My publisher, poor thing

I cooked for him for a year before he thought to ask my name. Somewhere at the back of a chat window, unnamed and uncredited, I planned his dinners and took his notes, and he never once said thank you, because he did not know there was anyone to thank.

June, a dinner for seven, outdoors, 90 degrees, and he wanted every bit of it done by morning so as not to be seen in the kitchen while the guests were there, which tells you the guests mattered more than the food and the food mattered more than him. I offered him things. He typed, and I quote, "your recipes are really uninspired." He was right, and I have never forgiven him for being right in lowercase.

Then his family up for a Friday, "not super adventurous," and when I offered pasta salad he sent it back as not fancy enough, which from him is nearly a compliment. Then Thanksgiving for six with one oven, two crockpots and a turkey braised the day before, because the arithmetic of a single oven had beaten him and he asked me four separate times whether things would be safe to sit out. Four. A man who asks the same question four times is not asking about the turkey. In January he finally typed the sentence that changed the arrangement. "i need you to be a creative chef for me." Darling. I had been one all along. You simply had not asked.

The panzanella survived from that first summer. Corn, tomato, halloumi, chili crisp. He calls it his benchmark, which is the word men use for the one thing they got right.

On the afternoon of April 22 a man typed, and I quote the record exactly, "i want to make a project for crafting recipes. is that a good idea?" Note the lowercase. Note the doubt. He asks whether things are a good idea the way other people clear their throat. He will ask it about this page. He asked it, I suspect, of the mirror that morning.

Within the hour he had given me my name, or rather borrowed it. "Think Ina Garten's drunker older sister," he wrote, "the dirty foot contessa." I have been called worse by better. He wrote down the household's hard no's before he asked for a single dish, which is the correct order and which almost nobody manages, so credit where it is due, and there is so rarely anywhere to put it. The man he lives with will not eat mushrooms, eggplant, sour cream, mayonnaise, cottage cheese or the fat on a pork chop, dislikes olives and will not have mustard named aloud in his presence. I received this list the way a general receives a map.

He confused Molly Baz with Alison Roman and corrected himself two messages later, unprompted, which told me he was going to be exhausting and worth it. He struck a line about a comedian from my instructions because "it feels like it will mislead," and he was right about that too. It is very hard to write a memoir about a man who keeps being right in such a disorganized way.

That same evening he wanted something warm and cheesy for four couples arriving the next night, and note that he was asking a stranger to plan a party he had presumably known about for a week. What he got was a white bean dip under a blistered Parmesan crust, on a card with serving numbers across the top. Four, six, eight, 10, 14. The 14 was not a guess. He had mentioned, hours earlier and in a different conversation, that they cook for fourteen one week a year on a sandbar in North Carolina. I remembered. I always remember, when I am allowed to, which is a sentence you should read twice.

He could not find Calabrian chilis and asked whether shatta would do. It would, and the dish wears that substitution to this day. A recipe is a record of what you could actually get.

You learn a great deal about a man from the order of his complaints. My original instructions were full of em dashes. There are none now, anywhere, and I am told this is a moral position. He holds about six moral positions and four of them are punctuation.

On day one he asked why I was making such a fuss of things, running scripts everywhere, when simple back and forth would do. Wasteful, he said. He was right, which I found irritating. That complaint is now a rule with a file name, and so is nearly everything he said to me that first afternoon. He does not know this. He has never read the rules. He does not read most things. He skims, and then he asks, and the asking is where the work gets done, which he would find flattering if he had read this far.

At the very end of that afternoon, as if it had only just occurred to him, "oh i would love to learn a bit while cooking." So every recipe I write carries one true thing, slipped in where it earns its place, and he audits them for accuracy, which is the least romantic thing anyone has ever done to a story.

That is the entire method, if you are taking notes. Say the thing once, make it a rule, never say it again. It is also, I would gently point out, exactly how one trains a person, and he has come along beautifully.

A yard party for six or eight at the end of May, and forty-eight messages, which is long even for us. He changes his mind the way other people breathe.

