, doubled over on myself trying to be both the Ideal Christian Girl and also Whoever I am, which is beginning to seem like someone I don’t like, or know. Years later, I’ll discover I had several undiagnosed issues masked with religious devotion. 

When I do, it will be a comfort. I could never digest cognitive dissonance.

I’m working before and after classes just to put gas in my car, and I burn through my meal plan too quickly by snacking every evening by myself. By inhaling the most egregious kinds of processed foods that I was never allowed to have, I am asserting something in the quietest way. 

I can see it now, that the boundaries we transgress in girlhood so often are done in secret, in self-destruction.

I wear stretchy skirts and long sweaters to hide my body. It feels like everyone is blossoming into themselves, and I am a soft apple that has rotted and fallen off the tree. If I were in a lineup, I could hardly pick myself out.

5. Macaroni and Cheese
 
Around age 20 I spend an afternoon recreating my grandmother’s mac and cheese from the recipe she gives me over the phone. The measurements are suggestions and ingredients flexible to what you have on hand. I live in a dorm so I have nothing on hand, but we’re having a potluck, so I go to the store with the list she suggested. 

I make it with faux confidence in the center of the commons with a boy I think I might like. I pretend to him that I make my grandmother’s recipe all the time and am cavalier with my interpretation. It turns out a bit too greasy for me, but the boy pretends it is the best thing he has ever eaten. 

I decide I don’t really like him.
 
“...Many [men] said that when they ate these (comfort) foods they felt ‘spoiled,’ ‘pampered,’ ‘taken care of’ or ‘waited on.’ Generally, they associated these foods with being the focus of attention from either their mother or wife.” 
 
6. Tiramisu
 
At 21, I sip liquor from a plastic kids cup and eat tiramisu from a styrofoam takeout container on the floor of a basement, watching fuzzy music videos on a console TV after work. Only once or twice do I go to parties instead with the people at the restaurant I work with. It's only a couple of guys who really want me there anyways, who know I have a long-distance boyfriend, and hope I will get too drunk to remember him. 

It’s the first time in my life I don’t connect with other girls. I’ve spent all my school years attached to a best friend or two, virtually inseparable, writing long notes to each other during classes and spending hours on the phone. But here, I cannot seem to find a way in. They aren't sheltered pastor’s daughters like me, and even though we laugh sometimes and bum cigarettes from each other, we aren't friends. I feel a bit like Belle in the opening sequence of Beauty and the Beast—- the odd girl out who is easy prey because she isn’t in the pack. 

One of the managers on his last day calls me into his office and asks what I’m giving him as a going-away present.  He shuts the door, and I realize what he wants. 

That I managed to simply walk out after rebuffing him, unscathed, is a miracle.  I’d been taught to fear men, and I did- often being called “cold,” “hard to read,” or simply- “prudish bitch.” Being wary served well. 
 
7. Queso
 
I am 22, arguing with a boy on his bed while we eat queso and chips. We used to flirt in the church basement over donuts and coffee, but I was uncomfortable with the charge I felt with him, and the latent disapproval I felt with any decisions that were fully mine, any fences I crossed on my own. 

So I wait until I am about to go student teaching to blow everything up. I break up with the college boyfriend I thought I might marry, plan to move in with my grandmother in another town, and call the boy from the basement.  

I had often felt in my family like the only one with emotions.  But he and I are matched in ardor, wit for wit. I let him look at me, and believe the things he says about my body because he is so lavish, so open, his eyes hungry but not dangerous. 

I feel uncomfortable with his parents’ laissez-faire attitude about the number of nights per week that I sleep in his bed, but not enough to stop. My dad would object, but he doesn’t know. 
 
I’ve never felt more myself.  I’ve never felt so powerful. 
 
When he proposes, I’m at my grandma’s house and she watches him kneel from her perch in the dining room. 

She later teases that I would sneak him in through the patio door at night, but she knew this and pretended not to, allowing me to feel rebellious. I would get him a snack from her cavernous kitchen after she’d gone upstairs because he had driven two hours after work to see me, and I’d  grade papers for my teaching internship while he raved about her leftovers. I’d warm up bacon-covered scallops and aged steaks. We’d drink gin and tonics with the blue-cheese stuffed olives she made for just that purpose.

He laughs that he has to come hungry and eat or she won’t let him come back. It's a joke, but the kind that is mostly true. Everyone was welcome in her kitchen, but she took feeding people seriously. Our comfort was her labor. 

I appreciate that he recognizes this.
 
“Although [women] liked hot meal comfort foods just fine, these foods did not carry the associations of being ‘spoiled,’ ‘taken care of’ or ‘waited on.’ ….they were reminded of the work they or their mothers had to do to produce them. These foods did not represent comfort, they represented preparation and clean up.” 
 
8. Side Orders from KFC 
 
I’m wrecked with morning sickness with all three of our kids, with aversions to everything but a few specific items that my stomach demanded. With my third, it was mashed potatoes and corn from KFC . 

They always say it's a good sign. When you describe the nausea, the vomiting between classes in a school bathroom, hoping students can’t hear you, they remind you that nausea means that the baby is growing well. They tell you this while you cry with your legs in stirrups.

Later, I ask my Christian school for a better room to pump in, but they tell me there is nothing available. Other women cover for me as I sit again in a stall with a handheld breast pump during every available moment of my downtime.  I am both comfort and food, gulping water to maintain the supply. 
 
9. Simmer Pot
 
Kitchen work is endless. I’ve heard that the right playlist, the right apron, a tapered candle on a thrifted candlestick, can set the mood for pretending to be a tavern wench or cottage witch rather than a woman in kitchen with mismatched tupperware, a sink seething with dishes, oily crumbs wedged in the space between the stove and the countertop. 

Sometimes I spend entire days in the kitchen, leaning into the story that if I can only keep one room clean, let it be this one. I can prep dinner, bake something, scrub the counters and clean out the fridge with headphones in, and it doesn’t surprise me that my grandma would often settle into her rocking chair, pour herself a scotch, and watch the tiny kitchen TV rather than bother with the couch in the living room. 

It’s why I set a simmer pot with herbs and lemon slices on a clean stove, and serve dinner on the deck so the strawberry juice can drip down my youngest’s belly after a day in the sun. It’s why I buy everyone their preferred snacks that they don’t have to hoard, or share. It's why my husband brings up a spread of sharp cheeses and chili fig spread to eat on crackers together in bed. 

It's surveying the kingdom, claiming the comfort after laboring over the food, and resting on the 7th day, declaring it good.