16 / The cottage and its cheese
hi everyone :)
Health updates and donation links at the end, if you wanna skip the essay!
WHEREIN I FINALLY ADDRESS THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM, NAMELY MY RELATIONSHIP WITH COTTAGE CHEESE
By FAR my most common response I have gotten to this newsletter is: "Charlie PLEASE go long on your relationship with cottage cheese. Expound on it. Explore it. Use your relationship with cottage cheese as pretext to discuss your maternal grandmother and to draw conclusions about human relationships with food more broadly." I have resisted for a long time but at a certain point I just have to cave. To those who have written to me, with increasing fervor, demanding I write on this topic: you've gotten what you wanted. You have bullied me into submission. I hope you're happy.
I started eating cottage cheese in October of 2018 after abstaining from it for my entire life. The reason may surprise you. Actually I'll just say it, the reason is the Holocaust.
In September of 2018, I began to think frequently about the death of my maternal grandmother, four years prior. I don't know why. Her name was Leslie Strauss, which she changed from Hilda Freudenreich after escaping Nazi Germany to the United States. Her name change was assimilationist on her own accord — she willingly and gladly took her husband, Morton Strauss' last name, which was still Jewish but less ardently German. She changed her first name from Hilda to Leslie as a teenageer because, according to her, "in America, 'Hilda' is the name of a milkmaid." Fair enough.
For a year, when Oma was 11, she and her family lived in hiding, moving around Europe as they waited for a visa to the United States. Their survival and by extension my existence were only possible as a result of their great wealth, which gave them the funds to live on the run for a year and the connections to secure visas. There's a lot to reckon with. Her entire extended family, as well as her entire social network in Germany, were killed. She arrived in New York at age 13, unable to speak English, and was placed in a remedial kindergarten class. She prided herself on her intelligence, and in less than a year was ahead of her grade level. Through her life, she worked as a sales associate at Bergdorf Goodman at the Yves Saint Laurent counter, a research assistant in a laboratory, and a teacher at a school for children with severe physical disabilities. After her marriage ended, she had several boyfriends. This was perhaps also true during her marriage as well—Europeans can be more chill about that sort of thing. She and my mother travelled frequently together, to seemingly everywhere in the world, except Germany. I think she loved her life very much.
I called my grandmother "Oma," which is an affectionate German term for grandmother. Removed from its German context, I believed for a long time that Oma was her name, not a title—a misunderstanding exacerbated by the absence of a complementary Opa, due to unfortunately ALS, and the fact that I call my other grandmother, who is French, Armande, which actually is her name, which if you can believe it is a whole other story.
I loved Oma. She loved culture and language, a love which she passed down to her children, and to me. She and my whole maternal family shared an obsessive and joyful relationship with compelling words and phrases, which has, obviously, inspired much of my comedy and writing work. I remember one Thanksgiving the entire family laughing for hours at the German word purzelbaum (summersault) – why not! Oma and I would play Scrabble and Boggle and watched The Simpsons and Seinfeld together. She read the New Yorker every week and did the New York Times puzzle most days. She very much loved to live, and, I've gathered, loved her erotic life as well. When I came out to her as gay, she told me to have sex with as many people as I could. Aye aye.
As familial deaths go, hers had been relatively easy. She was 90 when she died, and she lived a full and mostly happy life, as far as I can tell. We saw her death coming because she started telling us that she wanted to die and then stopped speaking or eating, which is one of those things that will kill you if you really commit to it.
When my mom called me to tell me that Oma had died, I was at a party in my friend's basement dorm in my sophomore year of college. I took the call on the phone outside, stepped back in, and didn't tell anyone for a while. I grieved for her in the months after she died in a normal way. I remember sobbing in the living room of my dorm (suite style #epicdormlife) at 1am and Nish, my sweet roommate with whom I was not close (which, in a different way, also #epicdormlife) coming out of his room to check on me. Thank you Nish.
I don't know why, but four years later the surreality of her death became inescapable, and I found myself grieving again, albeit differently. Removed from the immediate, brutal sadness, her death began to feel surreal in a way that was almost banal. I kept being struck by gentle little wants that involved her, and how those wants could fundamentally never be fulfilled. I wanted to hear more stories of her upbringing and escape from Germany; I wanted to talk to her about sex; I wanted to watch her bake salmon with mustard in her toaster oven; I wanted to go to the Boston Market in Flushing with her; I wanted to play Scrabble with her; I wanted to go to her house and play ping pong with my brother in the basement. All impossible. It was more confounding than painful, like the brief, stunned feeling you get right after falling to the ground because the chair you were going to sit on isn't actually there. Moments where reality shifts too much too quickly for you to process. Your brain gets clogged, and the world for a second feels as strange to you as it does to a newborn.