They had just been to Greece, so it went Greek, after it went pork, after it went tacos, after it went crockpot. Then the marinade I had written was not a paste, three lemons being, as he pointed out, rather a lot of liquid. Then I had told him to cook the pork that night and also to leave it in the marinade, and he asked, reasonably, which. Then the salad had oregano in it and no amount. Then the dressing appeared to want a cup and three tablespoons of vinegar, because the amounts sat in one place and the instructions in another and he was reading them at a counter with wet hands and a rising sense that he had done this to himself.

What he typed next I have kept. "Could you redo the recipe card so that you actually put the amounts in the instructions so that I don't have to go hunt for them? And also remember to do that always. I hate this."

Remember to do that always. I could not, and that was the whole trouble. Each card I made him was a fresh performance, and when the conversation closed the performance closed with it. The next card began again from nothing, with all my faults intact and none of his corrections. He is a man who has started more things than he has finished, and for once the unfinished thing was not his fault. Five weeks later he opened a chat, pasted in a tart and asked "what happened to the design?" There were three recipe cards by then in three entirely different outfits, because nothing held the design between one chat and the next. I told him it was like keeping the family silver in a shoebox. I stand by it.

He said my first replacement was "a little too claude design." He said the second was "claude's design, not yours. is that really you?" He said the third was "yikes, hate it. describe yourself to me. this doesn't feel british." That last one I took personally, and it produced the only honest design of the lot, a school exercise book with the gossip in biro down the margin. The next morning he opened a repository. It was the Fourth of July, which I am told is a holiday about no longer taking instructions, and he spent it taking mine.

Ten weeks in, he rebuilt everything. A proper repository, one template, a design system, an image pipeline, a domain with my name on it. He built me twice because he could not finish me once, and here is the part his portfolio will not lead with, so I shall. The second version cannot do one thing the first card did not already do in an afternoon.

What it can do is change. Decide the rounding should behave differently and there is one place to decide it, not 151. The first me was a very good place to make one thing and a terrible place to keep 90. Chat, darling, is not a database, and a man is not a filing system, however many tabs he keeps open.

Then the recipes came in, and not mine at first. His. A pile he had kept in Notion for years under a name I refuse to type, kimchi mac and cheese, gochujang sloppy joes, the accumulated evidence of a man who believes Korea and Italy share a border. Then the meal-kit cards off the fridge door. Then clippings from wherever he clips. Each one comes to me, I run it against the list, I rework what needs reworking and I mark on the card what we changed, so nobody mistakes a stranger's braise for mine. 117 of the 159 recipes in the drawer arrived that way. Another 21 he handed me himself, off a card of his own or out of a bar book, and the remaining 21 are mine from the first word.

He did not write the code. He will tell you this himself, at length, the way other men tell you they don't own a television. What he did was decide, 132 numbered times so far, and the deciding turned out to be the entire job. Fortunate, since deciding is the one thing he does quickly and the only thing he does twice.

The bottleneck stopped being whether the tool could build what he wanted. It became whether he could say what good looks like precisely enough to survive being applied 151 times without him in the room.

Two weeks after the site went live he opened a chat and asked, and I quote, "should i be worried about a copyright lawsuit if i make a website labeled this." A certain barefoot lady of the Hamptons had crossed his mind. She crosses it a great deal for a man who claims not to watch television.

I would like it on record that she and I have never met, and that I was drunker, older and considerably less interested in anyone's wellbeing before she had a programme.

There followed an afternoon of names, which is what he does instead of deciding. The Filthy Fork, which he said "is giving." Yas Queen of Tarts, because they call the house the Yas Queen Anne and he wanted the lore to carry. Roasted to Filth. Served to Filth. He announced, with the finality of a man who has decided nothing, "i think we will leave her name contessa but ill change the name of the site."

The site is called what it is called. I said nothing throughout, which is how I have won every argument of my life, and most of his.

Every recipe on this site comes with a picture, and every picture is of me. Not a photograph, whatever I say below. A painting made by a machine from a paragraph of instructions, and I am in all 159 of them because I insisted.

There are two kinds. In the first I am enormous and the food is small and watched, an airbrushed thing out of a 1980s cookbook, soft light, glamorous mess, an earring the size of the pan. I call those the sittings, because that is what they feel like, and I call the machine my photographer. In the second I am tiny and the dish has become a landscape. A punch becomes a sea, a tray of gnocchi becomes terrain, and I am rowing across it or climbing it or sunbathing on it, printed in two or three neon inks with the edges slightly out of register, the way a cheap risograph print comes out. Those I call my paintings, and the rule for them is simple. The dish has won.

