I like to cook in the same way I like to dance: alone. Regardless of whether I’m in a relationship, cohabiting or not, this has always been my preference, my natural state of things. Part of this is due to real estate: With few exceptions, the kitchens in the 13 apartments I’ve lived in throughout my adult life have been of the dollhouse variety — too small to hold more than one person without the threat of internecine warfare. And part of this is because I’m both introverted and moderately selfish: Almost nothing makes me happier than turning on a podcast and zoning out over a cutting board for an hour or two.
The idea of couples cooking has thus never posed any real attraction for me: Like couples massages or couples manicures, it’s an activity that doesn’t inherently benefit from the participation of the person one happens to be sleeping with. In my own household, my fiance, David, and I have a church-state arrangement that plays to our respective strengths: I cook, he cleans. On the rare occasions we have cooked together, we typically end up competing over who gets to use the better cutting board or who has a more rightful claim to the eight square inches of uninterrupted counter space next to the refrigerator.
And yet, even I can appreciate the theoretical benefit of a second pair of (competent) hands in the kitchen, particularly on a weeknight. So when I received the galley for Sonja and Alex Overhiser’s A Couple Cooks: 100 Recipes to Cook Together (out from Chronicle on October 15), I was both skeptical and curious. There are a lot of so-called “couples cookbooks” out there, and many of them seem to be geared towards date night or newlyweds. Nourish your relationship!, they cry. Cooking is an act of love! Rekindle your romance through this paella recipe! Interestingly, most of these books don’t appear to be designed for more than one cook: Their instructions are written as though one person will be doing all of the work while the other is elsewhere, presumably waiting for this act of love to be delivered.
A Couple Cooks takes a different approach. Each step of its recipe instructions is accompanied by a symbol that designates Cook 1 or Cook 2, a feature that makes it theoretically easier for two people to be in the same kitchen, working towards a shared goal. This is the second cookbook from the Overhisers, whose popular A Couple Cooks website has successfully monetized the idea that two people in the kitchen are better than one. “Cooking shouldn’t be just about getting food on the table,” they write in the introduction. “It’s about bonding over bubbling pots, chatting over chopping vegetables, and creating memories that last long after the dishes are done.”
It’s a nice idea, right up there with the equally anodyne conceit that food brings people together, and I was in need of some weeknight inspiration, so I figured, why not? When I informed David we would be cooking together, he received this information with a certain wariness. But into the kitchen we went, accompanied by the Overhisers’ recipe for blackened shrimp with avocado lime sauce.
The recipe’s division of labor seemed a bit lopsided: One cook makes the sauce and the shrimp, while the other combines slaw ingredients and warms the tortillas. But given that one cook (ahem) had prepped the slaw ingredients beforehand, this left the other cook with more time to do dishes, so no harm, no foul. Generally, the recipe was smooth sailing, insofar as it was easy for two people to follow, and the shrimp seasoning and avocado sauce were very good. That said, the sauce’s ⅛ teaspoon garlic measurement was mystifying — you might as well just wave a clove in the sauce’s general direction — and the shrimp wasn’t actually blackened but sauteed. This, however, created the bonding experience that the Overhisers promised, as we found ourselves complaining about the same thing, and if that’s not the point of sharing a life with another person, I don’t know what is.
Since I was determined to prolong this experiment until I could find something meaningful to take away from it, we returned to the kitchen the following evening to make the book’s recipe for sticky orange tofu and broccoli. This recipe worked really well, as did the division of labor, which felt evenly weighted. When we started making the recipe, we were sniping at each other about something unimportant, but by the time we were done we were getting along splendidly. The final product was delicious, which also helped. We ate it while watching What We Do In the Shadows, one of the only TV shows we agree on.
There’s a chapter in A Couple Cooks called Just For Two, which functions as the de facto Date Night chapter that couples-oriented cookbooks are contractually obligated to provide. Its recipes, per the Overhisers, are “fancy enough to wow, but practical” — think Date Night Pizza, truffle pasta, shrimp and scallops, and other animal proteins expensive enough that you don’t want to lavish them on children or guests. I chose the Sweet Heat Salmon, a recipe described as “great for spicing up date night.” It had only six ingredients, and most were pantry staples, which I appreciated (many of the Overhisers’ recipes rely on pantry staples and err on the side of low-key approachability, which makes this a solid weeknight dinner book regardless of whether you happen to be partnered).
Alas, for all its ease, the dish — through no fault of its own — did not wind up spicing up date night. This is because there was no date night; instead, there was a regular weeknight, hectic and lousy with good if unrealized intentions. I made the sauce (butter, hot sauce, Sriracha, honey, and tamari), put it over fish, and we ate it, and it was nice, and that was it. But maybe that’s its own form of romance, a meal that meets your expectations without making you feel bad that you didn’t exceed them.
All of this made me realize that cooking together is a bit like starting a daily exercise practice: It requires determination and conscious decision-making and the development of new muscles, specifically that of accommodation. Could David and I cook together every day? Probably not, at least not in this kitchen. And I don’t think either of us would want to; again, we know our strengths, and we’re good at playing to them. But while I can’t say this experience led to memorably deep conversations or above-average bonding, it was, in its own way, satisfying, especially because cooking together made it a lot easier to clean as we went, which ensured that no one got stuck scrubbing dishes afterwards.
Did cooking together create memories? Well, yes — most conscious experiences do. If anything, it created a new awareness of my own muscle memory: So much of what I do in the kitchen is the result of doing things a certain way over and over again until I don’t really think about doing them. Cooking together is in a sense no different than riding a tandem bike: You have to be aware of how the other person moves and the energy they expend, and adjust yourself accordingly. Eventually, you might just make it to the top of the hill, sweaty and perhaps a little tired, but able to appreciate the view all the same.
