Party for One

A teenage search for belonging through food, and a recipe for marshmallow kebabs. Words and photo by Sophie Robinson.

Sep 23, 2024

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Cooking from Life is a strand of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world; cooking as refusal, heritage, messiness, routine.
This week’s Cooking from Life is by Sophie Robinson. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

Party for One

A teenage search for belonging through food, and a recipe for marshmallow kebabs. Words and photo by Sophie Robinson.

I was twelve, tucked into the yellow-and-orange seventies-soaked spare room at my grandparents’ house, the late August night was close around me in a claustrophobic 1950s Wolverhampton suburb, stripes in the lawns of each semi-detached house. My grandad was snoring next door, his teeth in a plastic tray on the sink, pink corner bathtub, butter-yellow carpeting soft underfoot, when I brushed my teeth. My spit was purple from the thick, soupy, hot Ribena my nan sent me to bed with each night.

I was at the end of childhood, breaking through the rubble of it all into the wild unknown of my teens, vibrating with hormones, nipples stinging and sore, sprouting hips and hair and always, always, always hungry. It should have felt exciting, but my lasting memory is of a howling, defeated lostness. School was about to start, and I was due to return to my new life at my father’s house, far away.

Then one golden evening I chanced upon the film Mermaids, the opening credits of which were playing on the spare room’s small television as I switched it on at bedtime. It’s not the best film in the world – far from it – but it is perhaps the film I have watched the most in the twenty-five years since that late summer night. Released in 1990 but set in the early 60s, Mermaids casts Cher as Rachel Flax, a rebellious, independent, sexually and geographically promiscuous Jewish working mother – to teenage Charlotte (Winona Ryder) and nine-year-old Kate (Christina Ricci). Rachel moves the family to a new state each time she gets a new job or ends a relationship, which is often.

Mermaids embodied my pining to belong to a ‘normal’ family – and also the need to liberate myself from that desire – through its dealing with food in particular. Throughout the film, Rachel serves the children fun, light-hearted no-cook meals – cheese ball pick-me-ups, marshmallow kebabs, peanut butter sandwiches cut into star and heart shapes – which neurotic, Catholicism-obsessed Charlotte archly describes as hors d’oeuvres (‘anything more is too big a commitment’, Rachel says). When Rachel’s suitor, Lou – played by Bob Hoskins donning a questionable Massachusetts accent – comes over for breakfast, he’s rendered almost speechless by what she serves him: bagels stuffed with bacon and tomato and crispy lettuce and melted cheese, cut into dainty quarters and skewered with toothpick American flags. Never in my life have I seen someone treat a bagel this way. This is the film I credit with teaching me how to feed myself.

Growing up with my mother was like being in a cult of three: me, her, my sister. Our days revolved around the rituals of eating. Meals were at the table, eaten all together, and cooked on a rotation: spaghetti bolognese, chicken Kyiv, tuna bake, roast beef on Sundays, fish and chips on Friday nights or when we went to the beach, Chinese or Indian takeaway if my mum didn’t want to cook on Saturdays. No snacks, no helping yourself, washing up on a rota, peeling potatoes at the counter, porridge on the hob on dark winter mornings. Eating was something to do with loving, and something to do with belonging, and something that happened at an organisational scale I was merely a cog within.

But as my relationship with my mother deteriorated – daily fights and being sent to bed without dinner, laughter and cooking smells rumbling up the stairs – so did my relationship with food. I’d go days without eating, hoping to starve whatever badness seemed to render me unlovable. But an insatiable hunger was also growing in me; it would wake me in the night and guide me down to the dark kitchen, where I would climb up to the top shelf of the cupboard and grab fistfuls of dry cereal, stale half-bags of Kettle Chips and peanuts reserved for adults to eat over wine and gin and tonics, Mini Cheddars and boxes of raisins meant for our lunchboxes, soft slices of supermarket bread, and eat them all in my room, hunched over a Point Horror novel in the lamplight, crumbs everywhere. These crimes only provided my mother with more evidence of my flaws, my similarity – in her eyes – to my father. There’s only one thing I hate more than dishonesty, Sophie, and that’s greed.

Then I was sent to live with my father, who would leave £10 on the kitchen table on Monday mornings so I could buy food for myself for the week. At first I would attempt the adult meals I had been fed before: ‘pie’ (a tin of baked beans topped with instant mashed potato), ‘spaghetti’ (Super Noodles topped with a cheese slice), ‘pizza’ (a slice of bread spread with tomato ketchup and a cheese slice, then melted in the microwave). I would eat them alone at the dining table, a quiet despair settling over me.

