Alison Cook's pandemic diet: Ritz crackers and bottled spaghetti sauce - Houston Chronicle

Supper was Ritz crackers slapped with some Jif Creamy peanut butter, standing right at the kitchen counter.

No plate. None of my fancy Confituras jalapeño pepper jelly to liven them up. I just kept making peanut butter crackers one after another until I was sort of full. Then I poured out some bottled tea (Pure Leaf, unsweetened black) and chucked in some ice cubes.

“Who am I anymore?” I asked myself as I gulped it down.

There was a time — can it really be six months ago? — when lunches and dinners were a daily adventure for this professional restaurant critic. Chile momos from Tibet, Sri Lankan curries eaten off a banana leaf. Mousse of foie gras with a glass of Cremant. Gooseneck barnacles flown in from Spain, the latest and greatest in Texas’ rapidly evolving barbecue. I chased it all, never looking back.

Never allowing myself to think that this rolling feast would end, either, curtailed abruptly by a period of self-isolation in which I would find my carefully honed palate regressing into the distant past.

I hadn’t eaten or thought about Ritz crackers for decades, until the moment I suddenly sought them out on H-E-B’s curbside grocery list and added them to my order, as if directed by some occult hand.

Another week, I was seized with a compulsion to buy Graham crackers. I don’t think I’d eaten one in 40 years, but now I longed for their gentle sweetness and reassuring crumble of coarsely ground wheat flour.

I ate Graham crackers for dessert. For breakfast. I ate them as midnight snacks, with a glass of milk, as if I were a child of 8 again. At some point, I started melting Ghirardelli’s chocolate chips (another urgent craving) in the microwave and spreading them over the Graham crackers to make a sort of s’more manqué, as if I were trying to recapture the joys of Brownie Scout cookouts.

I suppose I was. I wanted to wrap these old familiar flavors and textures around me as if they were the comforter my late honorary grandmother, Ruth Roberts of St. Albans, Vt., had knitted for me out of warm, fluffy yarn, back when the world felt less uncertain.

Suddenly bottled spaghetti sauce was crucial to my well-being. Right before the lockdown, I had laid in a supply of Sal & Judy’s, made by one of New Orleans’ classic Italian red-sauce joints. Now, whenever I felt that pandemic dread setting in, I’d boil some spaghetti and self-soothe the way I had in my tweens, when my parents went out and deputized me to whip up a Kraft spaghetti dinner for my younger sister.

I felt proud and self-sufficient then, emotions I could tap into now. Sometimes I’d brown some ground beef or Louisiana sausage and onions to throw into my pandemic tomato sauce. Other times I’d pitch in some canned mushrooms. Canned mushrooms! What was happening to me? Once, I am slightly ashamed to admit, I just ate some Sal & Judy’s Red Gravy straight out of the jar, by the tablespoonful, until I had had enough.

Sandwiches became my life rafts. I needed my life-sustaining proteins and vegetables swaddled in something soft and carby, a cushion against my daily bouts of nerves. Eating a sandwich with a cup of coffee felt like a settling dive into my Swedish roots, the way fraught protagonists in the grisliest Nordic Noir are always de-stressing over coffee and sandwiches.

I made scores of grilled cheese on homestyle white bread (forget a more challenging loaf!) using Cabot Extra Sharp Cheddar, the cheese of my Vermont youth. If I felt fancy, I’d add some of the homemade tomato chutney my sister sent me, but mostly I’d wolf the sandwiches straight.

Staples that had long since vanished from my high-flying critic’s life elbowed their way back into my consciousness. “Remember us?” they wheedled from the far corners of my brain.

So I threw together bowlful after bowlful of egg salad and tuna salad, the simplest and softest of pleasures, the stuff of childhood lunches eaten at the kitchen table. I might sneak in some Brine Queen Flame Pickles from right here in Cypress, but the operative salad-sandwich principle has been to soothe the ragged spirit.

Toward that same end, I consumed many a pint of vanilla ice cream. Not my old favorite coffee, or dulce de leche, or the seasonal boutique flavors I once pursued. Nope, vanilla, preferably Häagen-Dazs, the fake-Danish mass-market stuff, and not the fancy “vanilla bean” version with the black specks, either. Just “plain” vanilla, which to me right now tastes like the food of the gods. When my grocery store runs out of vanilla and notifies me my curbside order will not include it, I feel frantic.

While many of my fellow citizens challenge themselves with feats of intricate home cookery, I have descended into a cozy world of fried eggs and French toast with maple syrup and the frozen stuffed pasta H-E-B has made for them in Italy. These little packages cook in four minutes and — with a splash of olive oil and coarse sea salt — are utterly calming after a day of writing and doomscrolling.

In a way, I’ve been grateful for this period of simpler food pleasures. It’s instructive to detach from the status and excitement of the chase for the newest, the best, the mostest. I’m not sure I appreciated that life fully when I had it; or questioned its validity sufficiently; or that I would let it consume me as much if life ever returns to normal again.

I’m not sure who I’ll be, or what my palate will be, when this period ends. But both of us will be changed.

food@chron.com

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Alison Cook's pandemic diet: Ritz crackers and bottled spaghetti sauce - Houston Chronicle
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