A Short History

It’s 1987, and I am a very small, half-Chinese Martha Stewart. For Christmas, I’ve given everybody hand-made, staple-bound books of seasonal jokes and word puzzles (editor: me; difficulty: none). Hand-written in black ballpoint and illustrated in three highlighter colours, they’re ragged where I got impatient tearing off the perforated printer tracks. I have some way to go before I establish my housekeeping/crafting empire, but I am moving in the right direction.

It’s Sunday morning and I’ve decided to make breakfast. The house is still quiet, but I’ve been awake for hours, and I’ve even folded my green-and-yellow blanket. (Just like our maid does, I bring the two corners on each side neatly together before giving the fabric an almighty swoosh. Somehow, though, every time I get to the other side, I undo my work on the side I just folded. Losing interest, I try to arrange the freeform cloth into a convincing quadrilateral, and hope my mother will be impressed.)

Lately, my grandfather has been taking fat shreds of Yunnan ham, marinating them in honey, and pressing them between sliced white bread to make the best sandwiches I’ve ever tasted, then and now. Yunnan ham is as gloriously salty as prosciutto crudo, but served in meatier slices, and I can’t resist Garden Co.’s soft Life Bread, which, untoasted, squishes into a gummy tablet just like its American cousin, Wonderbread. (Surely the hoped-for effect in this alarming recipe–popularly attributed to MFK Fisher, though I have my doubts.) Today, I’m going to make some of my grandfather’s ham sandwiches. It’s just as well that no cooking is involved, as I can’t reach the stove.

My parents wake up to find a very self-satisfied garde manger chef beaming across a table set for six, a sandwich at each setting. It’s not clear who I thought would fill the three extra places. My memory of the episode gets very hazy after this, but my parents’ reaction can’t have been too traumatizing or I wouldn’t be the cooking-minded person I am today.

Fast forward nineteen years, and I’m sitting at my desk in my Chelsea office. I’m drinking a latte, which I hate, but going downstairs, crossing the street, waiting in line, ordering and paying for the latte, opening the sugar packets, pushing the sugar through the froth, petting a cocker spaniel and walking up the stairs again is preferable to making the phone calls I have to make, to give a spiel I can no longer sell. Still, the coffee is burnt, and a latte shouldn’t have froth in it to begin with–baristas of New York City, take note.

So I get up from my desk, and I tell the receptionist that I have to leave the office, and I walk up and down Seventh Avenue, from Two Boots to Penn Station and back again, for three hours. I ask myself a lot of questions, most of them beginning with “Why”.

The rest is not, as they say, history. Not even close. But it’s something different. With more cooking, and fewer lattes.

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