How to Stay Married

If you stay married long enough, say 42 years, certain truths will be revealed. Like maybe your mate prefers staying at home to freezing on an Antarctic adventure cruise. Or perhaps he has such a severe obsession with sports on TV that he not only watches anything with a moving ball, but he also feels compelled to deliver a running commentary to no one in particular in an inappropriate voice. Finally, just as you start accepting your husband’s quirks, even finding them cute, don’t be surprised if he hits you with a new one. Like my husband, who recently announced that he will no longer eat my food.

I was shaken to my core at first. Isn’t he the one for whom I rushed home from work to cook gourmet meals over the course of about 30 years? Back when our sons were young he seemed very happy chomping away on osso buco, Provencal fish stew, or Aunt Ruthie’s brisket, basically anything I put in front of him. Then he hit 70 and everything changed. He decided to take control over what went into his mouth. He became a vegetarian!

Even though he explained that he had been feeling bad about eating animals for a long time and his doctor agreed that a vegetarian diet might be better for his heart, in my heart I felt a pain. He was about to win the biggest competition of them all. He was going to outlive me!

Of all the values I inherited from my mother, the obligation of a wife to provide family meals stuck. Even though it clashed with my feminism, I couldn’t resist wowing the gang with homemade pizzas, cloud-like Chinese dumplings, perfect roast garlic chicken and lemon tarts. I enjoyed the creativity of working with my hands, and I loved the power of following my own appetites as I decided what to cook each night. In retrospect, gathering the family around the table each night was a pleasure.

As much as I yearned for a break from all that food production, once I got over the freedom when the kids left home, I cut back to cooking a few dinners a week. I couldn’t quite shake the habit. Perhaps it was due to the Steins. The first couple of my parents’ generation to split up, family legend has it that chopped liver was to blame. After 35 years of serving the same menu every evening, Mrs. Stein wasn’t in the mood to make her legendary liver one night. When her husband walked in the house and didn’t see his favorite dish on the table, he turned around and promptly walked out. “She stopped making the chopped liver,” he explained in the divorce proceedings.

My husband Ted is a bit more modern. A journalist with no gourmet aspirations, he adored whatever I put in front of him for 40 years. As soon as the food would come to the table, he would fill his plate, beam at me lovingly, and exclaim “Yum! This is delicious!” Then he would gobble it up. As he mopped up the sauces with the last bit of fresh baguette, his gaze told me I was a goddess. Though I suspected sometimes that he couldn’t really discern what he was eating, it didn’t matter. I could never have flourished as a cookbook author with a picky eater giving me corrections. It took me a long time to admit that all he ever really wanted was to refuel—a fact that explains his need to eat quickly, pay the tab, and go home when dining out.

As he mopped up the sauces with the last bit of fresh baguette, his gaze told me I was a goddess.

Now that he’s cooking exactly what he wants when he wants it, his diet leans toward the functional. He’s hoarding for the vegetarian apocalypse. The pantry is overflowing with ancient grains, every kind of lentil, chickpea, bean, nut, rice and seed that the modern food industry can market. He hunts for his own special vinegars, hummus of every variety, and enough avocados to cause a shortage. As for the spicy Siracha sauce that he slathers all over his creations, there’s always another bottle in the pantry waiting on standby.

I understand that other wives may adjust their cooking to accommodate crotchety men in retirement, but I just can’t. I love my repertoire too much; plus, for me salad will always be a profoundly unsatisfying meal.

In the new system, we try to time our dinners to eat together, which takes coordination since he tends to spread out, use every bowl, and blast bad music. Nonetheless, dinner remains sacrosanct—the time we sit together, catch-up and occasionally share a vegetable side.

Los Angeles food writer Helene Siegel is the author of 40 cookbooks, including the “Totally Cookbook” series and “Pure Chocolate.” She runs the Pastry Session blog.