Summer Cooking
July 2020

I am doing my best to balance on a teetering wooden footstool as I peer into the top shelf of the cabinets in my new kitchen. It is June, and it is hot, and New York is feeling just exactly as I had hoped it would, even if I have only been here for just a month and maybe don’t know any better. Katey, my new roommate, like many New Yorkers I’ve met so far, doesn’t really cook, so luck is on my side in terms of kitchen real estate but I’m still not really sure where to put everything. Hopping off the stool, I pull open a thin drawer to find a collection of makeup brushes in the silverware caddy and I decide to start there. I carefully remove the brushes and place them in a speckled turquoise glass I find in the closest cabinet and set the whole thing on the countertop like a small vase of flowers. I manage to shuffle around the contents of a lower shelf to make way for my set of All-Clad pots and sauté pans — three of the former and two of the latter — and place them carefully in the cupboard, stacked like nesting dolls, conscious of not taking up too much space. It is clear that I am going to have to trim down the kitchen supplies I brought with me when I moved across the country last month, but these naturally make the cut.

I poke my head into the refrigerator and inspect the bottles lining the small shelves on the door and take a quick inventory. Ginger-miso-lime-mango salad dressing, a fancy thin bottle of honey mustard, vegan ranch dip, an ever-present tub of hummus, a clear plastic to-go cup of cut watermelon pieces, and a half-eaten bar of milk chocolate with almonds and dried cherries. I lift the butter compartment and handfuls of sauce packets come tumbling out: soy sauce, ketchup, Chinese hot mustard, duck sauce. 

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“I hope this is ok, but one thing I ask…don’t worry it’s nothing huge…but we don’t keep or cook any meat in the apartment.” Katey was going through a divorce and was living alone with an extra room to rent for the first time in eight years and she was having trouble shaking the use of ‘we’, especially when it came to rules and how things were done.

“Of course, you can eat meat, but I just don’t want to smell it or have it here in the apartment. I’m not that strict though, so if you eat it when you are out and have leftovers and bring those home, that is fine. And fish is ok, fish is totally fine, but no meat, please. Is that ok?” Katey announces this to me over the phone while I am still in San Francisco and I know that isn’t really a question I am supposed to answer or elaborate on and I just say yes, no problem.

Katey and I worked together on a job in Miami earlier this year and over jumbo mojitos at the hotel pool where we were staying, Katey learned of my desire to leave the Bay Area, my home for the last 13 years and move to New York.  

“YOU SHOULD! You totally should! You’ll love it!”

At the time, Katey was still married and living with her husband in Manhattan and had recently shifted careers from non-profit work to being a make-up artist. I loved hearing her tales of the city I had always dreamed of living in and she loved to be the ambassador and doled out beauty tips and skincare rituals along the way. It was only a few months later when I got the call. Katey needed a roommate and she thought of me, I was in.

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I continue shuffling around the small kitchen like I’m inside a pinball game, every turn sends me in a different direction. I finally grab a pair of nail scissors from the countertop, the only sharp object I can find, and gently cut the tape on one of my moving boxes and open the top flaps carefully. Sitting right on top is something I didn’t recognize or at least had forgotten about. A small paperback with an illustration of cherries, strawberries, beans in a pod, and the title Summer Cooking by Elizabeth David. I hadn’t remembered packing this, but suddenly the long walk through Hayes Valley and the Fillmore and up through Western Addition many months ago came floating back to me along with the quaint bookshop where I found it. The colorful cover art and the simplicity of the title — and all that it implied — had called out to me, but in the fervor of my sudden decision to relocate after receiving Katey’s invitation, I had not yet picked it up.  

Summer is a cold and foggy affair in San Francisco and I often yearned for days that were hot and humid and drenched in a thickness that could be worn like skin and would require a book just like this to resume one’s dignity in the face of it all. Finding myself now in the perfect environment, I start flipping through the trim book, and I dive in on the spot. Elizabeth David writes in simple, direct prose that assumes you know your way around the kitchen. Her recipes are written in paragraph form rather than a list of ingredients with specific quantities followed by step-by-step instructions. As I read through the various sections, I immediately scold myself for not opening this book any sooner, and when I get to the line in the introduction asserting that it is "rather dull to eat the same food all year round" I know exactly what she means. At this point, despite record-breaking heat and the many boxes still unpacked, I decide that I am hungry.

