Nunn - The comfort food diaries: my quest for the perfect dish to mend a broken heart

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Copyright 2017 by Emily Nunn

Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Atria Books hardcover edition September 2017

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Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe

Jacket design by Anna Dorfman

Jacket photographs Brand X Pictures/Stockbyte/Getty Images

Author photograph by Dot Griffith

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nunn, Emily, author.

Title: The comfort food diaries : my quest for the perfect dish to mend a

broken heart / Emily Nunn.

Description: First Atria Books hardcover edition. | New York : Atria Books,

[2017]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016055910

Subjects: LCSH: Nunn, Emily. | Comfort food. | Cooking, American. | Food

WritersUnited StatesBiography. | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX649.N86 A3 2017 | DDC 641.5973dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016055910

ISBN 978-1-4516-7420-0

ISBN 978-1-4516-7427-9 (ebook)

For John (April 8, 1934April 4, 2017) and Mariah Nunn, who taught me to rethink my definition of family.

No one who cooks, cooks alone.

Laurie Colwin

No one knows how Ezra Pound came to be born in Idaho. Thats something an English professor at the giant magnolia-shaded southern university I attended announced one day during my freshman year. What a ridiculous statement , I thought. Ezras parents probably had sex in or around Idaho. The joke about this school, back then at least, was that someone would throw a diploma in your car window if you drove through town. So I thought, Perhaps this man is not a top quality academic .

Decades later, I believe I understand what he was trying to get at: theres no real logic to where we start out and what we end up with. Its like cooking. Once you get your ingredients, how you put them together at any given time is up to you. Maybe you have a book of recipes that has been passed down to you, maybe youre winging it. Either way, its your responsibility to create something good, which you must then attempt to parlay into something better, never knowing exactly how things will turn out. It helps to have a high tolerance for disasters, in the kitchen or otherwise.

The place where I came to be born, and the place where I learned to cook, is Galax, Virginia, population seven thousand, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Its hard to imagine my parents doing what Ezras did (in Galax, in Idaho, or anywhere), but it happened, and something about my upbringing flung me far away rather than keeping me in the fold.

I ended up in New York City, heaven to me after small-town life, where my first job was at a magazine called Wigwag (the word means to signal someone home). A group of upstarts had left the New Yorker magazine to start Wigwag , which ran out of money during an economic downturn and stopped publication a year after I arrived in the city. When a few of them returned to their old jobs, I tagged along and landed at the New Yorker , too, and for almost a decade ended up covering theater plus editing and writing the original Tables for Two column.

My assignment, basically, was to go to the theater (sometimes five times a week), eat in restaurants, and have engrossing conversations with interesting people. I often felt like the luckiest person in the world. Why would I ever leave? I wondered this immediately after I took a job at the Chicago Tribune , despite the fact that they almost doubled my salary, gave me my own restaurant column, and promised I could write on any other topic I wished: the world would be my oyster.

If I was lonely at first, a few years after arriving in Chicago my life had fallen beautifully into place. I loved my job, and Id met a local engineer who was tall, handsome, funny, wore Brooks Brothers suits, had pale blue eyes, and shaved his face exactly the same way every day. I adored him; I didnt doubt for a second that he adored me back. Less than a year and a half later, we moved in together to a building a few blocks away from the Tribune s hulking gothic headquarters and even closer to his firm.

And as great as this man was, he came with an added benefit: a seven-year-old daughter who also had blue eyes. She was as enchanting and lighthearted as a fairy princess, even when she was covered with mud from sliding down a clay embankment in the rain, even with her arms tightly crossed and shoulders up in fury, or when she had rats nests from days of not brushing her long, shiny chestnut-brown hair, just because she was not in the mood. She had an affinity for the natural world that was reciprocated: I once watched her tiptoe extremely close to a deer as if she were indeed a woodland fairy princess; she and the animal stood staring at each other for a long while, as if they were trying to remember where they had met before, until the deer bounded away.

A few months after we met, the Engineer told me I came first in his life. First. Since I had grown up in a family of sevenan exquisitely dysfunctional southern family, in which various members had stopped speaking for years in various convoluted and confusing configurationsyou can imagine how alluring that was, in spite of how rushed it seemed. A few months after wed moved in together, he took me to Tiffany and bought me the prettiest platinum three-diamond Etoile engagement ring. It didnt seem to matter much when the Tribune laid me off during the recession, along with a lot of other people who had high salaries and a Pulitzer or two. I threw myself into a life of heretofore unthinkable, at least for me, domesticity.