Illustration: Sarah Kilcoyne
Madeline Cash’s debut novel, Lost Lambs, tells the story of a modern American family: semi-estranged parents in an ill-fated open relationship and three teen daughters with internet boyfriends and dangerous connections to the tech billionaire up the road. The book made such a splash when it was published last month — “vivid, breezy prose alight with casual wit,” said The New Yorker; “the comic novel we need right now,” declared the Washington Post — that a few readers theorized that she was an industry plant of some kind. Cash laughs off that idea. “I grew up with a single mother, and she was a hospice nurse at a convent,” she says. “If someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes, I am not privy to it.” When I talk to Cash just after her week of eating, she’s in Bath, England, a jaunt away from London, where she recently moved with her boyfriend. “You can’t actually go into the baths,” she says, “which is unfortunate, because I brought a swimsuit.”
Wednesday, January 28
It’s negative-seven degrees when I conclude my U.S. book tour in South Bend, Indiana, and take the world’s smallest plane to my connection through Chicago. At O’Hare, I order a muffin, eat the top, and discard the bottom while browsing the Hudson News book section for titles by “Madeline Cash.” I find Malcolm Gladwell and James Patterson but no Madeline Cash.
I buy a bottle of water, a carton of duty-free cigarettes, and some American trinkets for friends abroad like an on-leave GI. I board a normal-size plane to London and eat the complimentary Biscoff cookie. My seatmate laughs loudly at the film Zootopia.
I sleep through the in-flight meal, land at Heathrow, and take the train to Liverpool Station. I buy a Tesco ham sandwich “meal deal” for £5. The meat is a disconcerting shade of gray. I think the expiration date was last Tuesday, but dates are written differently here, so I can’t be sure.
I have been away for a month. Back at our flat, my boyfriend, Chris, says the foxes have been mating and make terrible noises at night. Chris is making my favorite meal: stew. Stew is meat, carrots, potatoes, celery, and bone broth simmered over a long period of time with a side of bread. The meat is usually lamb, but I’ve been feeling weird about eating lamb — since the book came out, people have been sending me a lot of cute lamb content. I tell Chris the stew will make good fodder for my article. “I can’t believe they’re letting you write about food,” he says. He asks if the magazine is aware of my culinary particularities, that I eat like a finicky child. I tell him, “They will soon find out.”
Thursday, January 29
I greet my British friend in an accent like Dick Van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins. We order a full English breakfast at a place called The Full English. My British friend insists this is integral to my cultural assimilation. The plates come with limp tomatoes and mushrooms and beans. Beans really have no business being on a breakfast platter. I don’t understand this affinity for beans. Perhaps the bean companies had an excess of product and a great marketing team. I look up “Is there really blood in blood sausage?” There is.
I spend the afternoon drinking coffee and writing in the office. I’ve never lived somewhere with my own office. My apartment in Chinatown is the size of a small shipping container. I didn’t cook there. I ate Chinese food three times a week from Wo Hop or Panda — not Panda Express, just Panda. Panda is open until 2 a.m. I am on a first-name basis with the proprietor and her two children, who also work at Panda.
I write until it gets dark. The weather in London is conducive to the writing process; I’m never pulled away from my work by the pressure to enjoy the outside world.
I enjoy the inside world with Chris. For dinner, we order Indian food with Deliveroo, a British Uber Eats alternative. There are six Indian restaurants in our neighborhood. I select chicken tikka masala and garlic naan from the menu. Chris gives me a look to convey that the order is bland and uninspired. I feed him chicken tikka masala “airplane” style and spill it on the sofa. I look up “remove chicken tikka masala from fabric” and do as instructed. We sit in the dark. We are trying to avoid using too much electricity because we’re not totally sure how to pay the utility bill. Outside, there is a noise like a woman screaming. I sit up and ask Chris if we should call 911. “It’s the foxes,” says Chris. “And it’s 999 here.”
Friday, January 30
Chris brings me coffee in bed and says, “Don’t spill.” The coffee is made in a six-cup Bialetti moka pot. I tell Chris that upon request, Alfonso Bialetti was cremated and his ashes buried in a 12-cup moka pot. We listen to the BBC to culturally assimilate. I spill coffee on the sheets and clean it up when Chris isn’t looking.
I decide to leave the flat and work on my new novel at the café down the road called Millfields. I order a latte with “regular milk.” The barista inquires, “What is regular milk?” I specify, “From a cow.” I order the most elaborate pastry in the pastry case: a cardamom flower. The pastry resembles the underside of a horseshoe crab.
