When Elsa died — a stroke, on a Tuesday evening in October, quickly, without warning — the first thing I could not do was eat. This lasted perhaps two weeks. After that I could eat bread. After that, soup. I worked my way back toward food the way you work your way back toward light in a house where every curtain has been drawn, one room at a time.
It was my daughter who found the recipe card. She was helping me sort through the kitchen drawers in November, two months after the funeral, the way families have to eventually do these things. She held it up and said, ‘Papa, look,’ and I looked, and it was Elsa’s sauerbraten. Written in her particular handwriting — very upright, very certain, with occasional corrections where she had crossed out one word and substituted another. The card was stained with something dark at the bottom right corner, wine or gravy, and it had been folded and unfolded so many times that the paper was soft as cloth at the creases.
I had eaten that sauerbraten every October for forty-seven years. Elsa made it on the first cold weekend of autumn, when the light turned and the leaves on the Lindenallee went gold. She would start the marinade three days before, and for three days the apartment smelled of red wine and juniper and bay. By the time she cooked it, the anticipation was unbearable. It was the meal that meant the year had turned. That warmth was coming, paradoxically, as everything outside cooled.
I had never made it. I had never made much of anything. In forty-seven years of marriage, I washed the dishes and Elsa cooked, and I thought this was reasonable, and perhaps it was, except that when she died I realised I had no idea how to look after myself, because she had been doing it for so long I had forgotten it needed doing. I was seventy-three years old and I could not cook a meal.
I practised through the winter. My first sauerbraten was too sweet. The second was tough. The third I burned the gravy. My daughter came for the fourth, and we ate it together, and she said it was very close. She was being kind. By the sixth, in the following October, I felt I had it. I invited my son and his wife and my two grandchildren. We ate it on a Sunday afternoon with red cabbage and potato dumplings, and my grandson, who is eight, asked for more gravy, and for a moment the apartment felt full again in the old way.
I still have the recipe card. I do not use it to cook — I know the recipe by heart now. But it sits on the kitchen counter, propped against the back of the hob, where I can see it when I cook. It is not sentimental, or not only sentimental. It is practical. It is her handwriting beside me while I work. It is the closest I can get to having her still in the kitchen. I make the sauerbraten every October, and I invite anyone who will come, because Elsa would have wanted it eaten at a full table.
