Rebecca Orchant had me with grilled cheese sandwiches for breakfast. Her father made her one every morning in the kitchen of their house on Quixote Drive when she was growing up in Rio Rancho, N.M. — a place she describes in her new book as “at the edge of the unconquered desert.”
Frequently those sandwiches were hastily made with American cheese and melted in the microwave, but sometimes they were fancy, stuffed with Muenster and browned in butter in a frying pan. I may not know much about the marathon of running a restaurant or the ups and downs of polyamory — ingredients in Simmering, A Kitchen Memoir — but I know anyone who eats grilled cheese for breakfast is someone I can relate to.
In this epoch of peak technology, we’ve all been transformed into memoirists after a fashion, as we dutifully, digitally record our daily experiences, always in the best possible light. But it takes wit and honesty to transform events into compelling stories, and Orchant offers ample servings of both. In Simmering, she renders the mundane moving and the, shall we say, anomalous accessible. The sandwiches are just the start.
Locals in Provincetown who know Orchant as a celebrated sandwich purveyor, pie judge, and aspiring burlesque performer with the stage name the Duchess of Sandwich, might not know the many and varied kitchens she worked in before she came to town. These anchor her sensuous, unselfconscious, sometimes melancholy, sometimes hilarious essays.
Orchant writes in the tradition of M.F.K. Fisher — that is to say, this book is about food but also about much more. Where Fisher’s 1942 volume How to Cook a Wolf addressed head-on the practical difficulties of living in a nation at war, from stretching food budgets to coping with grief, Orchant takes a straightforward look at the boredom and disconnection brought on by the pandemic and the nation’s mind-bending runup to the 2020 presidential election.
During that time, Orchant created the blog “Soup and Despair: Food as a Survival Tactic During Dark Times” with her friend Sarah Flynn. It was her December 2020 blog post, “Someone Else’s Oyster Stew,” that caught the attention of Patrick Davis of Unbound Edition Press. The stew recipe heretically combined oysters and coconut milk. A book deal ensued.
The book gets off to a banging start in the first paragraph of the first chapter where Orchant covers the range of kitchen experiences she has shared with her now-husband Sean Gardner —ranging from tender first courses, to hard-edged sniping, to sex. It’s only page three but I understand that there’s a lot cooking in Orchant’s kitchen, and it’s often at a furious boil.
While I’m still basking in touching images of a Brooklyn kitchen steak supper during which Sean proposes, I am suddenly wrenched by the zigzag narrative to a Provincetown kitchen where Orchant finds herself hungry for a cherub-faced fisherman whose accent “makes everything sound like it’s been filtered through dark wildflower honey.” Wait, what? Honey, you just got married!
It’s true Orchant writes about sex in kitchens. She also writes about kindness in kitchens, and about loyalty, grief, confusion, and side-splitting laughter, all in kitchens. She writes about food, too. Lots of interesting food. Can one really be the same having read about the “ham luge,” a pandemic meal in which shots of bourbon are taken from a channel cut down the center of a whole aged Benton’s ham until all those partaking fall asleep?
In and among the book’s 22 tightly written essays are 9 recipes for dishes with names like “Grits for Wooing a Great Love” and “Sue’s Green Soup.” The latter is the one to make now, by the way. It’s a cold summer soup — half potato-y Vichysoisse, half cold cucumber, and tart with buttermilk — that’s the product of a seminal kitchen lesson from Orchant’s mother: “If you see two recipes you like across the page from each other, smash them together and see what happens.”
One particularly affecting essay, “Albuquerque: Getting the Coffee” is about the day Orchant’s father died. Her encounter with a relentlessly perky coffee shop clerk moments before her father’s life support is withdrawn will be painfully vivid for anyone who has had to pretend to function normally while shredded by loss.
Days later, not able even to fry an egg successfully, Orchant sits sobbing on the kitchen floor with her husband: “He looked at me like he looks at me when he knows my brain is about to absolutely explode and said, ‘I’ll order us a nonstick pan.’ ” It’s a story of loss and grief but one that’s tempered by another story, that of a husband’s anchoring kindness and wry humor.
