Close comfort Of food and men BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

There’s nothing better than frigid January temperatures in March and a weekly deluge of snow to make us really get into the cozy thing. Like reading recently decirculated novels that are nothing but story while cuddling up on the couch with your kitty, or cooking big pots of comfort food. This, as long as you can keep your eyes away from the front pages (they say most American males only read the equivalent of sound bites anyway — so that’s why they’re so uncommunicative!) and the radio and TV (what’s that thing again?) because, if you’re like me, the daily dose of carnage and lies puts a real damper on the whole comfort-curl-up-with-a-book-and-homemade-stew thing.

I’ve only had one previous boyfriend who could actually cook by himself. He was Italian. The kind from Italy, not from Brooklyn. When I met him I was living in Paris for a year "off" and had invited some friends over for a Valentine’s crepes party and he came with his brother. I was in the kitchen making all sorts of crepes salées et sucrées, for which I had prepared by going to the nearby Rue DaGuerre market and piling my arms full with gleaming, precisely grown fruits and vegetables and generously doled-out meats and cheeses, and a huge bag of gorgeous Clementines from Spain. That first meeting, he mostly consumed as I shoveled food at him Jewish-mother–style, and something in him must have clicked that I couldn’t be so bad if I could cook that well and make him mangia mangia. From the distance of today, it’s quite possible that this pattern of devouring just continued, as I felt more and more consumed sexually, emotionally, intellectually until I no longer wanted any of it.

But he did teach me to make all sorts of comfort foods that his mama had taught him growing up in a small town near Milan — pasta cooked with carrots and potatoes and zucchini and covered with poppy seeds, olive oil, pepperoncini, and salt. Pasta aglio e olio. Papparadelle ai funghi e mozzarella. Delicious, simple, honest foods. And we had fun making them, eating them together and finishing with one of his hand-rolled cigarettes sprinkled with hash for dessert.

I think of him now, of course, because I am wondering what are the limits of comfort food when an Italian journalist is shot by Americans? And I wonder if he’s as angry as I am.

It’s funny how you take food from one relationship to the next and your future boyfriends basically have the option of rejecting it outright or accepting it. My next boyfriend, an Englishman raised in private, sleep-away schools since he was six, was learning to cook while we dated. I taught him all of my Italian’s recipes and he learned to make them himself, sometimes mixing two, like the marinara and carbonara, to get a super-salty, extra-protein-kick take on the regular simplicity of tomato sauce and pasta.

We spent hours on the phone with his mother getting the right calculations for Yorkshire pudding with roast pork, and roast rosemary potatoes with lamb and mint sauce.

My longest relationship was devoid of food pleasure in many ways. Not that we didn’t go out to eat and enjoy — we did, but we didn’t get our hands dirty with food the way I had with the foreigners. Well, actually, I got my hands dirty — alone, as I learned to make eggplant salad and baked apples and barley with mushrooms for Rosh Hashanah, and Matzoh ball soup for Passover, all from recipes his mother may have given me as some cruel torture, but which I accepted gamely. I wanted to get to know his culture through food. The problem was, the food was not so much a part of his personal culture — his family wasn’t rapturous about food. Food was incidental.

His idea of comfort food was Carnation chocolate milk and Corn Pops. Or some fries with mustard sauce from McDonald’s.

I remember once — early in the relationship — when we were still getting to know each other, I was sick in bed and he came over to "take care of me." I asked for a soft-boiled egg and dry toast and he had to yell up to me in the loft bed of my studio apartment to ask how to boil the water, when to add the egg, how dark the toast.

I finally hobbled down and made it myself. I should have known.

During the in-between times there were meals alone, or shared with my cat sitting on her stool next to me. But there is something so lovely, and yes, sexy, about sharing the completely tactile experience of cooking with someone you will go to bed with at the end of the night.

These days, as the snow piles up outside my windows and the guy next-door plays with his loud toys ad nauseum, blowing and plowing banks which are already blown and plowed just fine, my new love and I hole up and cook. We both bring our pasts and a similar love of heat and crunch to a meal. We work silently together like line cooks, sharing knives and condiments as we chop up perfect salads and braise chicken, me adding this, him stirring in this, like we’re in sync and we don’t even have to talk about it until we sit down to try what we’ve made. It’s all new, it’s all an adventure, and we’re trying it out together.

Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com