For this series, we reach out to a member of the department who has a very particular obsession and ask them to share it with the world. In this edition, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Marcus Jackson chronicles his ardor for the palatable art.

1

My cooking and food obsession began in elementary school, the late 1980s, my mom sacrificing an extra 90 cents of the grocery budget so I could get Totino’s frozen pizza instead of the inferior Kroger version. The Totino’s, when cooked seven minutes on our oven’s middle rack then five minutes on the upper rack, had the ability to achieve a suitably flaky crust, and the supplier’s rendering of tiny, cubed peperoni and crumbled pork could strike a pleasing note of salt and smoke upon the not-real mozzarella. I would mix onion powder, garlic powder, and dried oregano into a quarter-stick of butter I had melted in our microwave, and then I would transfer the concoction into a miniature turkey baster to drizzle the pie where it seemed thirstiest. This was usually the Saturday night feast for my younger sister and me. We would jokingly tip our pinkies up while savoring small slices in front of a TV that played the VHS of Coming to America continuously. My mom would watch us eating for a moment. Leaning against the room’s door jamb, she would grin and blow the smoke of her Marlboro out lavishly.

2

In high school, I dated someone whose intelligence, beauty, and earnestness were quite the counterpoints to my brooding and my dismantlement. I once made breakfast for her and her three sisters on a Saturday, in the kitchen of the house where they lived with their mother, who worked twelve-hour shifts at a snack-food factory.

“What’s in these damn pancakes?” her older sister asked me after she took a second bite. The kitchen had a table at which we all ate. There was a generous window, and the early light was making us—even as we sported ill-fitting and/or improvised sleepwear—feel rightfully angelic.

“Besides my spiritual response to the atrocities that proceeded our existence,” I said, “There are lemon zest, vanilla, and cinnamon in the pancakes.”

“Killer,” she said, dipping her fork back in for more. Upon her sister’s complimentary declaration, my beloved looked at me and beamed.

The four of us finished our pancakes, our egg-spinach-scallion scramble, and our garlic-rosemary home fries. We hand-washed our dishes, and then we shared a Black & Mild outside, all of us full and sure the years ahead of us would be at least somewhat prosperous and just. 

3

In order to cook skillfully, one must eat many different foods enthusiastically. For graduate school, I moved to New York City, and I stayed there for five enthusiastically-fed years after my MFA in poetry was complete. New York City was heavenly for me in plenty of ways, but the multitudes of affordable cuisines, bold chefs, and inventive food-trucks were more divine than I had imagined. Additionally, there were two factors that made eating out more fulfilling and practical: no one I knew in the city lived in an apartment with a big kitchen or had the time to cook extravagantly, and I was working for a few years as a mover, which made my appetite even more ravenous and opportunistic. My friends and I would escape the small rooms we rented and meet at rotating restaurants we had already vetted for cost and excellence, and we would trade bites of the dishes we chose, and our eyes would sometimes roll back with the pleasure that was proof we were thriving.

I ate, straight from my hand, some gloriously spiced Gored Gored at an Ethiopian place uptown. In the Lower East Side, I ate pork dumplings that had broth sealed inside the perfectly seared dough-skins. I ate a halloumi, sumac, and green tahini skewer in Brooklyn that made me write a rambling poem about sumac. Between two fifth-floor walk-up moving jobs, on an August evening, my colleague in schlepping, Gavin (a wonderful poet and skateboarder), and I ate takeaway crispy duck and sweet buns as the humid wind on FDR Drive rushed through the cargo van.

4

If I were to cook for you, in my current home, in the kitchen I personally renovated to accommodate all of the preferences, instincts, pivots and shuffles I possess and exhibit while I cook, you would learn that, although there are seats at the island counter for you to perch near my meal-making, I love not talking to anyone until after the finished plates appear. Instead of entertaining you with forced jokes or my opinions on politics and art while I cook, I would remain silent enough to make sure that the onions are caramelizing correctly with the oaky merlot I added to the pan, sure that the flat-iron steak is dually primal and refined, sure that the haricots verts have accepted the brilliance of the citrus butter, sure that you leave the meal with some discovery or memory that you are living quite thoroughly in this world.