A night like the hinge in a door

If there is anything considered a comfort food in my family, this Marcella Hazan pasta dish is it. It is the first meal I remember eating, and there are numerous photos of me as a baby with it all over my face, hair, and high chair tray table. I have eaten it in every house I have ever lived, and it was the first main meal I learnt how to cook. Every time I've moved house, city, country, the first thing I've done is located the few ingredients (garlic, flat leaf parsley, tinned tomatoes, olive oil, tinned tuna and pasta) and cooked it, as a sort of way of making each new house -- and its kitchen -- my own. I feel if I couldn't find those ingredients and couldn't cook this meal, I would never truly feel at home.

Because most of the most significant events in my life have revolved around moving -- leaving homes behind, crossing an ocean, living away from my family -- I've also come to associate this dish with moments of significance in my own life.

Of course, therefore, on the night before my wedding, I would cook and eat nothing else. It's calming to follow the same familiar motions, chopping garlic and parsley, heating olive oil, scooping tuna into the fried tomato sauce. This city, this house, and this relationship have been my home for a long time now, and in some ways getting married is simply a public confirmation of something I've felt for much longer. But still I felt the need to mark this turning point in a quieter, more personal way that would matter to me and be invisible to others. Tomorrow I will go out to the registry office and say the words, and celebrate with Matthias and our friends and families, and we will still be the same people, but something will change in a way that I find impossible to articulate. And I will carry on cooking pasta with tuna sauce, and it will continue to mean change, and comfort, and continuation, and home.