I walk home and eat string cheese, which I peel like a palm tree while standing in the kitchen. I ask Chris about a piece of chain mail hanging from a hook. He says it is for cleaning the cast-iron skillet. Things have accumulated in my absence, things in which one could prepare food like pans and saucers. When did we acquire all of these things? A carrot peeler. A Wüsthof chef’s knife. “Don’t touch that,” says Chris.
Chris and I go to dinner at St. John. It feels like being in Sweeney Todd. We order the bone marrow to start because of St. John’s bone marrow’s positive media reception. Chris excavates the calf bone with a tiny fork. I squint at the menu. It’s written in code: trotter, tripe, offal, rape greens. I try and fail to identify a food item with which I’m familiar. The waiter says they have a special tonight: braised saddleback and anchovy. I order it. Chris orders a roast eel, and it arrives coiled like a cinnamon roll on a bed of root vegetables. “What’s saddleback?” I whisper. I fear I’ve inadvertently ordered horse.
Saturday, January 31
I go to the River Cafe. The restaurant has an open kitchen. I’d read that some Italian restaurants have open kitchens so mobsters could watch their food being prepared to ensure it wasn’t poisoned.
I order the flourless chocolate cake and write some postcards to friends back home while I wait. My cake arrives unpoisoned. I buy a bottle of £65 River Cafe olive oil. An eccentric billionaire I know, who lives in Italy to avoid taxes, swears by this olive oil and has it imported to his home in Venice. The bottle says “made in Tuscany,” which means the billionaire is buying olive oil from Italy that is packaged in the U.K. and then sent back to Italy. I hope to be this wealthy one day.
I eat a kabob on the way to my friend’s 30th-birthday party in the basement of a hair salon in Soho. I will turn 30 later this year. I drink a coffee from Caffè Nero because I don’t drink alcohol but like to have a cup in my hand at parties. A man who is clearly on cocaine says, “Coffee? You’ll be up all night!” I have a slice of birthday cake. The cake has fruit in it: The English have a tendency of putting fruit in their baked goods.
On the way home, I look for Goldfish crackers at the off-license, which is what bodegas are called here. They don’t have Goldfish and don’t seem to be aware of Goldfish, pointing me toward a wall of canned tuna.
I feel pangs of homesickness. I miss New York. I miss bodega snacks and pizza and Chinese food. I’m homesick for my 20s, for my friends, for my mother in California. And I’m homesick for something else too. Something I can’t name.
I call an American friend and try to explain the inexplicable feeling. She suggests it might be my “Saturn return,” that Saturn, which orbits the Earth every 29 years, has cycled back to the place it was when I was born; for some, this can be difficult. I tell her that I don’t think I’m sad about Saturn. She says it’s more of an existential shift, a transition into adulthood. My diet aside, I thought I had come to terms with growing up. I have a career and a partner and an accountant and a dentist. My American friend says some things can’t be intellectualized. They just have to be felt. I am up all night thinking. I snack on Oreos.
Sunday, February 1
I make coffee, browse the kitchen cabinets, and nibble small holes in various food items like the Very Hungry Caterpillar. A bite of apple, cheese, peanut butter, bread.
I let a call from my mother roll to voice-mail. My mother used to make a concoction called beans and cheese and rice, which is, namely, beans, melted cheese, and rice. This was a Cash-household staple. My mother’s parents were Irish peasants, and this is sometimes reflected in her cooking. Perhaps I should change my stance on beans, seeing as they were so integral to my childhood. I wonder if my transition into adulthood would be easier had I grown up eating sashimi or pâté.
I meet some friends for an early drink at a wine bar of their choosing in East London. The waiter asks for my wine order. I ask for a Shirley Temple, and the waiter pushes fruitier wine varietals. I tell the waiter that I don’t drink, and the waiter gives me a look like, Then why are you here? I ask myself, Why are you here?
The Shirley Temple arrives. I tie a knot in the cherry stem with my tongue and show the table. It’s a crowd-pleaser. Then I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, which is called the loo, and scroll on my phone. My friend enters the loo and asks, “What’s wrong?” I shake my head. Something about Saturn. I tell my friend, “There is a knot in my stomach.” My friend suggests I swallowed a cherry stem.
I read that taste is the sense mostly closely associated with memory, so back at home, I order in New York–style pizza. Chris and I sit down to watch The Pitt, but we find it’s not available in London, so Chris downloads something called a VPN to skirt draconian U.K. television laws. I listen to the foxes having sex outside. Chris looks peaceful and happy. He is younger, so his Saturn hasn’t caught up with him yet.
The pizza arrives. It does not taste like the New York pizza I’m accustomed to, like Scarr’s or Prince Street. It’s something entirely different. Not bad, just new.
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