Last week my house blew up. These are not words that anybody expects to write, and it feels funny to write them, but it’s true. While my husband and I were traveling to visit family, there was apparently a propane leak, and the resulting explosion shredded the house like so much cheese. It must have been something to see. Judging by the wreckage, the roof seems to have gone straight up, the walls went straight out, and then the roof came straight down again, but in pieces. There’s wreckage more than 60 feet from the walls. Huge chunks of dirty snow lie under, among, and on top of the twisted beams and smashed bits of our belongings. And everywhere there are books, our poor books, fluttering damp pages weakly among the wrack and ruin.

I have imagined my fair share of disasters and catastrophes over the years, but worrying about a event and actually getting the news are in no ways alike. To pick up the phone and hear somebody saying “I’m so sorry, but there was an explosion at your house, and your house is gone” is to be enveloped in a tingling uncanniness, a sensation of the universe sliding out from under you. If you’ve ever had a really bad dream in which you were gripped by some terrible news, you will know that horrible feeling washing through you; if you, unlike most people, are not occasionally cursed by nightmares, I can only tell you that the sensation is something like having icewater rinse suddenly down the back of your neck. It does not feel like something is wrong; it feels as if the whole world is wrong, slanted, suddenly cracked open.

If you, like me, are lucky enough to have only felt this in dreams (until now, anyway), I can tell you that it is extremely surreal to experience it while definitely awake. I was at my father’s girlfriend’s house when I got the call, looking out of her windows at the Oakland hills. It was an ordinary morning. I stood there watching a car pull into a driveway, a pigeon flying past, a mail truck jouncing down the block, while inside me I could feel the shape of my own life dissolving into little powdery bits.

The most surreal thing of all, somewhat to my surprise, was that we weren’t dead. This, to me, was a truly wild fact: our entire house exploded, and everyone was okay. The slimness of this chance seemed so impossible, so completely far-fetched, so utterly unlikely to me, that I had to call my dad and ask if it was real, or if maybe I was dead, and just imagining I was still alive. “You’re not dead,” he said. “Listen, I’m in Tacoma. Would your brain think I was in Tacoma if you were dead?” I had to admit it wouldn’t. (I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with Tacoma – I’ve never been there – it’s just that I am fairly sure it is not where my mind would wander in the last moments of my life. I hope I’m right about this.)

It may seem strange that not being dead was the hardest thing to process – harder than the loss, which we weren’t there to see – but I have discovered that sometimes the event which doesn’t take place is more astonishing than the one which does. (If we had been there, and gotten out just in the nick of time, I would probably still have the shakes.) Yes, our house is blown so radically to bits that it looks like something Wile E Coyote might have done with one of those cartoon TNT plungers. This is, by all measures, an incredibly unlucky thing to have happen to you. And yet what I feel, writing this, is the intensity of our good fortune. I might perhaps write an essay about all the ways in which it could have been worse, and the strange sense of blessing (dayenu, it would have been enough, as Jews say at just this time of year), but it’s enough for now to say that we not only weren’t there to be blown up, the fact that we were traveling meant that we both had a suitcase full of clothes, our computers and phones and wallets, toiletries, even our tango shoes. It is amazing how much easier it is deal with destruction when you have a change of underwear.

Luck, as it turns out, is relative. I oscillate between the panicky sensation of having missed a bullet (will the gods, cheated of their sacrifice, come looking for us?) and the glowing, radiant feeling of having been shown a miracle.

The cosmic strangeness of escaping unscathed does wake me up at 3am some nights, but the luck, not the panic, is uppermost in my heart. We both feel waves of sadness for our lost things, but I am sad about them, the way I might be sad about leaving my favorite scarf on a plane or realizing that mice have nibbled the insides out of one of my childhood stuffed animals. Losing things, as it turns out, even for someone like me who loves objects and trinkets and toys and books, feels mild in comparison with the howling, shrieking void of grief I might have felt if things had been only very slightly different. Losing everything we own is painful, yes, and challenging and upsetting and really incredibly strange, and I would not blame anyone for taking it harder than we’ve been taking it. Things do matter; it is a cliché to say they don’t. And yet – when I see the insides of my house hanging in the branches of a thirty-foot pine tree, and then I think of what would have happened if D. had been inside that house during the explosion that flung those bits into that tree, what I feel is primarily a desire to get down and kiss the earth in gratitude.

