Rachel Levin - Steamed: A Catharsis Cookbook for Getting Dinner and Your Feelings On the Table

I ts increasingly clear were going to need something more than meditation. Or medication. Were going to need to yell. Were going to need to shout. Were going to need to pound. Not just the pavement. And certainly not our spouses, bosses, or children.

Also, there may be crying.

Where can a person express frustration, existential crisis, and rage at the same time, without drawing attention to herself? Where is aggressive, barbaric behavior encouraged, even necessitated, without repercussion?

There is only one truly appropriate place. It may not be custom-designed or fully equipped or even all that clean, but whether you live in a 200-square-foot studio or a 20,000-square-foot mansion, most everyone has one. A special place where we store blades and knives, grinders and graters, scissors and corkscrews. Its also home to honey for treating wounds, potatoes for soothing burns, and fresh bread for mopping up the mess.

Its called the kitchen. And as Corona Quarantine taught us all too well, its where we find ourselves, even at our worst. Because at the end of the dayno matter how bad it was, and its been badwe still have to eat.

We still want to, too. The question to ask yourself is not What am I in the mood to eat tonight? but What am I in the mood to make tonight?

Steamed is the catharsis cookbook for our time. Every good (or bad) home cook knows that cooking is a form of therapy. In fact, a study, published in 2012, of elderly women in Taiwan showed that the psychosocial benefits of frequent cooking, whether alone or together, contributed to enhanced survival. If cooking has the power to ward off death, imagine what it can do to improve a bad day!

Remember: cooking itself evolved, way back when, as a survival mechanism. It made food easier to digest, killed bacteria, brought people together around a fire, and helped stuff taste better too. Today, cooking still helps us survive, for all of those reasons, and morein our very twenty-first-century kind of way.

Go ahead and crack its spine. The chickens, we mean. Now, tear the husks off some corn. Next, hand whip a big bowl of cream; go ahead, really beat the crap out of it. Grate some onions and horseradish and have a good sob. And for gods sake, once everything is set and donenow that its legal in at least a dozen statesbake a batch of cannabis-infused cookies and calm the F down.

Yes, this is anxiety cookingstress eatings more constructive cousin: Fifty recipes guaranteed to alleviate the madness, if only for a moment, if only for a meal. To help you feel a wee bit better about the state of the world, while feeding the people you love most in it.

I t was your mother. In the kitchen. With the mallet. A classic suburban supper scene, yesand also likely your first introduction to the idea that cooking was not just physical, but could be kind of, well violent?

With its long wooden handle and nubby little spikes, the mallet was reminiscent of a gavel, like Judge Judy gone punk. And whatever it hammered into submission was definitely guilty of something. (Or, just a bunch of innocent, plump, pink-fleshy chicken breasts in need of a little pummeling.)

The mallet is an essential tool for flattening and expanding the surface area of a piece of poultry, or beef, so it cooks more quickly and evenly. But the mallet also serves another purpose. One you may have realized one evening, presiding over your counterperhaps while your kids watched you whacking away the frustrations of the day, as they waited not so patiently for dinner.

Yes, the very same mallet used to tenderize meat is also capable of unlocking dormant rage. Were talking about the kind of feelings that come from driving home fuming at the news pouring from NPR and the $90 parking ticket fluttering on your windshield, or from a conversation with your casually racist coworker or being stuck in your house by yourself, or maybe with your whining kids, for weeks on end.

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Likewise, if your laptop crashes and you lose the entire Excel spreadsheet it took you all day to create, cleaving a butternut squash, just feels right. As does stabbing hunks of raw swordfish with skewers when the dude youve been dating for two months suddenly ghosts you. If you cant leave your apartment for months, hunker down and hammer some schnitzel.

When it seems like the world is imploding (because it is), spatchcock some poultry! Since you cant break the back of, say, Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein or Larry Nassar or Derek Chauvin (or, or, or), break your birds. Then, toss it over hot coals, splayed like a dead man, and voil: anger management and dinner.

Consider the following recipes an outlet. A coping mechanism. An opportunity to vent. An alternative to the therapists office, the gym, perhaps prison. Go for it. Rip the heads off some shrimp. Its suppertime.

Handy Kitchen Weapons

Mallet