The cheese of the cottage
Oma loved cottage cheese, which makes sense demographically—she was a Jewish grandmother, and Jewish people loved to eat mushy, unappetizing things that come in cans or tubs (gefilte fish, tuna fish, others). I remember her eating it with a spoon or even on melon. To me, eating cottage cheese on a melon, though apparently common, is disgusting; it reads to me like the foul side project of the kid in your middle school class who invented the idea of putting ketchup in milk and drinking it for attention. Still, I have a distinct and tender image of my grandmother gently wiping cottage cheese from the corner of her wrinkled mouth. I hope that's okay to say.
When I bought cottage cheese for the first time in October of 2018, I wasn't sure what I planned on doing with it. I hadn't even initially connected my purchase to my resurgent grief — I only connected the two after I tasted it for the first time and found myself wiping the whey from the corners of my mouth.
The taste of cottage cheese is underwhelming. It's such an audacious textural concept—curds (already: bold call) of cheese in whey (a lactic liquid). It altogether looks like spoiled milk, so its mild, salty flavor is both a let down and a relief. As cheeses go, the only thing truly remarkable about it is its off-putting delivery mechanism. Unsure of how to eat it and randomly refusing to Google (because life is more honest when it's hard? I don't know), I decided on what seemed like the neutral middle ground of toast, famously the most accommodating and flattering canvas for foods. Eating cottage cheese on toast stuck—in my mind cottage cheese was permanently locked into my head as a spread and a spread only. No other way to consume it made sense. Certainly not on melon – I simply don't have the energy to shift my understanding of what food categories cottage cheese and melon fall in. Cottage cheese on toast with a little cracked black pepper and, if I were lucky, some cherry tomatoes, made sense.
Is this disgusting to you? Picture from this literal morning. The bread I put it on is this comically healthy grainy German brown bread called "Mestemacher" that my mom put me on to. It's so healthy that it feels like the whole thing is making fun of the idea of bread. It feels like it's making fun of me for eating it. It does not taste good.
With cottage cheese, I found that my personal food taxonomy did not align with the broader social consensus. Here's a huge online fight I got into on the matter with my friend Caroline Doyle.
I doubled down.
Caroline and I are no longer close, just kidding.
This disjuncture happens to all of us occasionally, I imagine. One that comes up often for me is the case of the classic American breakfast platter: the syrup from the pancakes washing into the eggs—to some a central, appetizing feature—is utterly repugnant to me. I love pancakes with syrup, and I love eggs, but this particular combination disgusts me. When I tell this to people, they assume that I must not like any combination of sweet and savory foods, which is wrong and actually hurtful. Of course I love sweet and savory foods together. Don't test me on that. I don't have to prove that to you. I'm not going to name some sweet and salty foods I like. Give me the benefit of the doubt that there's a nuance in my visceral disgust of eggs with syrup. Jesus, fine. Dates with bacon. Honestly, most American Chinese food is that delicious because of its sweetness. There are a million examples. "Oh you must not like sweet and salty foods together"? How simple do you think I am. How DARE you. Get out of my courtroom.
(For the record, you can change your taste, if it's worth it. In 2017 I forced myself to like olives, because my friend, on whom YES I had a crush, thought it was lame that I didn't like olives. Three years later, I'm the editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, a position to which I was promoted on the strength of my love for olives. It just goes to show. )
The cottage, and the cheese thereof (quarantine)
Cottage cheese has been a staple food for me in quarantine. It's a perfect breakfast – more substantial and hearty than any of the other breakfasts you can prepare in a similar amount of time, so ideal for when I accidentally get out of bed with just twenty minutes before three back to back hourlong tutoring sessions (job reveal alert).
Beyond convenience though, there's something spiritually comforting about cottage cheese. It is ultimately a humble and unfussy food. The long history of its consumption suggests both durability and future, and its Jewishness connects me to my own heritage. It's a good quarantine food. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence that many of my other long-lasting, quarantine-appropriate staples—cans of tuna fish, pickles, apple cider vinegar—are similarly Jewish, representative of a religion and cultural tradition preoccupied with its history, both long past and recent, of having to leave the comforts of normal life behind at a moments notice.
I will say that the pressures of preparing all my food for myself (I've only ordered delivery twice as part of a weird, self-restrictive, hardline pseudo-ethical rule) has sometimes led to a few meals that have felt as perverted as Cottage Cheese X Melon. One night at 1am, having just gotten off an engrossing Zoom hangout and having not eaten since a late 5pm lunch, I made myself a dinner of a piece of cake, a pickle, two slices of muenster cheese, and a slice of toast, eaten sequentially, standing over my kitchen sink. A bummer. I could have, like, made myself rice, but it also felt emotionally impossible in that moment to make myself rice. You know the feeling.
