The Recipe for a Breakup

How to eat when the world falls apart.

The first thing Robi cooked for me was, I believe, a rather classic spinach/chickpea curry he had learned at the Indian restaurant he worked at, in London, back in the shining era in which Italians single-handedly ran the whole of the dishwashing in the city, circa 2011.

Then again, was it?

Like we all do, I remember our first date, glimpses of the first things we’ve done together. I don’t know how many people actually remember the first thing they cook for their new date. In hindsight, it is kind of like remembering how we first took care of each other.

He was unfussy and absolutely decent in the kitchen: his mother, a professional line cook, had tempered him to retain basic survival recipes when he went off to uni.

He was well travelled. An aunt who had moved away from her little birth town in Molise when she was 18 told him wonders of the many places she travelled, inviting him to Singapore, Melbourne or Delhi. Sitting at our small town’s bar, where the biggest novelty was the Chinese restaurant that had opened in 2002, we shared spritzes and bonded over his tales of Asian eating houses where you could eat bowls of noodles for as little as 2 bucks, while I told him about the crazy Chinese underground megastores I shopped for limp veggies in Manhattan on a 5 dollar a day budget. Our early 20s were fun, straddled with nights spent sleeping on dusty floors and, in his case, bottles of alcohol occasionally stolen from their Indian patrons with the other Italians.

What’s the recipe for a breakup?

Maybe it has something to do with chemical reactions like that of gluten in bread: it keeps expanding and, if you don’t keep an eye on it, it will overflow and deflate. The same way stars explode or universes expand by accumulated energy that reaches its limit, until one atom expels the other.

When we moved in together, and shoved both our dangerously inflating universes into our moldy 2-bedroom apartment, the space had a hint of feeling cramped, but room for novelty always tricks you into thinking you’ve got far more maneuvering space than you actually do.

The apartment we lived in was in an old 5-story condo in the outskirts of Bologna, with light formica doors and very Bolognese terrazzo-like floors, which look infinitely worse than what you have seen on Pinterest. Funnily enough, there was a Michelin-star restaurant in the house right beside. Many times we said we’d go try its famous tortellini in brodo, reasonably priced at 35 euros, and each time we never did.
The paper-thin 1970 glasses rattled in the morning to the sounds of trash trucks and that of the bus announcing its current stop, which was right downstairs. A layer of moisture would build up all over the glass in the colder months, trickling down in copious tears, sometimes forming a little pool on the ugly terrazzo floor.
Like in all Italian houses, the smell of coffee from the moka came wafting into the bedroom from the kitchen at 7. I’d hear the bubbling sound of the coffee coming up as Robi trafficked in the bathroom, while I still laid beneath the covers. The metallic female voice of the bus stop softly chanting Trebbo, prossima fermata, Trebbo, muffled through the windows.

I would take in to all the morning melody produced by his getting ready, wait for him to leave, then get up. In my nights, often sleepless, often disturbed by bad dreams, laying in that bed and smelling the morning coffee was my coziest corner of comfort.

On Sundays, we had a ritual of making pancakes. It was one amongst several others, but one of the first we had established.
There, maybe that’s the first thing I cooked for him. As I’ve always associated pancakes to post-sex treats, that must have been what I made the first morning after he woke up next to me.
Pancakes - with ricotta and lemon. The kind of pancakes in which you have to beat the whites until fluffy and incorporate them in the batter, take the time to do it.

Admittedly, I think my pancakes could have used some improvement. I was never able to make them as great as those I once had at Sarabeth’s, or as those that Eva made for me when I was at her place. I always thought that I could wing it, that it was ok if an ingredient was missing, that everything was repleaceable. That I could just do without researching the method. I thought it was too much work for something that you’re supposed to whip up first thing in the morning.

What was, then, the recipe for a breakup?

Sometimes, it’s a recipe you think you can wing. Something like my pancakes: faulty, careless and lacking method from the beginning.

We’ve always treated our relationship like those pancakes: assuming that that’s as good as it gets and that it would never be as top notch as the others’.
What we didn’t understand then was that it wasn’t about making our pancakes as good as Sarabeth’s. It was about taking the time and care to do things right and, when they tasted good to us, that would have been our pancakes, and they would have nourished us and we would have loved them, even when it took some effort to make them. It would have been us, and our pancakes, each with their flaws.

