How to be a Good Ghost

"...when after about ten minutes in Aix, I knew without even looking at my girls' faces that we must come back, leave Switzerland, change every schedule, seize this moment of being at least on the same side of the oceans as Aix then was to us, for as long as I dared make it last.
   By then I knew more how to be a good ghost."
–MFK Fisher, from Map of Another Town








There is enough food to go around in the city of Madison that, if one thought it beneficial to mind (here in the dead of winter), you could buzz around town by bike, by car, by Uber, and test some new fascination virtually every day of the week and fall in love with some new quarter of the city. When I first moved here, I had the Quixotic dream of dabbling in such a way; I would pass anything that resembled restaurant or dive lounge and place that on my mental list; I would then fantasize about making myself there a regular and memorizing the menu, get to know the chef intimately, pass along the good cheer in writing to anyone who would read such things and then, by the end, become the food critic in the greatest food move of all time Ratatouilles, and singularly change peoples' world by the touch of food writing. Some of this has held true, and much has not. I spend a good part of my day thinking of such side schemes but very often only a brief cookbook review for a newsletter to show for it; perhaps a rapid dash off to the west side of town to Cafe Hollander, and fantastic multi-level Belgian off shoot pub that endears bicyclists with bold Belgian art along the walls and real bikes dangling from the ceiling. I then ask myself the most fundamental of all the critical questions, as it pertains to cooking and living life, the very two purported prongs of hope for my future – do I cook? Alas, a tragedy has struck, the tale of the single person who has lost his desire to move through the once beautiful gears of recipe picking, the grocery shopping, the prep, the cook, the consumption. I might very well attribute this sickness, if you will, of apathy, to a partially more benevolent reason, and that is I have always preferred to cook for others, as I had for three daughters and a wife for some twenty years virtually nightly. Those were the days of kitchen command whereby my hours, whether known to others or not, was built around the 'process.' For all of us who have been drawn into the quasi fantasy and quasi purposeful schedule of real cooking knows...this is the kind of thing that can sustain a person through thick and thin. I think of my own hero's singular title "How to Cook a Wolf," a collection of food writing from the very lean years of WWII, in which food sampling, of course, could not be perceived quite as the luxury of recreation as we see it today, but something quite other, some of necessity and harkening back to our deeper tremblings of human nature. In a word, it was vital. Now I have to ask my self how exactly one resuscitates the vitality and necessity of cooking by oneself? That is the essence of "How to be a Good Ghost." I dare say, if it takes the conjuring of ghosts to cook for, then let it be. Pick up the culinary knives, and draw out the French recipes.