After watching Mermaids, something awoke in me and something died. The film changed my relationship with food. As much as I related to Charlotte’s longing for a so-called ‘real’ family, I also idolised Rachel Flax – I was captivated by her confidence, her disinterest in tradition, her dedication to fun and frivolity. To Rachel every meal was a party and an opportunity for a kind of irreverent and juvenile cuteness that ran contrary to the ‘serious’ food of traditional family dinner tables. I didn’t need to try to approximate ‘real’ family life when I could make myself food that felt fun, special, and all mine.

Inspired by Rachel, I began using my weekly allowance to buy hors d’oeuvres: cocktail sausages, marshmallows, crisps, Scotch eggs, gummy bears, tiny little carrots all wet and glimmering inside their refrigerated bags. After school I would assemble snack plate dinners for myself. I pretended I was in the film, dancing around the kitchen to songs on the radio as I speared each snack with a toothpick. I ate in front of the small TV-VCR in my mostly unfurnished bedroom, or crouched in front of the coffee table in the empty living room. I lost myself in the worlds of films and ate voraciously. For the first time, I began to conceive of myself outside of the family unit and realised that I did not need to pretend I was still part of a family, that what I did and what I ate could be for me only. My all-American diet felt fun, light, full of promise, and untouched by nature, in stark contrast to the food of my childhood, which was heavy with gravy and meaty animal smells and confusing rules and rituals.

Later, I would replace this diet of party food and videos with alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy, cigarettes, sex, shopping, and any number of other things that sparkled in the dark and promised to paste over the emptiness that rattled in me. But for a while I was happy, and I learned how to create a life for myself that did not rely on anyone else – a party for one. In the absence of flesh-and-blood role models, I had found myself without a roadmap for living. As much as we were warned about the dangers of excessive television-watching in the 1990s, TV and movies raised me – and they saved me. I was teleported into worlds rich in aesthetic nutrition, foreign ritual, repetitive comfort, and instructions for living I could follow.

The denouement of Mermaids shows both Charlotte and Rachel – mother and daughter who had been two inflexible halves of a binary – begin to soften. Charlotte warms to her mother and Rachel agrees to stop running and try staying still for a while. I no longer eat all my meals on the floor in front of the TV, and I no longer fuel myself only with party food. But all these years later – on the other side of addiction and recovery – I still spend the majority of my time alone, and I still rely on the wisdom of Mermaids to support me. When that familiar feeling creeps in, I throw myself the same old party: a Tesco haul of finger food, set out carefully in an array of little bowls and platters, a double bill of films, luxurious-feeling loungewear, candlelight – a night that’s all mine. A me that’s all mine.

Marshmallow Kebabs

This recipe is a more luxurious, twenty-first-century version of something I’d often make for myself as a kid, inspired by the marshmallow kebabs of Mermaids. You can coat the marshmallows with anything you’d like, as long as it’s in small enough pieces to stick to the chocolate, but this is the version thirteen-year-old me enjoyed the most. I’ve called them kebabs, but they actually more closely resemble American corn dogs or Korean gamja hot dogs.

Makes approx eight kebabs
Time 15 mins

Ingredients

150g regular white marshmallows
100g milk chocolate
pinch of salt (optional)
150g colourful mini marshmallows

Method

Place three or four regular marshmallows onto kebabs or chopsticks, leaving enough of the bottom of the stick bare that you can stand it up in an empty jar or glass.
Break the chocolate into pieces and place in a heatproof bowl with a pinch of salt, if using. Place the bowl over a pan of simmering water, making sure the water isn’t touching the bowl. Gently stir the chocolate until melted.
Pour the mini marshmallows onto a large dinner plate.
Dip the marshmallow kebabs into the melted chocolate to coat – you might find it helpful to use a teaspoon to help spread the chocolate.
Once coated, stand the kebabs in an empty jar for a minute until the chocolate has begun to set, then swiftly roll them on the plate of mini marshmallows until coated. Leave them lying on the plate to solidify, then pop them back in the jar to serve.

Credits

Sophie Robinson is a poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer living in Norwich. Her collection Rabbit (Boiler House Press, 2018) was a Poetry Society selection, and her writing has appeared in n+1, The Believer, BOMB, The Guardian, Stylist, The White Review, Poetry Review, and The Independent. She runs the substack Feelings Almanac, and is the founder of Devotion, a radical and inclusive online creative writing workshop. She is currently finishing her first novel.
This recipe was tested by Tamara Vos. The full Vittles masthead can be found here.