Back in Ireland, we would cook for each other. The stars aligned, allowing us to become excellent home cooks: we worked in restaurants and were well connected in our city’s small, but great, food scene. The rent for our respective houses was outrageously cheap and we lived with or near many friends – a number of whom were as interested in food as we were. We were privy to leftovers aplenty, discounts galore, and disposable incomes befitting people with salaries much bigger than ours. I had (and still do) a relentless belief that one should spend most of their money on feeding oneself.* The pantry in my house was as well stocked as any chef’s. My boyfriend was always a little more skint than I, and so tended to be slightly less extravagant when it came to the groceries. Still, he knew exactly how to flaunt his rules: regularly, with relish, and invariably with the help of smoked cheese and white wine. We gave casual dinner parties, served beautiful food, argued and smoked and drank and played cards. I had a go at baking sourdough bread. We tried picking things, but failed. I was vegan for a while. We blew all our money eating out and pretended we were food critics, joyously sticking our noses up at almost everything we were served, loudly and tipsily exclaiming that we could do a million times better at home. We casually cooked exquisite things for each other. Once, we went foraging for wild garlic by the river and I made risotto. A few people came to the house as we stood in the kitchen wolfing it down, and I offered them each a little cupful with a spoon. For special occasions (any excuse), we bought fancy cheese, and he made carbonara with seaweed, white wine and kale.

We left Ireland to travel, separately and then together. We came to Vietnam and found ourselves in new, scantily equipped kitchens with no ovens, pondering over vegetables we didn’t know how to use. Cheese and olive oil were expensive and of poor quality, and came with an enormous side of guilt about the air miles. Some of our favourite ingredients we couldn’t find at all. Eating out was half the price of cooking at home. I tried to cook, but everything came out wrong: over or under cooked, flaccid or flavourless. A central part of my identity was missing. I hoped it was not gone forever. I thought that my skills and knowledge would rot and eventually wither altogether. I felt a fraud and a failure. I had been displaced from my culture of food – not ‘Irish food’ exactly, but the small food culture to which I, we, belonged at home. Our relationship floundered. We complained all the time about the food in Vietnam, then felt stupid and guilty. I got fat, he got skinny. We fought in restaurants and missed home. Once, he cooked a nice vegetable ragu, but it would have been ten times better with a little Parmesan and a glass of white wine. We argued that night. Food had been central to our life together. Cooking and eating and sharing had padded the cracks in our relationship with everyday gratuity, adventure and love. Now, the cracks were becoming crevices, and were soon to become chasms too vast to be repaired.

*Sidenote: I know that this is an utter luxury. But it shouldn’t be!