What Do You Cook on a First Date?
When I was in grad school, I had a crush on a boy in the history department. To impress him…
…I invited him over to my shoebox apartment and cooked him a ridiculous multi-course dinner: We started with lots of white wine and maple-candied toasts, topped with soft-bellied Camembert; next was the soup course, a creamy tomato number, followed by whole trout en papillote with minted pea puree and sautéed pattypan squash; the finale was homemade vanilla ice cream with raspberry coulis (which I was, thankfully, able to prep the night before). We balanced our dinner plates on a tiny side table and kept our wine glasses on the floor by our feet. It would’ve been romantic had it not been so extravagant. To make matters worse, the conversation was stilted, since I had to run back and forth from the kitchen to dole out each new course.
As impressed as History Boy was with the meal I had cooked for him, on a graduate-student budget no less, he immediately fell asleep on my bed. The food had put him into a stupor. When he awoke from his nap, he kissed me on the cheek and took a cab home, leaving me with a sink full of dishes and an empty bed.
I’ve certainly eased up on my date-night entertaining in recent years*. Not least because I’ve grown more comfortable in my own skin and
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