I land on the recipe for Gnocchi alla Genovese which she declares in the first sentence is “simply an excuse for eating pesto.” I suddenly remember the basil in my bag that I left by the front door from my trip to the farmer’s market earlier before getting diverted by my unpacked boxes.  

After fetching my groceries and making room for them nestled among Katey’s various condiments in the refrigerator, I open up to the recipe again and make a list. With the list in hand, I take a quick trip downstairs to the grocery store across the street to gather the semolina and pine nuts that I don’t yet have in my pantry. I run up all five flights with unexpected enthusiasm and sweat soaking through my blue cotton dress and go to work.

I have never made gnocchi with semolina before and frankly never realized there was a version made without potatoes, but so far I trust everything Elizabeth David has told me, so I continue the course without question. The semolina is added to seasoned milk that has been brought to a boil in what starts to feel like the process for making polenta, but quickly the combination thickens into a large ball and starts to take on the shape of a sturdy dough. Parmesan and eggs are added to this mass and once gently incorporated the whole thing is spread out on an oiled sheet pan about ½ inch thick and set to chill for a few hours. While the semolina is enjoying the cooler climate of the refrigerator, I start the pesto process which requires bunches of this and handfuls of that, and after much pounding away with the mortar and pestle that I managed to dig out of one of the moving boxes, the sauce is complete.  

The chilled gnocchi dough gets cut into squares and then rolled into the familiar cork shape of its potato cousin with floury fingers. This is a meditative practice that I am now so deep into that I hardly hear the front door open and Katey shouting hello from the other room.

“Wow, I’ve never seen so much activity in here, what are you making?” she murmurs leaning on the doorframe to the kitchen while fanning herself with the mail she has brought up from downstairs. “It’s going to be nice to have a gourmand in the house.”

I tell her all about the gnocchi and the pesto and Summer Cooking and let her know there will be plenty for both of us.

“I don’t know how you can eat right now, I think I’m going to take a nap, thanks though.”

She inches around one of my boxes and grabs a tub of hummus and a bag of carrot nubs out of the crisper in the refrigerator and heads out again.

“Oh, are these my brushes?” Before I can explain, she grabs the turquoise glass and is headed down the hall. I hear the door close behind her into her room that is the only part of the apartment with air conditioning.

The water on the stove is simmering by now and I slowly drop the small blobs into the pot one by one and watch them bump and twirl and bob until each one rises to the top and hovers there waiting to be pulled out with a slotted spoon. I gently remove the floating pillows from the salty water and place them in a colander I had waiting in the sink. Once all the gnocchi have been fished out, I do as I am instructed and place them into “a hot buttered dish and leave them in the oven for 5 minutes”.

At this point, my dress is soaked through and my face is flushed and maybe Katey is right, how can I eat in this heat? 

Still keen to fully have this experience, I grab the pesto that I thought should also have a moment in the cooler environment of the refrigerator and set it out on the Formica countertop to give it a stir. I drag the wooden footstool to the back window and redirect the small fan clipped near the sink towards the same spot and pull the gnocchi from the oven. I spoon the pesto over the gnocchi with a heavier hand than Elizabeth David would likely suggest and cover the whole dish with a substantial dusting of Parmesan cheese. I pour a bit of the white Burgundy I opened the night before into one of the matching speckled turquoise glasses and carry that over to the window, along with the bowl of warm gnocchi exuding bright basil and rich, sharp cheese and take a seat on the footstool. While cautiously balancing everything on the windowsill, I stare silently through the window that faces the brick building behind us, and I watch the old man across the way reading in his armchair. I let the fan blow my tomato-red face while stabbing my fork into the gnocchi, swirling it around in the radiant green sauce, and confirming that Elizabeth David is indeed correct about pesto being the main objective here.