Omicron is on its winter rampage as I write this, Austin has a 30% COVID positivity rate. I’m not keen on venturing any further than the local market, choosing instead to nestle in the warmth of my house, a few footsteps from my kitchen—and, when I’m not cooking, the pixelated glow of my computer screen—keeping the shadows of disease at bay.

Musing on these fragile safe zones now remind me of a scene from Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing.” Two parents drive to confront the baker of the birthday cake their newly-dead son will never enjoy for repeated acts of rudeness, including the midnight call that sparks their visit. Once the baker hears of their loss, the baker apologizes, brings them bread and rolls from his kitchen and sits with them. Night and death surround them; all they have is the comfort of each other’s presence and the life-giving pleasure that food provides.

The kitchen now outranks the study as my favorite space. It adjoins the living room which looks out over the tiny 12 x 6 garden where I’ve learned to grow some of the herbs and plants  I use to cook—oregano, parsley, basil, thyme and lavender—since I moved in a year ago. I feed myself, walk to my couch with a mug of tea and relax in view of the greenery outside my window. Frost recently killed a bell pepper plant and a bucket full of snow peas in bud. But the pomegranate and blackberry seedlings I planted last year are holding their own against temperatures that move with frightening ease between the extremes of heat and cold; they are my survivors. Texas has notoriously fickle weather. But as I watch the clouds cycling the skies over Austin, I know better. Earth’s climate is changing because we forced it to change, evolving almost as fast as the virus that now stalks humanity.

Maybe living in this small space during this strange, thoroughly unpredictable time has been what’s made learning other women who cook and love their gardens so meaningful. It started last September with Valerie Bertinelli, whose new book, Enough, Already, I reviewed for Kirkus. I knew her as Barbara Cooper from One Day at a Time, the fresh-faced teenager who entered American living rooms to become everyone’s favorite kid sister. Then she grew up, married the late Eddie Van Halen and disappeared into a professional dead zone for more than twenty years. It was only after divorcing Eddie that she slowly made her way back to fame, first as a spokesperson for Jennie Craig, then cook books and later, hugely popular cooking shows.

Her story captivated me; Bertinelli is nothing but real. She even looks after her own plot of earth and uses the fruits, herbs and vegetables she grows herself. Her recommendation for freshly squeezed lemon over cantaloupe got my sky-high approval - tangy and sweet, it tastes like a kiss of summer. Then I looked at her recipe for Sicilian Love Cake and gagged. Made from boxed cake mix and pudding, the most Italian thing about it is the mascarpone and ricotta filling. Like everything else most Americans eat, the cake uses over-processed ingredients and relies far too heavily on sugar and fat for flavor. I learned that early on from a Tuscan-bred mother whose hyper-developed sense of smell and taste turned whole food into a source of personal fanaticism. I love you, Valerie, but not this. Never this. Shaking my head over Bertinelli’s recipe, I imagined celebrated Italian food writer Marcella Hazan, who abhorred the use of anything less than the most carefully selected foods, grumbling in chorus with my mother from beyond the grave. At least you call your cooking Italian-American.

Diana Kennedy became the next of my companions, introduced to me by my graduate school roommate Brigid. She was part of Brigid’s extended family and, as it turned out, the British-born doyenne of Mexican regional cuisine. Kennedy wasn’t someone I would have found on my own. Still, I decided to at least investigate the documentary, Nothing Fancy, Brigid said had been made about Kennedy’s life. Then I discovered that a woman, Elizabeth Carroll, had directed the film and premiered it at the last pre-pandemic SXSW festival in 2019. Curiosity now morphed into nostalgia for a bygone world less than three years past.

It comforted me to learn that this nonagenarian had also lived through a time of radical change. WWII forced her to forgo university in favor of joining in the British war effort as a Women’s Timber Corps member. And although she loved to cook, becoming a food writer had never been her plan because she didn’t have one, flitting from one experience to the next. That adventurousness eventually took her to the Caribbean where she met Brigid’s grandfather (New York Times journalist Paul Kennedy) at the hotel where both happened to be staying in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. With uncharacteristic tenderness, she recalls how he introduced her to Mexico, a country he covered for the Times and which became her second great love after Kennedy. Never once admitting that her presence in his life helped bring about the end of his marriage to Brigid’s grandmother. A deliberate lapse; but karma doesn’t forget. She in turn would lose him to cancer ten years after they met.

Kennedy grows her own fruits, herbs and vegetables now, on a small farm located just outside Mexico City. But unlike Bertinelli’s garden, hers is filled with plants she gathered from all over Mexico. Alone. With no companion except, on occasion, a pistol. Take away the taste for risk and excitement, though, and what remains is an academic manqué with an ethno-botanical bent. The recipes Kennedy makes are exact, down to the techniques she learned in the field, from practitioners of authentic Mexican cuisine. Guacamole, she says, must be made with a mortero y maja (mortar and pestle) and the ingredients must be ground in a particular order to create what she calls layers of flavor. I don’t typically make this dish and love my blender. But her slow-form cooking style makes sense. Grinding food by hand dignifies food in a way that pulverizing does not.

These women—Bertinelli, Hazan, Kennedy and even the mother who taught a wilful, contrarian child from saying no to the good food she made—they’re all my companions in the storm. Feeding me their lives. Their wisdom. Their food. Keeping me comforted as the world changes outside my door. Most of them with the tragic exception of my mother, found their stride in midlife, sometimes after experiencing distressing lows. Apart from food, maybe what’s summoned these women to my table is the fact that now that I’ve reached the middle of middle age, I actually understand them and their epicurean sensuality so much better. I spent the first half of my life lost in books, contemplating the likes of Raymond Carver and more because to me they were life. I liked food well enough, but cooking? It was just something I did rather than spend time thinking about. Now I stay near my kitchen, my culinary companions beside me, not just to keep world-angst at bay. But also enjoy senses I once ignored. And that a global pandemic taught me to appreciate.