Post-Traumatic Cooking Disorder

I know the Psychiatric community is all over PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but I think I have stumbled upon a more positive disorder I call Post Traumatic Cooking Disorder.  I have self-diagnosed this after years of flash backs about food and cooking.

Today while I was buying a head of cauliflower I had a vivid memory of the summer of 1980 I spent living in Nantes, France.  No Nazi’s were involved is my disorder, but I did spend a lot of time that summer walking past bombed out buildings that had sat half demolished for forty years on my way to and from school.

I was living in Nantes with a French family.   Marionique and Patrice were the parents of two little boys ages five and three.  Why they wanted a college girl to live with them I will never know.  I don’t remember much about them, probably because my French was so bad that I had a headache all the time from concentrating on trying to understand them.  I certainly know they hardly ever understood me.

My cauliflower flashback was from my first weekend with them.  I arrived in Nantes after spending a week in Paris with a group of 12 other American students I was going to school with.  We arrived in Nantes by train and were all met at the station by our new families.  Marionque picked me up and after many false starts at conversation I finally understood her to say, ‘I think we are going to have trouble.”

We arrived at her tiny house and after she showed me to my room she told me we were going to get back in the car and go to their summer place on the coast.  I was a little apprehensive because I was going to miss the fun my friends and I had planned for the weekend in Nantes and I was beginning to realize that my personality was dependant on being able to communicate humor, which I could not do in a language I hardly spoke.

I was right to be fearful because the “summer place” was the French equivalent of an airstream parked on a perch overlooking a violent Atlantic ocean.  The only thing I remember Marionque teaching me all summer was how to make a steamed head of cauliflower with ham slices and cheese sauce on top, but it was well worth it.

Once we arrived at their retreat Marionque and I walked into the little village to buy food.  She asked me to go to the meat counter and order “quatre tranches du jambon,” which I came to learn was four slices of ham.  I was certainly not used to ordering meat by the slice, but I have never forgotten that “tranche” means slice in French and I have never used it again in my life.  No wonder the French are thin when they order meat by the slice rather than by the pound.

We walked home with our basket of just enough food for dinner for five people, one cauliflower, four slices of ham, a small hunk of Gruyere like cheese and a small bottle of milk.  Marionque steamed the cauliflower until it was just tender and then draped the thin slices of ham over the top and poured the Mornay sauce she had prepared with the milk and cheese over the top.  I carefully watched her prepare it, helping where I could.

It was probably the most silent meal I had ever eaten but so delicious.  I was incredibly lonely being in the middle of nowhere with a strange family unable to communicate, but the food was so delicious and simple.  Now whenever I see a whole head of cauliflower I have a little tug-of-war internally from remembering my feeling of isolation and the divine taste of dinner at the same time.  I’m sure it is already a real disorder, but for now I will just all it PTCD, short for Post-Traumatic Cooking Disorder.