The Provincetown essays are peopled with characters who, if you know the Outer Cape a little, may seem familiar, and, if you don’t, may seem too odd to exist. Either way, you’ll certainly wish you could meet them. The book also offers glimpses of the inner workings at Pop + Dutch, the local sandwich shop named after Sean’s grandparents (although his grandmother’s nickname was actually Duch, not Dutch), a fact that has left the shopkeepers dealing with disappointed Dutch tourists. And in the tradition of other restaurant memoirs, the catalog of ways to injure oneself behind a takeout counter is not for the faint of heart.
Orchant has a knack for scene setting that reflects her earlier interest in becoming a playwright. After earning a degree in dramatic writing from the University of New Mexico in 2007, Orchant moved to New York, where she quickly decided that the theater was unlikely to put food on the table. But her blog, “Chronicles of a Stomach Grumble,” in which Orchant showed her love for quirky food topics — she wrote, for example, about cooking her way through the 1925 cookbook, A Book of Hors d’Oeuvre — led to a food-writing gig at the Huffington Post. There she turned out three or four food stories a day, many of them charmingly sassy lists like “Five Reasons Why ‘Spring Mix’ Deserves to Die.”
It’s a good thing for us that job grew stale after a few years. With a detour or two in between, Orchant and her husband washed ashore in Provincetown, where they founded their sandwich shop in 2014.
Sitting in her tiny apartment in the West End, where the kitchen and its “inadequately slender fridge” and “miniature oven” are tucked into one corner, Orchant says that she has had some anxieties about the work of writing honestly about herself. Certainly, her experiences and observations about sexuality and romantic relationships fall outside of the mainstream, but Orchant is also interested in queerness in the larger sense of the word, as the deviation from what is expected or normal. She sees that sort of queerness everywhere, say in having a husband and a boyfriend at the same time, or in her chignon-coiffed grandmother’s habit of cracking “T-bones between her teeth at the table to suck out the marrow,” or in the “weird little grill marks, the mirthless mashed potatoes” of a Hungry Man Salisbury Steak TV dinner. The effect is mind-opening.
I’ll come clean that I’ve already had grilled cheese for breakfast a few times since I read the memoir. Queer, perhaps, but Orchant has given me license. As for Sue’s Green Soup, if you think a cold soup that combines cucumbers and potatoes sounds too queer, read on and be comforted. As if to encourage any wavering cooks, “trust Sue Orchant,” is one of the recipe steps.
SUE’S GREEN SOUP
Makes 4 to 6 servings
2 Tbsp. butter
4 cups cucumber, peeled and diced
2 potatoes, peeled and diced
1 bunch scallions, sliced
2 leeks, sliced and very thoroughly rinsed
1 bunch fresh spinach, chopped
3 cups chicken stock
Juice of ½ lemon
1 cup half-and-half
2 cups buttermilk
Salt and pepper to taste
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- Heat butter in a heavy-bottomed stockpot over medium heat. Sauté scallions and leeks in the butter until soft.
- Add chicken stock, cucumbers, potatoes, salt and pepper, and lemon and bring to a boil (I know that it sounds crazy to cook a cucumber into soup but I just want you to trust Sue Orchant. This is the secret to making this soup verdant and special, and somehow refreshing and comforting at the same time.)
- Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, until the potatoes are soft. Add spinach and cook for 2 to 3 minutes until wilted but still bright green.
- Remove the pot from the heat. If you have an immersion bender, blend the soup right in the pot until it’s very smooth. If not, transfer the soup carefully in batches to a blender and puree. Return the soup to the pot.
- Add buttermilk and half-and-half and mix. Taste for seasoning and serve immediately or chill and serve cold.
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THE KITCHEN KINK
The event: Rebecca Orchant reads from Simmering
The time: Monday, July 29, 7 p.m.
The place: Wellfleet Public Library, 55 West Main St.
The cost: Free; seating is limited