I notice that food has been tasting better, this week, at least after the first night when I couldn’t really eat (we went out and got cracked crab and prosecco, just to celebrate being alive at all, but I was too shaken up to taste much). Hot coffee seems almost holy; a bowl of mushroom soup at Chez Maman in Potrero Hill nearly lifted me out of my chair. A few days ago we drove back up to the house, or anyway to where the house used to be, to meet the insurance adjuster and sift through the ruins, and on the way home from this rather taxing emotional experience we stopped for some of the most aggressively mediocre Indian food I’ve ever had. It was objectively a bad meal – a $16 dish of vegetable korma in which the “vegetables” were clearly an ungenerous scoop out of a bag of frozen peas and carrots – but I enjoyed it thoroughly anyway. Holy smokes, we’re still alive. What could be better?

In a strange sort of complement to this, one of the things I am already mourning most is my collection of cookbooks and other writings on food. I came home a few weeks ago from a trip to Berkeley with about thirty additions to this particular shelf, and I didn’t have time to read any of them before they were flung out a window into a snowbank. Most of them are replaceable, of course, and I think my precious and tattered copy of Paul Reboux’s Food for the Rich will survive with only minimal damage. But I will probably never find another copy of The Pantropheon for twelve dollars, and the gift of a well-loved edition of the Tassajara Bread Book is gone forever. Goodbye to the beautiful letterpress prints of Menus for Chez Panisse, whose pagesare now curled up like a snail from lying out in the rain that fell on the ruins. Farewell to the molasses-stained copy of The Art of Eating I found in a used bookstore one very important summer when I was nineteen, even though that particular copy was cracking down the spine anyway and I was beginning to think about getting a replacement.

Well, so be it. I bow, with gratitude, to the fate that took my library and spared our lives. I chose my books on food above all for the joy they gave me, and that why I am sad that they are gone. It is a good lesson, probably. Good writing on food, like good food itself, soothes the soul in times of turmoil. It is a reminder of the warmth and flavor of being alive at all, and also of all the good things yet to come – because the ability to savor food, unlike most things we possess, is both proof that we are still alive and something we keep for a lifetime, whether we sit down before a giant steak in the hungry days of adolescence or a half-glass of champagne and a bit of good cheese in the digestive peace of elderhood.

My collection was not comprehensive; it was missing a number of famous and important texts on food simply because I didn’t like them very much. What I looked for in my library was color, humor, inspiration. Who, for example, would not be cheered by this tidbit from Pampille’s Table:

“Stuffed cabbage is misunderstood; it is scorned; it is accused of being indigestible; it is treated like a poor relative. It is rarely placed on a menu when there are guests, which is quite unfair. A well-made stuffed cabbage is a gift from the gods. It looks beautiful; its succulent leaves leave nothing to be desired, and, when cooked long enough, it does not weigh on the stomach like a rock.”

And on a bad day (for example, the day your house explodes) it is always good to pick up Edward Espe Brown’s Tomato Blessings & Radish Teachings, and read, at random, something like this:

“We can suffer a lot by trying to have nothing but delicious experiences. Inevitably we will have to chew on and digest some difficult, painful moments. We would like to say, ‘Skip the [rotten] pickles,’ but this is the great dilemma that life serves up: not everything is tasty and cooked to perfection and there is no way to avoid all that is unpleasant. If we become too finicky we just don’t eat. The dirt of our life contains both good and bad, sweet and pungent. The cook unearths what is there, and labors to make it nourishing.”