In constrained circumstances like ours, where our normal food habits are difficult to maintain, I've been so grateful for nutritious, reliable, easy to prepare, non-perishable or at least durable, staples:
-soba noodles (protein rich, nutty!) with rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, and sesame oil
-frozen peas
-tuna fish salad (tuna fish with mayo a little curry powder and if you have a cucumber why not just go and slice it right on up in there)
-frozen blueberry smoothies
And I'm grateful for cottage cheese. It's a food that sings to me of resilience through simplicity, and strength through heritage and ritual. I'm sure you all have foods that bring you this – I hope you have access to them and are enjoying them, even right now :)
end of the essay about cottage cheese, beginning of the section on how it was my birthday :)
This past Saturday, April 11, was my 25th birthday. I had a nice day! My friends Natalie and Rachel came by and we sat 8 feet away from each other on some benches near my house. Natalie made me a vat of tuna fish salad, and Rachel embroidered me this:
Thank you Rachel.
I also ran a birthday fundraiser, to which many of you donated, where we raised over $3000 for three causes: a bail fund, Make The Road's emergency fund for low-income immigrant communities, and the Bed Stuy Strong mutual fund. Thank you all so much donating – for my birthday I wanted to feel like I could be a vector for good in the world, and you all helped make that possible <3
I had a lovely birthday — holistically, not even circumstantially. I got to spend the whole day basking in online appreciation, which I honestly loved. Obviously it was a bit disappointing I couldn't see more people, but I do feel like the idea of being disappointed is pretty baked into the concept of a birthday. There's just so much pressure. The only birthday that meets the bar is you have an amazing day and an amazing party where someone you love who lives far away has flown in to surprise you. Anything less,a and you will feel a twinge of disappointment. A few months ago my plan was to have a party at my friend Celeste's house, but in retrospect that would have been really stressful and I probably would have been a psycho needy bitch, as I always am on my birthdays. So perhaps bullet dodged. Instead, in the evening I took half of a 2.5mg weed edible and drank a few glasses of Lambrusco wine that my cousin brought me (my first substances in over a month) and spent the night listened to pop music and answering birthday texts. It was magical.
places to donate
I wanted to share a few places to donate. Many of us have gotten or will get stimulus checks, and if you still have a job or other financial security, perhaps you could share some of that with people who do not!!! I still have tutoring work, so I've been trying to donate a lot. Here is my incentive: if you reply to this email (which you can do!) showing me that you donated, I will respond with a video that I find special to me. Is that enticing? You can also just donate.
Bed Stuy Strong – my local neighborhood mutual fund, which uses that money to buy no-contact groceries for people in need.
Make The Road Emergency Fund – immigrant communities in Queens have been hit worst by this crisis. Your donation means a lot here.
Cosecha Emergency Fund – A mutual aid project for undocumented families, who do not receive a $1200 stimulus.
Housing and Care Fund – Fund for formerly incarcerated people who have been recently bailed out of jail, to give them a softer landing. Among the many ways our criminal justice system is broken is that there is little emphasis on reentry, which understandably leads to a high recidivism rate.
Solange's List – My friend Solange Azor organized this list of a few other places – I think it'll be updated continually, and is great if you are trying to send a list of places to people.
randomly promotion
doing an Instagram show hosted by Fareeha Khan on Saturday at 8pm. I'm honestly excited!! I have a fun bit.
health update if you care....
I gotta be honest: health-wise, I am mostly the same as two weeks ago. In my last newsletter, I wrote to you all that I was 90% better, and unfortunately that's sort of stayed the same.
I'm now on day 34 of being sick, and for the past twenty or so days have had roughly the same symptoms, cycling in and out: mild cough, chest pain, shortness of breath. I've had no discernible improvement, and I'm reckoning with the idea that it may be like this for a long time. My vibe is somewhere between :( and :/
I'm in a coronavirus support group on WhatsApp organized by Fiona Lowenstein, who wrote this article, and it seems like this is a pretty common experience. Many people, even those with mild cases like mine, have lingering symptoms long after the two week period the CDC tells us COVID-19 should last. There's a frustrating lack of clarity around whether this means I'm still contagious, as well as an anxiety as to whether this will end at all. I've spoken by DM to some people who've had other coronaviruses that have turned into Chronic Fatigue Syndromes or other illnesses. This is one of those classic situations where ultimately it is what it is.
The ending of the newsletter
Much love,
Charlie