—

My restless nights and growing anxiety derived from the fact that I hated living where we lived. Markets were incredibly expensive, the town felt lifeless, and the bassa bolognese, in its gray, foggy attire, felt stuffy and suffocating. I was never, despite some efforts, able to make any friends.
But living in Bologna was convenient, as travel was easy: in the five years we had lived there, I photographed over ten cookbooks for northern Italian editors, and was able to hold my desk at an American university in Florence where I taught photography once or twice a week, as it was just a quick 30 minute train ride away. I saw my life slip through my fingers and I didn’t understand how that was possible. In my dreams, I lived somewhere in the countryside, where the air smelled different and the light was warmer. I longed to go back to our hometown - which we did almost every weekend. I thought those breadcrumbs I could get out of my days would be enough.
I didn’t understand why I was so unhappy and, even when I started to figure it out, I wasn’t able to communicate it properly to my partner, who was perfectly fine where he was, as long as he could pay the bills and go out and not think of work on weekends. I understood that feeling and wished I felt the same.

My solace was knowing that I'd sleep next to him after a nice dinner and a chat. I was so used to his presence that I had trouble falling asleep alone. I had what everyone would call a very successful career, and yet I couldn’t wait for the day to be over and, when it finally was, the perspective of having my place in that bed seemed like the only good thing, along with dinner, I could squeeze out of life.

I loved our eating habits. We’d often cook together. He wasn’t creative with his recipes, but had a handful of excellent staples - pasta al tonno, or ragù, or lentil stew.
‘My lentil stew’s just the best,’ he’d say. ‘I’ll put in two chillies… all right, one,’ he’d say as he saw me giving him the side eye. I was never a fan of spicy food.
His lentil stew really was the best. Oily and tomatoey right to the point, with a perfect hint of heat, and a very finely minced soffritto. I was never a fan of lentil stew. But his, I thought - and this is something I could never say out loud - was even better than my mom’s.

After dinner, he’d make himself a cigarette and smoke it on the terrace, door ajar, as I sat next to him indoors and we talked about politics, our days, music, or our friends through the window. We lived very close to the airport, and we’d hear the planes pass over our heads. Even though that happened every night and was far from a novelty, we’d sometimes comment about how they made the paper-thin glasses of our apartment tremble.

That little bubble, that little universe where we’d push our things and that we kept feeding for years was what kept us afloat, even though our things often clashed rather than fit, like two boats anchored to the same floater. That bubble, which felt both like a distant world and a secret chamber, became the spare room in which we’d stuff the load we didn’t know what to do with. The more things we added to it, the less we agreed on anything. We wanted to build a house and it was like unpacking a bunch of Ikea furniture at once on the floor, without separating the parts and screws and bolts.

The recipe for a breakup always has unclear instructions. Even with all the good parts, not understanding or misreading the steps can never amount to anything good. Then you get it wrong, and keep adding spices to mask the flavor, often making it worse.
Lack of communication is what ended us. We were mingled Ikea furniture. We were a recipe full of typos that we never had the motivation to fix.

After years of cooking for two, the trauma of leaving our house, and finding myself alone after all those failed recipes, I hardly had any will to eat. L’Appetito - the Appetite, that primal survival instinct that revs our engines, lost into despair.

For a few months I could barely swallow some yogurt or some rice. My mom would beg me to eat something and made me stelline in brodo.
Then I read somewhere that people who refuse to eat do so because deep down they don’t think that they deserve to exist, and that made me mad. I didn’t know wether I deserved to, but I wanted to exist.

And I existed.

That existing required new recipes, new ways to nourish myself.

At the beginning, it required no recipe at all.

Re-adjusting after cooking for two for years, along with the lack of appetite, meant scaling down. Living alone, I sometimes learned to embrace things that might be seen as haphazard, maybe even careless, but that actually feel liberating. Eating something in front of the open fridge. Eating fruit while standing over the sink, like my mother did with fresh peaches from the market, ditching that all-italian law that has you put on a tablecloth and take your time, meal after another, until the linen is irreversibly stained with red wine dripping on the bottom of glasses and tears of coffee from old mokas that drip everywhere as you pour. I still don’t use tablecloths. At home with Robi we had one that we never took off, until - like our mothers’, it was stained to a point of shame and we’d feel the need to change it. Many times he tried to convince me to just get a plastic one, which I hate with a passion. The Italian experience of laying the tablecloth lies not in the slow meal experience, nor in the cloth per se. The sentiment lies in the stains.

