Introduction
It's amazing the reactions you get when you tell people you're writing an ex-boyfriend cookbook.
"What?" asked our friend Lisa, skeptically. "Like how to fricassee the ones who really pissed you off?"
"Not a how-to-cook-your-ex-boyfriend cookbook," we told her. "A book of recipes we've gotten from ex-boyfriends over the years."
"You've dated men who could cook?" Allison asked, incredulous.
"Great," Jane cried, "a cookbook with nothing but recipes for toast and ice cubes!"
"If you were lucky," Jeri muttered under her breath.
So, maybe we are a little jaded, but we've honestly been served some damn fine meals. And we've dated some pretty amazing cooks. Chefs in New York restaurants, short-order fry cooks, campfire cooks, that guy who worked the waffle line at Campus Dining Service. One ex-boyfriend baked bread whenever he got depressed. Another worked in an upscale gourmet food store where the owners paid him minimum wage and he felt compelled (and thoroughly justified) to steal copious amounts of absurdly expensive produce, spices and condiments with which he'd concoct heavenly dinners in the kitchen of the run-down boardinghouse where he lived with eleven impoverished housemates, six flea-riddled cats and a parrot named Igor.
It's likely that everyone could make a list of things gained and lost in relationships material, spiritual, physical, intellectual. We take away from relationships all sorts of things: perfectly worn-in Levi's, those mixes with lots of REM and Peter Gabriel that they make for us during the gushy phases, espresso makers we've bought together, personal insights, new pet peeves, a list of character flaws to watch out for in men we might date sometime in the future. We gain weight, gain religion, gain great and profound understandings of human interaction in the world. We lose things to relationships as well: virginity, innocence, pride, CDs, hardcover autographed first editions of out-of-print books by our favorite authors, thousands of dollars in long-distance phone bills, years of our lives, years off our lives. Coming out of failed relationships makes us lose weight, lose self-respect, lose countless hours to therapy.
People have written all sorts of books about the things lost and gained in relationships. There have certainly been plenty of books on women who give too much, on men who give too little, on people who give the exact right amount of all the wrong things. But in our experience we've never come across a book of what we find to be one of the most valuable things one takes away from relationships: recipes.
We aren't scoffing at love not at all! We're actually about the biggest romantic cheesebags (no, that's not the name of a dish, it's an expression) we've ever known. This is not a renunciation of love, but a celebration of the search for it and the things we share with another person during that search. Specifically, food.
These are our ex-boyfriend recipe stories. If you're anything like our friends, we're sure you all have plenty of your own. Once you tell people you're writing an ex-boyfriend cookbook, suddenly everyone's got a story to tell you. So we've left you a few pages in the back on which you can add some of your own ex-boyfriend recipes and recipes of ex-boyfriends yet to come. We're not, nor have we ever been, married ourselves, thus there are no ex-husband recipes, but if you've got one, please feel free to include it, along with any ex-girlfriend, ex-fiance, or ex-anything recipes.
All names have been changed to protect the guilty, the innocent, the ones we're not yet over, the ones who haven't gotten over us, and the ones who don't yet know they're exes. We run great risk in putting these recipes out into the world, namely, that no one will ever want to date us again for fear of winding up as an index listing for potato kugel. Or worse: that the men we date will refuse to cook for us, or that we'll have to sign predining agreements swearing never to release the ingredients of the food we are about to consume.
Nonetheless, here they are. And like the men who made them, these recipes are varied and run the gamut of our romantic histories, from pathological liars to Ph.D. candidates in Ancient Greek civilization to the sweet little boy next door. We hope you enjoy them as much as we have.