The Hopes of Home-in-a-Lunch-box

And three links to upcoming events

If you’re in London (or close) come to a live recording of Cooking the Books on February 10! Or an evening of conversation and food at Honey & Co. on February 11! Or a an evening with Bee Wilson at Quince Bakery on February 12!

Now to this week’s question—

Dear Tamar:

Ever since we moved to a new city, more than 5,000 miles away from home, I’ve been cooking school lunches for my son. In the initial months, the packed lunch felt like an anchor to our old life. It was mostly Indian food—comforting, familiar, steady.
Over time, my range has expanded. We now rotate through a loose rhythm: a pasta day, a sandwich day, a taco day, something rice-based (often fried rice), and a wild card day. Often I simply cook an extra portion at dinner so he can reheat and take the same thing for lunch the next day.
Lately, I find myself wanting fresh ideas—not so much for him, who is usually content, but for me, as the cook. I’d love guidance on how to keep this daily ritual feeling curious and alive rather than purely functional.

Thank you!

Home-in-a-lunch-box

Dear Home-in-a-lunch-box,

I think there must be two types of lunch practitioners. (I know, we say there are two types of everything—feelings about anchovies, circadian rhythms, pet preferences. There are actually more types, and to reduce everything to binaries is lazy. I know, and still…I do it.) There is the type that thinks lunch should be the same every day and the type that believes—just as firmly—in midday variety.

I can’t say what genetic or environmental factors determine one’s type. Or: I can’t say for sure. I suspect that, like so many of our fuzzy and debatably useful binaries, it starts in our genes. I was fairly miserable at lunchtime until third grade, when my mother got a recipe for all-cheese lasagna—from the mother of Tamar Blau, the other Tamar in my class. I preferred the lasagna room-temperature to hot, and for several months, I brought it to school every day and I was happy.

I might still be eating it lasagna daily today, but for having noticed, at some point, that Leora Eisenstadt sometimes had two challah rolls spread with butter, topped with sliced and salted cucumber and tomato in her lunch bag. I begged my mother to do the same. She did, for a whole year, until a now-forgotten classmate introduced me to peanut butter and banana on whole wheat, which took its place.

I haven’t made the argument for a genetic basis yet, but I will. My son ate exclusively Hudson Valley Fisheries smoked steelhead on spelt bread for twelve months, before switching to olive-oil packed tuna on baguette (half a year), and then unsweetened crunchy peanut butter and blackberry jam for the next two years. I never sought a change and always acted put out when one introduced itself. David Lynch ate tomatoes, tuna, feta cheese, and olive oil for lunch every day. Before that, he’d spent seven years drinking a Bob’s Big Boy chocolate milk shake and a coffee every 2 pm. I don’t know what his parents’ lunch habits were, but I have my suspicions.

My son now goes to a school in Madrid that prohibits packed lunch. He’s adapted to a changing daily menu of two courses which may include carrot puree and hake with roasted potatoes or rice with tomato sauce and lean pork with peas, but has not yet featured smoked trout, and I’m confident won’t. I keep considering trying David Lynch’s formula, but find myself instead doing what I’ve done for the last five or more years: frying leftover rice with some leftover allium and chili paste and adding an egg. There are sometimes leftover beans. What can I say? I feel genetically formed this way.

You and, it seems, your son are genetically (or environmentally, or some combination) formed the other way. The very thought of trying to vary lunch makes me uncharacteristically anxious: My breath catches; I feel jumpy in my desk chair. By asking my advice, you’ve pushed me out of my comfort zone, asked me to imagine myself in the precisely opposite camp. You’ve asked me—for the duration of this inquiry—to imagine that I’m a different type. Obviously, any such exercise is a good one, worth doing more often. I’m grateful for the goad.

In this exercise, then, I would begin where I do when I fear becoming overwhelmed: with constraints. The most logical constraint might be to immediately limit the choices to “things that are good cold.” But my early happy days of cold lasagna proved to me that to imagine such a category as universal is a fool’s errand. I found myself drawn to the constraints you already have in place: four general frames plus a “wild card.” Once I approached the quest for new ideas with these frames in mind, my breathing calmed and I settled back into my desk chair.

Why not keep your four-plus-a-wild card, and let yourself roam widely within their bounds, even pressing against their boundaries? Tyler Kord wrote a book I love called A Super Upsetting Cookbook about Sandwiches. The book is what it sounds like—a romp through ideas for things to put between bread, which I don’t think would upset anyone but an Italian, whom it would enrage. Keeping a sandwich day on your lunch roster, I wonder if you and your son might enjoy sitting together with the book and picking outlandish sandwiches from it to try once a week. You could do the same with tacos—I love this by Enrique Olvera. And so on. Few of us suffer from a dearth of pasta recipes, but perhaps there are inspirations to be found within the rather narrower field of cold noodles, which might include sour spicy cold noodles, or a Korean version, or soba noodles, or mazeman, or even lasagna. I’m not going to deign to suggest variations on rice to a cook from the country with the second-highest rice consumption in the world. I’ll just mention again to how fun it can be to sit with your child and look at a panoply of rice meals and decide that way.

Dear cook, my favorite thing about your pen name—“home-in-a-lunch-box”—is what it suggests: that home is wherever you find yourself making food for someone you love. What a wonderful definition of home it is, and what a wonderful definition of lunch—food that reminds you, in some way, of home.