And now that I live alone, joy is to be found in the smallest of things. Your own eating habits, that you get to reclaim eventually. Here in southern France, that means going out to the market to get some very good butter, or a cheese I did not know before. It means getting a baguette at the Boulangerie in my village that makes top tier bread with a mix of whole flours. Hearing the jokes from the butcher, chatting with the English woman who has a vegetable stall.

You just tidy your bubble, little by little, and rebuild.

I recently found myself giving a ride home to this very young girl, who had just broken up with her boyfriend and was crying in my car, as I told her that there’s no better gift in life than being rid of someone who doesn’t want to be with you.
‘I wonder how they got to build all these roads,’ she said, her voice half-broken, as she stared silently outside the window after a good cry. ‘I wonder how they managed to build such a complex highways.’
‘Well, it started with just a bunch of cobblestones,’ I replied, mindlessly. ‘Someone, a long, long time ago, needed to build a path to connect two houses. And then three. And then a whole village. Throughout time, people who needed to travel further kept placing one cobblestone at a time. They engineered them. And then highways existed. Every big work has always started from something very small.’

And that is that, I thought, the recipe for my breakup. No recipe at all until I’ve regained consciousness of the small, single good things. No big recipes until I learn to savor the ingredients - the sun-kissed apricot in the summer, the fresh goat cheeses in the spring, the leaves for a very good salad. Then, learning that blessing them with a drop of honey elevates them to heaven. Buying the fresh, crusty bread, and the good prosciutto, and then popping open the homemade fig jam and using it to make a sandwich. And then you stop there, where it works. No overthinking, no useless additions.

A recipe is but a well-crafted, well-written, and mostly well cared-for, sum of its parts.

When you’re scraping by and need to reassess everything, start from the cobblestones.

And don’t cook with stale ingredients, either. The recipe for a breakup has ingredients covered in layers of mold, that kind that you just can’t scrape off anymore.

Sometimes I think I miss him. But then I realise that i’m just mourning the stale chance for old Valentina to talk with the old Robi. I wanted the version of myself who didn’t think she was failing to talk to the version of him who couldn’t communicate that we, in fact, were. But those two people do not exist anymore. We’ve rotted down to compost and gave life to something new entirely.
Of all the mourning I thought I’d have to do as an adult, I never thought the mourning of past versions of people to be an option. But it is, and a melancholically painful one. And, when mourning the loss of a partner, you don’t just mourn the loss of a person, you also mourn the loss of a home.

Write clear instructions. Communicate what is needed. The recipe for a breakup is written in scattered notes and has no care for method. Once you’ve learned to love your favorite ingredients, write down the steps. Sometimes you can wing it, sometimes you can’t. Lest your dough will spill over the bowl.

Nowadays, I make my pancakes American style, using a single bowl and a fork at best. No fuss, as little cleanup as possible. I add a couple tablespoons of sugar and chocolate chips. I make the pancakes that work for me, which are - funnily enough - infinitely simpler than the ones I’d make for Robi.
Then again, many things work extremely well without the pomp and circumstance. It’s the great secret of adulthood that makes being 30 great even though you’re burdened by bills, bureaucracy, careers and practical life.

Maybe it’s the same between people who want to be together. No pomp and circumstance. Still lots of work, but less mental fatigue. I love you. We’ll figure out the rest. And, if you’re missing an ingredient, just don’t make that recipe. You can’t make do with what you haven’t got in the pantry.

It’s like trying a food you loved, and recreating it at home. Tweaking the recipe, getting the spice just right. And, if it doesn’t work, you’ll note it for the next time and try again.

Just like with food, you wouldn’t try to figure out a recipe at all costs so you can get to love it. I mean, you can.

But why should you?

—

I cried a lot while writing this article. Writing this whole recipe for our breakup reminded me of all the things I did wrong.
But now I do live in the countryside that I like, where the air smells good, and the light is warm. I moved abroad like I had always wanted to. The markets are wonderful and I get to choose, and learn about, my new ingredients.

I almost thougth about including a recipe in this article. But then I thought that, even today, my favorite thing to eat alone is crusty bread with fresh ingredients I bought from the market - a proper jambon beurre, or golden tomatoes dripping fresh olive oil and basil.

It is, somehow, a way to state you’re alive.

A part of me will always fondly remember the comfort of our old bed.
But, as someone who really likes me recently told me, do not accept any violence. Take the sweetness and learn to accept it. Our healthy selves would not take any badly written recipe.

And there is hardly a bigger violence than something that doesn’t fit.