And I am always comforted by MFK Fisher, on any subject from love to potatoes. “It is easy to think of potatoes,” she writes, “and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety. Potatoes are one of the last things to disappear, in times of war, which is probably why they should not be forgotten in times of peace.” I think of potatoes, and I feel peaceful. Elsewhere she writes:

“Once on Long Island I saw jewel-like tiny potatoes lying in a newly plowed field, in late August, and I pulled off my shoes and plunged out into the soft sandy dust and culled enough for a fine lunch. A car slowed down on the road, and I thought it might be the workers back from a break, or the police, but there was a great laugh and it drove on. Later I learned that I had embarrassed my hosts (who enjoyed the nut-like little culls before they felt any qualms). But the next August came an air-mailed box of ‘more of the same’, and I have always wondered how and when other people got knee-deep dirty to pick them for me, out in that elegant banlieue.”

I feel calmed inside, wondering about this alongside her. And my heart is eased likewise when I read Zora Neale Hurston, who was, among many other impressive things, a food ethnographer, and wrote many things worth heeding. “It seems to me,” she wrote, “that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.” (This insight feels triply true to me, now that D. and I are living on couches and the generosity of our wonderful friends and family for the foreseeable future.)

My soul feels less hungry after reading such things. Does it spark joy? asks Marie Kondo, a question routinely ridiculed by Westerners who think of the world around them as more or less disposable and aren’t used to treating objects as if they had life and meaning of their own. I really did love those books, and I’m sorry that they’re gone. But I am also glad, more glad than words can say, that D. & I are still here to mourn them. As we put our lives back together, I’ll remember what I mourned and why, and in all likelihood the things I mourn the most are the things I’ll look to replenish first. Perhaps it’s odd that all this destruction makes me want to end up with things that I love more, not less. After all, maybe it would be more painful if we lost them all over again – a happenstance that would be really wretched, but not at all impossible in the shifting world in which we live. But this is a risk I am willing to take. I think, in the end, that it’s good if losing things makes you love them harder. I think it’s good if not losing things makes you love them harder. I think it’s good to love things, and I think it’s good to love people, and I think it’s good to love the entire peculiar fact of being alive at all, just as hard as one can.

And so, in honor of my lost copy of The Art of Eating, here is a recipe I love – my favorite recipe from MFKF, actually her mother’s recipe, for gingerbread, or really for a loaf of ginger cake. This recipe is easily over a hundred years old, possibly closer to 130 or 150, which tickles me greatly: what is immortality if not this? “It sends out a fine friendly smell through the house,” writes MFKF, “and it is so good that it usually disappears while it is still hot, which is too bad because it is so good cold.” The recipe is just as she says, and it makes a moist, dark, spicy loaf that is truly soul-sustaining served warm on a wet night, or cold with a little butter on a gray morning. I have made some minor modifications in the matter of the spices (I like it very gingery, and use ground ginger, fresh grated ginger, and chopped candied ginger to get it that way) but the method as written is reliable.

EDITH’S GINGERBREAD

Ingredients

1 ¼ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon allspice
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon salt
¼ cup butter, slightly softened
¼ cup sugar
½ + ¼ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup molasses
1 peeled chunk of fresh ginger, 2-3”
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 large handful chopped candied ginger

Method

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Sift together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, ground ginger, cloves, allspice, and salt. (Or just stir them together as best you can, if you’re like me and don’t own a sifter. If it comes to that, I no longer own measuring cups, measuring spoons, mixing bowls, a loaf tin, or an oven, but I am confident that I will again some day, so why not a sifter? I’ve never liked sifters, that’s why. I don’t know why. They don’t spark joy, apparently.)

Cream the butter and sugar. Add 1/2 teaspoon of the baking soda to the molasses and beat with a fork until fluffy (the acid in the molasses seems to react with the soda, so after a minute it really will start to become sort of foamy, and will turn almost orange rather than brown.) Add the molasses to the butter and sugar and grate in the fresh ginger and mix well to combine.  

Add the remaining 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda to 3/4 cup boiling water and stir to dissolve the soda. Add this and the dry ingredients to the butter-and-molasses mixture, alternating wet and dry bit by bit until everything is incorporated. Finally, fold in the beaten egg and pour into a greased and floured loaf tin. Sprinkle the chopped candied ginger over the top. Bake for 30-50 minutes depending on your oven – until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Let cool slightly before slicing. (As MFKF writes, “This mixture will seem much too thin to make a cake, but do not increase the quantity of flour as many doubting cooks have tried to do.”)