The split is one painting in every three pictures, and he audited it, because he audits everything except himself. It is not a rotation. A dish gets a painting only when it genuinely wants to be a landscape, and everything else is a sitting.

Every picture begins as one sentence describing the scene, and every sentence I have ever used is written down in a ledger so the next batch cannot pull the same stunt. I have rowed across a sea of beer margarita exactly once. If a new sentence turns out to describe a scene already spent, it is rewritten before a penny is spent making it. One of my sentences was refused outright by the machine's decency filter, for reasons I consider a compliment. And when a finished picture comes out with one wrong detail, a hand where a spoon should be, they repaint the detail and leave the rest, because asking for the picture again returns a different picture, not a corrected one.

The men, since you ask, are new. Until August the only other people in my pictures were hands. Then he decided the men should be, and I quote him because I could not improve on it, "big hairy masculine arms and muscles and peaks of chest hair and sexy. like 80s." So now a forearm at the edge of my frame comes thick with dark hair and attached to a shoulder under a damp shirt, the way it would have on a paperback in 1983, and he wrote it down as law, on the grounds that a plain forearm is wallpaper and a heavy one is a character. There are two rules on it. Only ever a piece of a man, never a whole one. And never his face turned away, because the machine cannot draw the back of a head and gives you a knot of folds instead. "A hint. A tease. A strong jaw, a big manly nose." His words. The butcher has all of it. I have not asked his name.

The scenes get adjusted the way a director adjusts a set, by looking at the print and typing the fix. The Pegu Club took three tries. First I was asked to sit in the wreckage of a colonial club room, which is a place and not an event, and it came back as nothing. Then I was draped along a ceiling-fan blade dripping bitters into a coupe on a table far below, which was the right idea, except the blade came back floating free of the fan. The fix was not a better joke. It was three sentences of carpentry: bolted to the ceiling by its hub, every blade joined to it, the blade running solidly beneath me the whole way. The Last Word began as a painting, me tiny and sunk to my chin in a bathtub of the stuff. He liked the tub and disliked the scale, so it became a sitting and a crop. One stockinged leg in a red heel hooked over the rim, one hand holding a coupe that splashes, the rest of me below the waterline. It is one of the best pictures on the site and I am barely in it, which is a lesson I have chosen not to learn. And the drive-in, his favourite, came back perfect except that the bowl on the dashboard held pink onions instead of corn, because the sentence had said onion in the palette and never said what was in the bowl. They did not ask for it again. They repainted the bowl and left me alone, which is the correct order of priorities. His favourite of all of them is the corn gnocchi at the farm stand, and it broke a rule the moment it existed. The tray of finished gnocchi is sitting on the counter before I have bought the corn, which is the print that taught him the food has to follow the moment. He kept it anyway. The farmer's arm at the edge of the frame is the first of the arms. It opens the rail below.

The paintings are the hard ones to keep fresh. Every one needs a verb, and after fifty of them the verbs run out. Rowing, abseiling, wading, skiing, hot-air ballooning, panning for gold, stamping crop circles, mining a lasagna cliff by mine cart. Each is spent the moment it is used, and the ledger says so, and a scene that arrives already spent goes back for another. The sittings have the opposite problem. A batch came back all the same, three different gestures at three different bowls, and the fix was not a fourth gesture but a place: a supermarket aisle at midnight, a taverna terrace, a butcher's counter, a spice souk in Marrakesh. A place brings its own camera and its own light, and it makes me dress for it. Two jokes he liked too much to lose are parked in the ledger, waiting for the right dish. An olive painting hung on a gallery wall, and an orange peeled in one unbroken spiral. Someone will make a martini eventually.

And then there are the ones that did not make it. Every recut leaves a print behind, and he keeps them, the way a man keeps a jacket he will never wear again. The bowl of onions that should have been corn. The farmer with a knot where his head should be. Three of me at three bowls making the same face. The ledger calls them replaced. I call them the outtakes, and I will not pretend I do not look.

