Eleanor Tomes lost her father in October. He had been ill for a year and the death itself, when it came, was not a surprise. The grief that followed it was a surprise. She had not understood that grief was a thing you would have to feed.
Eleanor is 41 and lives in Hudson, New York, with her husband and a 9-year-old son. She is a high school English teacher. Her father, Walter Tomes, had been a chemistry teacher in the same district for thirty-eight years. She still ran into people who had been his students.
In the first week after the funeral, she did not cook. There were casseroles in the freezer brought by colleagues. There were store-bought rotisserie chickens from the IGA in Catskill. There was a great deal of cheese, for some reason.
By the second week, the casseroles were running out, and the act of opening the freezer was beginning to feel like a small reproach. She began, tentatively, to cook again.
The first thing she made was a pot of brown rice. She had no plan for it. She just stood in the kitchen at five in the afternoon, and the rice was the thing she could manage. She measured it into a pot with water and salt and put a lid on it and walked away for forty-five minutes.
When she came back, the rice was done, and she sat at the kitchen table and ate a small bowl of it with butter, and she cried for a while, and then she felt slightly better.
Over the following weeks, the cooking that worked was, almost without exception, the cooking that asked very little of her. Soup. Rice. Eggs. A pan of roasted vegetables. Toast.
The cooking that did not work was the cooking that asked her to make decisions. Recipes with more than five ingredients felt insurmountable. Anything that required her to stand at the counter and chop for twenty minutes was, in those weeks, beyond her.
She found that the simplest comfort was a pot of soup made on Sunday afternoon that would feed the three of them for three nights. Chicken and rice soup. White bean and kale. A potato and leek soup her father had liked.
The potato and leek soup was the first one that broke her. She made it on a Sunday in early November, following the recipe her mother had taught her, and she stood at the stove crying into the pot, and her son came into the kitchen and put his small hand on her back and did not say anything.
It is a recipe with four ingredients and it took her about thirty-five minutes from start to finish, and they ate it that night with bread, and the leftovers fed them through Wednesday.
Eleanor's husband Marcos, an architect who works from home, took over the breakfasts for those months. He made oatmeal every morning. He packed their son's lunch. He did not say anything about the dinners, which were repetitive and quiet, except to thank her for them.
The cooking, Eleanor said later, was a structure. It did not heal anything. It did not, in any week of the autumn or winter, make her feel that she had moved on. What it did was give the afternoons a shape. There was a thing to chop at four o'clock. There was a thing to stir at five.
She also began, slowly, to cook some of her father's recipes. A peach cobbler he had made every August. A stuffing with chestnuts and sage that he had made every Thanksgiving. A weeknight beef stew she did not remember anyone particularly loving, but that he had insisted on making at least four times a winter.
She made the stew in early December. It was a long thing, three hours in the oven, and the apartment smelled like her childhood, and that was both terrible and good.
She has thought about why the cooking helped, when so much else did not. Part of it, she suspects, is that cooking is a small completion. The meal is begun and finished and eaten and cleared away. There are not many things, in a grief, that have a beginning and an end inside a single afternoon.
Part of it is also that cooking is a way of taking care of other people without having to talk to them. She did not, in those months, have the words for her son or her husband or her mother. But she could put a bowl in front of them.
By the late spring, the soups had given way to small varied dinners again. She started cooking, occasionally, things she had wanted to learn for years. She made a real ragu in March, the kind that takes the whole afternoon. She made dumplings with her son on a Saturday in April.
She does not think she would have gotten there without the months of brown rice and potato leek soup that came first. The simple cooking was not, she says, a way of avoiding the grief. It was a way of staying inside her own kitchen while the grief did what it needed to do.
Eleanor wrote to this magazine because, she said, she had not seen anyone describe the cooking part of mourning, and she wanted other people to know that it was permitted to eat brown rice for a month.
She still cooks the potato and leek soup most Sundays in the winter. It is, she says, the recipe she will probably make for the rest of her life.
