SIMPLE by Yotam Ottolenghi

I feel anxious. I make fishcake tacos. More precisely, Fishcake Tacos with Mango, Lime and Cumin Yoghurt. The recipe is from a cookbook I have recently acquired: Simple from Ottolenghi. The recipe is not simple, necessarily, but it is easy to prepare in steps. There are a number of steps. The big mistake I make is to forget to first toast and then pound the cumin seeds with a mortar and pestle. I tip the cumin, untoasted, unpounded, into the bowl of the food processor, along with the fish and other ingredients. Luckily, I do not make the same mistake with the cumin seeds for the yogurt sauce. In the end, my slip-up doesn’t seem to matter. The fishcake tacos are beyond delicious. The mango salsa dresses them perfectly. For a change, I am even able to find fresh coriander, one of the ingredients of the fishcakes, at the store. (I live in Germany. Fresh coriander is, unfortunately, never a given.) My husband declares he could eat these fishcake tacos every night for the rest of his life and not get tired of them.

I am anxious because of the sheer number of positive rejections I have gotten from literary magazines, including from a number of what could be termed high-level journals. Such rejections come in tiers. I have received standard positive rejections (we enjoyed your work), more encouraging positive rejections (we are very impressed by your work), and even more encouraging rejections, sometimes signed by one editor or another, sometimes not, sometimes including a few sentences about what the editors particularly enjoyed about my story, sometimes not. Always with an invitation to send more work. I am running out of work. I only have so many stories. I am not sure I can write more, at least not now. I have already set off on a different work-in-progress, one I don’t want to put on hold. Please, I think every time I receive one of these rejections. Just publish me already. Sadly, the rejections I receive from what might be termed lower-level journals often prove far less encouraging. I constantly ask myself where I belong.

For the fishcakes, I manage, for once, to pull of presentation as well as flavor. Instead of merely chopping the ingredients for the mango salsa, which is my natural impulse, I follow the recipe to a T and julienne each of the ingredients. I am not good at the julienne. It takes a lot of effort on my part to get the mango into thin strips instead of mashing it to a pulp on the cutting board. As it turns out, I would give my mango julienne a B-. In that it is not terrible, but it also doesn’t look like the firm, well-defined mango strips in the huge color photo accompanying the recipe. My mango julienne is definitely a little mushy. Maybe the mango I used was too ripe. I end up eating the rest of the mango—for once, I measure the ingredients by the gram, according to the recipe, before adding them to the salsa—here and now. I use a grapefruit spoon to scoop the soft mango flesh away from its skin. Juice runs down my chin.

Writing—or rather publishing—is not the only thing I feel anxious about, but it is easier to focus on than other things. So here goes. I would like to be read, to eventually have a collection of short stories out, or, even before that, to apply for an NEA grant in prose, but to do that, I need publications in literary journals first. It is despair that I feel when I think I will never be read, but it is less despair than when I think about California burning, or unsurvivable hurricanes, or climate change more generally, or the end of democracy in the United States, or the murder of Black Americans by the police, or Covid-19. More than once it has occurred to me that what I feel is survivor guilt. We moved to Germany in early 2015 for my husband’s job, before Donald Trump even announced his candidacy for President. I know I am lucky to be here, not least of all because Germany has had a far better response to Covid-19. But I don’t know how to process my feelings about what is happening back in the United States. I almost said back home, but Germany is also home. California used to be home, the Bay Area in fact, but I left years ago, before even the tech boom hit. I’ve never so much as experienced a wildfire. I decide I will submit to a few journals today, ones that have sent encouraging rejections in the past. Yes. I can do something about this anxiety.

Simple from Ottolenghi, who is actually Yotam Ottolenghi, an Israeli-British chef, is a large white hardcover. The cover is adorned with the shape of one large yellow lemon. The design is, yes, simple. The recipes are demarcated by codes. These codes indicate how the recipes are simple. (For example, they contain few ingredients, or they rely on pantry items, or they can be largely prepared ahead of time.) The fishcake tacos recipe is deemed simple in three categories according to the book’s metric: short on time; 10 ingredients or less; and make ahead. I wouldn’t exactly say making this recipe goes quickly, but it’s also true that I make the tortillas myself, which adds a significant amount of time to the preparation process. What the recipe isn’t, in any shape or form: complicated. At no point during the process do I lose my mind. (I once lost my mind cooking because I was trying to do too many things at once. A curry, and a raita, and a rice recipe instead of plain basmati rice, with no time to clean as I went.) But not here. First I make the fishcake batter. Then I form the fishcakes and put them in the fridge to firm up in the cold. After that I mix up the yoghurt sauce—remembering to toast and pound the cumin seeds first—and follow this with the mango salsa, all ingredients julienned. Because of how systematically I work, I am able to clean as I go. Chaos does not reign in my kitchen or my head. No. I push the chaos out.

I write this in the present tense, but of course I am not cooking and writing at the same time. Right now is actually the next morning, after breakfast. I am drinking coffee sweetened lightly with muscovado sugar, which was the closest thing I could find to brown sugar at the store yesterday. My cat has just jumped onto the desk and is trying to make himself comfortable. First, though, he gives me lots of head butts. Then he lies down on my arms. He, like cooking, is also a tonic combatting anxiety, although in his case, a little white fluffy one who purrs a lot rather than an act of creation broken down into manageable steps. Recipes are like that, I think. They are promises. Do this, this, and this and you will get one particular result. In other words, recipes are dependable. For now, I decide, this will have to be good enough.