Finding Comfort in Food, A Lesson From Nora Ephron’s ‘Heartburn’

This story was prepared by Noëlle de Leeuw.

“Food, I believe, is my beloved issue,” Nora Ephron as soon as stated to Vogue’s foodstuff critic Jeffrey Steingarten, for the duration of an interview in her Upper East Facet kitchen, “When I go somewhere, I have no need in anyway to see a renowned Renaissance painting. I only want to go to the sector and I only want to go to the places to eat. It is all I treatment about.”

Nora Ephron often understood most effective, particularly when it arrived to food. Her quips and a person-liners have always been a resource of convenience. On a poor working day, there is very little a bowl of pasta—my carb of choice—and a Nora Ephron movie cannot salvage, or at the very least right up until the credits roll. As for Ephron, she’d convert to potatoes—her carb of choice—when life got sharp all around the edges, and wallowed in a bowl of buttery mashed comfort. At the very least, which is what she wrote in her 1983 autobiographical novel Heartburn, a ebook that is as significantly a lesson on hauling oneself out of heartache as it is on mastering the best vinaigrette. In Heartburn, she recounts the conclude to her next relationship. At 7 months expecting, she finds out her partner has taken a lover, leaving her with nothing but a child on the way and her recipe for the fantastic vinaigrette. And you’d be a fool to think she’d at any time give that to her partner.

In Heartburn, she thinly fictionalized herself as a foodstuff writer, scattering recipes during the e book. As to suggestion my hat to Ephron on the 10th anniversary of her demise, I resolved to invest my weekend cooking my way by way of the pivotal moments of Heartburn, beginning with the heartache-comforting mashed potatoes, the “you just do not bump into a vinaigrette that good” vinaigrette, and key lime pie, the latter of which is extra than just a sweet ending to Ephron’s legacy. At the end of Heartburn, when her marriage was actually at the issue of boiling more than, a sliver of catharsis was discovered in a critical lime pie, which she threw into her husband’s facial area with gusto during a dinner get together.

This essential lime pie genuinely is incredibly easy to make and a lot more importantly, it is loaded with butter. Nora Ephron didn’t think in God she believed in butter. Considering that this is the woman who the moment uttered the words “All this things about butter is almost certainly as close as I’ll at any time get to faith,” I figured it would be rude to disregard her philosophy on the make a difference. So off I went, pouring a continual stream of melted butter into the graham cracker crust. Even though I poured a 2nd full can of sweetened condensed milk into the mixing bowl as Harry Connick Jr. performed in the background (it wouldn’t be an ode to Ephron devoid of him), it crossed my intellect that I had gone temporarily crazy for undertaking this.

Whilst the pie sat in the freezer to set, I tossed a couple handfuls of arugula with the vinaigrette and went to city on the butter for the mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes may possibly be labor-intensive, but it’s a accurate labor of enjoy. Even though the recipe calls for a potato ricer, my kitchen crafted for pasta-in excess of-potatoes is not geared up with a single. This was not the time for disappointment, so with my aged-fashioned potato masher, I grabbed having said that much butter was leftover from the essential lime pie and, for each instruction, added, “as a lot melted butter as you truly feel like” as effectively as a tablespoon of heavy product. I grilled a filet of salmon to accompany the attack on my arteries in an work to accomplish a little something resembling stability.

So that night, while watching the opening credits of When Harry Satisfied Sally, I was delighted to forgo my usual bowl of pasta for buttery mashed potatoes, salad, and pie. The vinaigrette was thick, creamy and tangy, and the crucial lime pie was as loaded and totally delightful as it appears. With each individual chunk, I couldn’t enable but consider that if I at any time had been to vindictively throw an item of meals in a lover’s face, this would be it. The custardy lime with the mountain of whipped cream definitely can make it the perfect mess for a task like this. Even at a evening meal occasion. Especially at a supper get together.

I’m sorry to convey to you that the vital lime pie from Heartburn was a fictional story from Ephron. In reality, it was a bottle of red wine that widened the eyes of those people all around the dining table, the contents of which she poured about his head. The complete bottle, to the pretty past fall, streaming down his confront, soaking his dresses and drenching the linoleum ground. So that night, even though Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal sang Surrey with a Fringe on Best in entrance of Ira, I had to pour myself a glass of merlot.

In Heartburn, Nora Ephron calls the marriage with her finest close friends “a shrine to food”, but Nora Ephron’s complete lifetime was a shrine to food items. Even in the deepest throes of heartbreak, she realized just how to access for the stovetop in a way that could melt absent the sharpest edges of the discomfort, acquiring comfort in whichever mouthful would come future. Braving herself through the heartache, until she was completely ready to prepare dinner for anyone new once more.

“What I enjoy about cooking,” she wrote, “is that after a hard working day, there is a little something comforting about the reality that if you soften butter and include flour and then very hot inventory, it will get thick. It is a certain issue! It’s a confident thing in a entire world in which nothing is positive it has a mathematical certainty in a planet in which these of us who long for some type of certainty are compelled to settle for crossword puzzles.”

And I, for one particular, will by no means settle for a crossword puzzle either.