Cooking, Love, and Vulnerability
“Oh my gosh — You’re my Sauce Man!”
“Your what?”
I was beginning to fall in love with someone after a long period of heartache. My spirit was finally open to someone else again, and he was showing the signs of being equally into this new relationship and decided to spend a long weekend with me in Rhode Island.
It was the end of February — cold and unpleasant outside, but with the right person by your side, even a New England winter can be quite heartwarming.
We had each been vulnerable enough to be set up by a mutual friend and risk traveling a few hours each way to see each other. All good signs.
On this particular day, I was making tomato sauce while he quietly sat near me, doing some work on his laptop.
I learned to cook at a very young age from my Italian immigrant grandmother during the time when she taught my parents her recipes for the Italian deli they were opening years ago.
When channeling nonna in the kitchen, every Italian and Italian-American knows that test of a deft hand and keen senses lies in the ability to replicate her tomato sauce. Of all the dishes lovingly prepared in Italian cuisine, it’s the sauce, the sugo, the gravy — whatever you want to call it — that’s the magic potion of unconditional love.
My nonna always presents the pasta on the table dressed in sauce and constantly surveys everyone’s plate:
“You wanna moh sauce?”
Rather than just smothering everyone’s plate, it’s like she takes joy in tending to us, making sure each has just the right amount. It’s another excuse to show love and care and attention. And when you stop eating:
“Whatsamatta? You gotta go to da batroom?”
In other words: What’s wrong with you? Accept the unconditional love offered to you. Don’t be shy. It won’t run out. This is not a trick.
So, here I am, genetically predisposed to not only share my own open heart by way of cooking, but also able to replicate the sauce that’s probably tasted the same in our family for centuries in the remote mountain villages of southern Italy. A true test in vulnerability.
What better tool could I have at my disposal than this rich red potion to make a man fall in love with me?
With all care and attention (and really smug about my cooking abilities) I lifted the wooden spoon from the pot of simmering sauce, cupped my hand under it to protect his clothes, and blew on it gently to protect his sweet lips from burning.
“Babe, come try this. It’s perfect”
What if he hated it? What if he compared it to the many sauces he’d had in Italy during his previous decade of living there? What if countless other men had tried this same magic method of wooing him?
It was a risk I was willing to take…
I could give you a blueprint of exactly where I was standing, how I was feeling, and the look on his face as he tasted the sauce and it struck him that I might actually be someone in his life willing to show him that unconditional love. The sauce was like a sacrament in that moment.
Nora Taylor had just written — I think on that very day — an article about finding your Sauce Man — the guy (or gal or person) who’d show you their true colors. Taylor puts it this way:
A Sauce Man is a person of any gender who gives off the aura of feeding you marinara on a wooden spoon, gently blowing on the sauce to make sure it is not too hot, seeking both your approval and admiration in their slow simmering labor. A mix of sensuality and support, a Sauce Man seeks simple pleasures and delights in sharing them with you…The voice! The skin! The aura of responsibility coupled with really, really nice arms! A Sauce Man is a person you look at and think, they’d just treat me so nicely. The opposite of someone unattainable, a Sauce Man is available without being smothering. They’ve got interests and passions and know how to live life to the fullest; they wear suede, not leather.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Thank you, Nora. I finally feel seen.
I felt seen by that sweet man the moment he tasted that tomato sauce and declared at the suggestion of his friend who’d just read Taylor’s article, that I was in fact, his Sauce Man. My willingness to put my soul into this — my vulnerability — was paying off.
We live in a time of disembodied dishes photographed all alone. Sexy food pics that tell no story, probably don’t even taste very good, and give no real indication that someone put their heart and soul into creating them for anything other than social media attention. We may be losing sight of the purpose of our time in the kitchen: to labor for the nourishment of others and the elevate the ingredients that — plant or animal — have given their lives to nourish us. There’s vulnerability in every facet of food preparation in that sense, but this is not a one-way deal. It also belongs to the cook to delight in the joy of those they’re feeding, but to have the love we have put on the line — or on the end of a piping hot spoon — accepted by the recipient in the hopes of being seen for who we really are as cooks: lovers.
Real cooking is an act of vulnerability. If not, the food is purely utilitarian, and that’s when we find ourselves alone in a parked car having a Big Mac attack, using the food itself to fill the space within is that only love can fill.
As cooks and chefs, what will we make of this incredible power that we wield? Will we be creators of lifeless food pics that someone scrolls past, or creators of something that could convince even the hardest of hearts that they’re loved?
The pandemic has amplified the feeling that a lot of time has passed since that day of my being outed as a Sauce Man, and the shift in communication in this relationship leaves me feeling very vulnerable and has me wondering where I stand — an uneasy feeling at best — but I can rest easy in the knowledge that he doesn’t have to wonder where I stand at all. He felt it…
…It was in the sauce.
