Cooking From The Heart

Editor: Chris Manganaro

Cooking involves many emotions. We may be nervous about how it will turn out then maybe excited and happy to see it come into existence after all the work we put in. Each person, each dish changes depending on many different factors. Whether it is a chef preparing food on the opening night at their restaurant or someone making dinner for a loved one, many emotions take place, constantly changing and evolving with the food we make. Cooking is like having relationships.

Giulia Meluuci’s book I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti: A Memoir of Good Food and Bad Boyfriends, the reader can see the correlation between the authors cooking and relationships first hand. Due to Melucci’s penchant for cooking, we are able to compare the emotions that she goes through as her relationships progress with the food that she makes. While this is not necessarily the main idea of her memoir, one can easily make such observations.

In the beginning of a relationship, when everything is new, Melucci has to decide when to cook for her newest beau. When is important because of how intimate cooking is to her. What she cooks is also important as she wants to entice and make her new lover happy. These emotions mix with the actual emotions of cooking, hence why some of her recipes names reference the circumstance they are made under. As the relationships head toward their bad end, so do the recipes sour. Well, perhaps they don’t sour, they are still supposedly taste okay; however, the feelings behind them change with the relationship.

While the cooking process is akin to the process of beginning and holding onto a relationship, there is also something to be said about cooking after the relationship ends. Melucci has a chapter which talks about cooking for yourself when single. It is a bit of a shame that she does not stick with this idea for the entire chapter, but she does comment on the satisfaction of being able to cook for yourself and how cooking for others gives you a whole other type of feeling. Melucci’s book holds many truths about food hiding beneath the surface of our everyday lives.