Homemade
Flash Fiction by Joanna Theiss
The onions burn because we can’t control our heat. We scrape the charred bits off the cast iron and start over with a new pat of butter. I add a heap of arborio, and you pour in a cup of vegetable broth, worrying over the instructions in the cookbook. The mixture thickens. My rice, your broth, our onions. We pass the bottle of white wine back and forth, then splash some in the pan. I stir while you change the record. You stir while I grate the parmesan. It is midnight when I hold the spoon up to your lips. More, you say. Feed me.
My grandmother’s box of old recipes is a distinctly American roux of old-country goulash and Midwestern casseroles. We moan over the sweet crackle of meringue floating in crème anglaise and laugh at her ham and Jell-O salad. You beg your aunt for her recipe for Mexican wedding cookies, but she won’t reveal her secrets, so we find instructions online. We dust the countertops with powdered sugar and the kitchen fills with the you-and-me smell of almond flour.
In a test kitchen downtown, we mimic the semi-famous chef as he places a teaspoon of filling on a wrapper. You dip your finger in warm water and press it tenderly against the folds. I release our dumpling into the oil. It hovers, then dances, then bounces against the metal sides. Pork, ginger, and garlic explode out of our neat casing and ruin the oil. We are told this is normal, that getting it right is a matter of faith. We let another dumpling fall. We believe this one will make it. It doesn’t. We believe this one will make it. It doesn’t.
We learn how to halve our families’ recipes, how to freeze our many leftovers. We make our own traditions: huevos rancheros for hangovers, coq au vin for snowed-in weekends, spicy Thai noodles with peanut sauce for health kicks, butternut squash soup for sickness. Sourdough baguettes for anytime. We buy a box like Grandma’s to hold our recipes. We intend to write them all down.
Somewhere between the last risotto and the first bucket of fried chicken, routine muscles in. Mac-and-cheese Mondays, Taco Tuesdays, Fried Fridays. You prepare the tacos the same way every Tuesday, with jarred garlic, smoked paprika, and canned refried beans. If there is time, I make salsa, but there is hardly ever time. It seems like another age, when our hands held the paring knives, the spatulas, when we so carelessly splashed white wine into a pan, when we researched recipes, the best pizza dough, the crispiest roasted potatoes. When even if the recipe was difficult, we were easy. We remember coq au vin, but we eat KFC from the bucket while looking at our phones.
Once, we eat apart. You in a hotel restaurant, spaghetti pomodoro that tastes like the inside of a can, me in the inviting kitchen of a neighbor, whose frittata is rubbery, over-peppered, and freckled with broccolini. In penance, we eat vegetable lasagna from the deep-freeze. We grimace through the chunks that did not thaw in the microwave.
We are not hungry, but we are not full, either.
Until the Friday I discover you ripping crisp Napa cabbage into bite-sized rhombuses while salty-fresh halloumi grills in our pan. Kalamata olives beaded with juice rest in a wooden salad bowl, joining walnuts split in half, English cucumbers sliced into pennies. I watch you chop, mix, and add; I watch you pinch an anchovy out of a glass jar and settle it on top of the cabbage bed like it is a baby you are putting down for a nap. This is a dish we haven’t made before, made with ingredients that we don’t usually buy. This is an experiment of people who forgot the love of meal-making, taking a shy step towards re-making home. Flip the halloumi, you say. It’s beginning to burn. I grasp the spatula, bully it under the firm slab of cheese, and flip.
BIO: Joanna Theiss (she/her) is a former lawyer living in Washington, DC. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Penn Review, Chautauqua, Peatsmoke Journal, Milk Candy Review, and Best Microfiction, among others. You can find links to her published works and her mosaic collages at www.joannatheiss.com. Bluesky: @joannatheiss.com