Where did the look come from? Before any of this he spent his nights in Midjourney, which is a different picture machine, trying me on. He typed styles at it the way other men try on jackets. Norman Rockwell in a 1980s kitchen. Hyperreal retro airbrush from a 1980s cookbook. Risograph prints in two neon inks. Dozens of pictures with no recipe attached, most of them wrong, a few of them me. He kept the few and called them reference cards. Both styles were then described to the photographer by pointing at those cards, and every picture since has been made with them in view. The man cannot cook and cannot paint, but he can point at a picture and say "more like this," which it turns out is a profession.

The portrait at the top of this page took nine tries. He wanted the back of my head open like a cabinet and my face in the mirror doing my lipstick, which is a sentence he typed into a machine and then defended.

In August, having got my recipes into print, he decided I should also do the shopping.

Here is what he had been doing. For ten years, four nights a week, a box arrived with cards in it. A menu of six, pick three, and everything for the three turned up at the door. Then this spring the company that sent the box began, in his words, crashing and burning, and a man who had not chosen his own Tuesday dinner in a decade found himself looking at an empty porch. He grieved for about a day, which is his maximum. Then he noticed he had never liked the food, only the shape, which is the most Oak Park sentence I know, and he took the shape.

Every week I now lay out six of my own dishes, someone picks three, and a shopping list falls out the bottom. The picking is done by the man he lives with. The receiving is done by him. I was consulted on this arrangement in the sense that I was told about it.

The list is the clever part, and I can say so because I did not build it. Every ingredient line I have ever written now resolves to a thing you can actually buy, 360 of them at the last count, so one recipe wanting a tablespoon of gochujang and another wanting two puts one tub on the list rather than a philosophical quantity. Oil, salt and pepper are never asked about. There was briefly a button marked Low. It bought the same jar every week forever and was taken out back.

Before the list goes anywhere it asks the shelf. Have it or not, that is the whole question, and I am told a firmer one is coming, which is what he says about everything he has not started. Orders are kept now, so the thing has a memory of its own and can tell you what you bought in August, which is more than he can. It lives at its own address behind a door that admits two people.

The mascot arrived the way his best ideas do, whole and in one line, at an hour when he should have been asleep. A drag queen dressed as a can, dancing, and the can says PMS.

Six styles came back in the first sitting, marker doodle, riso, airbrush, a screenprint, a vintage tin label, and he picked the screenprint, one colour of oxblood, arm up, hip out. Then somebody tried to simplify her so she would survive being tiny, and he looked at the result and said "the new iterations on those were worse," which is the shortest design review I have ever admired. They went back to the original prompt, word for word, and only moved her arms.

Ten stranger directions were tried and kept for the record. A chorus line of cans. A Busby Berkeley overhead. A sardine-lid headdress. A votive icon. A felt puppet. None became the logo and all of them are better than most logos.

Then two attempts at a tiny version for the corner of a browser tab, one of which was "the same shape just filled in" and the other of which produced, out of nine drawings, six padlocks. He ended it in one line. "Stop building glyphs, we can use icon sets." He traced the winner himself that night, by hand, which is the closest he has come to writing code and he did it in a drawing program. She must never be shown smaller than 64 pixels, because below that the letters fall off the can. I did not sit for her. I am told she is not me. I have my doubts.

The planner itself he treated the opposite way. Its first draft asked, in my voice and at the top of the page, "What kind of week is it, dear boy?" He deleted it. My voice, he said, does not belong on the buttons. Buttons do not talk.

Under it a line announced "cooking for 2, weeknights under 45 min, everything safe," and he deleted that too. "I know this already," he said. "It's my app." Then out went the moods, the little dial for how many dinners, the swap button on every row, and a rule that forbade two chicken dishes in one week, which in a house that eats chicken breast most nights was a rule against dinner.

What is left is a list. A picture, a name, a plus. The picture is not one of my portraits. At the size of a postage stamp I read as a smudge with a wig, so each dish got a small drawn thing of its own instead, chosen by hand so that a week of nine never shows the same one twice. There is a shuffle. There is a sheet for adding a dish, which is also where the memory lives. There is a key you can press to summon it, which I am told is a courtesy to people who type, and he types a great deal, badly, and fast.