In Praise of Eating in Bed

in praise of washing bed sheets and of Virginia Woolf, too

Before we go into details, I should clarify that I’m not talking about lush breakfasts in bed, I don’t own a tray, and I’ll leave the art of snacking to the remit of the kitchen counter, roaming around with a fork in hands and eating tuna directly from the tin while trying to make a decision. Living with an inflammatory, chronic condition means that I groan with all my teeth each time someone says to me, tonelessly, ‘Why don’t you go lie down for a bit?’ I do spend a fair amount of time hanging out in bed, but I like to be in control of the schedule. The thing is, as much as I have always loved spending time in bed, reading, writing, eating, I have also learnt that there is a fracture between having to go to bed and being in bed. Call a child out for bedtime and they have a boost of energy; pain makes me strikethrough something in my diary, and I could turn my mattress into lava. As I speak-up ‘in praise of eating in bed’, it’s the dishes that make being in bed a lasting meal that I have in mind. 

With her essay On Being Ill (1926), Virginia Woolf wrote about the poverty of the English language when it comes to describing illness. Woolf begins with mentions to the tragedies of Hamlet and Lear, as well as the hearts of schoolgirls who can find echoes across the pages of Shakespeare, Donne and Keats, solely to conclude that ‘let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ The essay broadens between the question of sympathy – ‘the cautious respectability of health conceals’ – onto the opportunity for creativity and the child-like state of receiving uninterrupted attention from others. I came across On Being Ill late in my journey through Woolf’s bibliography and, at first, I felt that the language Woolf uses – matter-of-fact, requesting a lexicon for the ills – didn’t fit with the rest of her body of work. I love Woolf for the intensity of her detailing of life. In my library, Woolf is the writer who was ‘in the mood to dissolve in the sky’ and who wrote Mrs. Dalloway (1925), of which the premise is about a woman having a party; Virginia Woolf, the author of plotless novels that is able to twist ideas nonetheless. I can’t say that I have always understood Woolf’s writings, but I have found safety in her ability to make her microcosm whole – and, now, reading her from my own bed, I follow the sight of someone who was bed ridden often. Except that Woolf wrote her way back into the world, from feeling like a ‘deserter’ who ‘sunk deep among pillows’, onto putting words onto pages that rose her beyond the distance she could physically cover. Virginia Woolf went on to become an intellectual public figure who made the front cover of the Time and who contributed to the canon of literature greatly – she moved mountains indeed. 

12th April 1937

I’m not a Woolf scholar, simply a devoted reader, so I hope you’ll indulge me in such an intimate and selective reading of her work. Returning to On Being Ill, I eventually found Virginia Woolf as the writer who describes trees that I know, as the essay continues with a lengthy description of what one can really see when being ill. The sick can look up, Woolf explains, pausing and absorbing surroundings – the didactic yet flirtatious point of view of someone who is immobile, dreamlike movements. The idea of Woolf having a restricted field of vision through which she could look at the world and using her words and sentences to open-up the ceiling above her moves me deeply. This is also when I acknowledge my subjective reading, but what are books for if not to give us an imagery to question and to feast on? I cherish Woolf for writing against needing a plot. Details make life, subtlety builds the soul, this is what reading Virginia Woolf has taught me, and there I find peace eating another meal in bed. 

The September wind blows outside my window, tree branches whisper and I crave stone fruits. This is a classic in my bedroom, the risotto equivalent for those who eat in bed, porridge with roasted yellow plums and pine nuts:
Porridge oats 
Yellow plums, roughly chopped
Pine nuts
A squeeze of chestnut spread (I scream Clément Faugier with a childish French voice here, but you can substitute this with a teaspoon of peanut butter, or else)

Preheat the oven to 180C. Roast the fruits and nuts while you cook the porridge. On a low heat, pour the oats into a pot and toast for half a minute. Cover the porridge oats with water, bring to a soft boil and lower the heat immediately. Squeeze in some chestnut spread, or the substitute of your choice, and stir with a wooden spoon. Cook until the porridge has soaked up the water, stirring continuously (I like mine rather dried out). Serve in a bowl with the plums and pine nuts sprinkled on top. Bring it back to bed.

Other porridge toppings I enjoy include poached pears and hazelnuts, grated apples and walnuts, or lemon zest and shaved parmesan for the capricious days. 

bubbly porridge and a tube of chestnut spread

Swirling around Woolf’s work, she was also the author of A Room Of One’s Own (1929), in which she defended a forward thinking, feminist argument for the requirement of financial and spacial freedoms for women to be able to create. The reason I’m returning to this specific essay when talking about eating in bed, is because I’m seeing here an opportunity to carve out a niche for the self – with either short-term or long-term illness – as an invitation to step away from the capitalist expectations of productivity, material and intellectual, so one can heal. As we navigate the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic as a society, years of experiencing illness en masse and uncertainties about the long-lasting effect of the virus, living together with sickness has become an urgent topic. The subject requires more qualified thinkers than me so I won’t pretend that I have a solution, but what I’m convinced of is that while we have an opportunity to reassess our approach to health as a common we, we cannot exclude sick bodies from the workings of our society. In 1978, American writer and philosopher Susan Sontag granted us with a prequel with Illness as a Metaphor, and wrote:

‘Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’

Recovery is never linear, thus the border between kingdoms blurs and I come back for second. When I have a meal in bed, I’m granting myself permission to continue conversations I’d normally have at the table with others. This is a different type of performance – not a pause nor an end – but rather a floating time when I can think, a day through which solely I can draw a skyline and influence the forecast. Call me hopeful, but one of the first things I remember about learning English is being taught that a termination with -ing marks the continuous form of a verb – and here I’m writing in praise of eating in bed, a shifting perception of movement and an argument for being alive. 

While hosting meals in bed, I found a tender friend in M.F.K. Fisher, to whom I owe taking a teacup of soup in bed. In With a Bold Knife and Fork (1968), Fisher wrote: 

‘There are several kinds of soup I consider excellent for such gentle suppers. When I am alone and perhaps a little low, it is good to heat a can of cream of tomato and some milk or water, pour them into a warmed bowl with a sprinkle of cinnamon in it, and go to bed with it. (A small, widemouthed pitcher is easy to drink from, especially if I am reading a good book.)’ 

I first shared this recipe for a piece I wrote for Compound Butter, In Favour of Broth. This one is called A Time Reclaimer and all measurements may vary based on the amount of broth or time or both on hand:
800ml of your broth 
1 leek, thinly sliced
4 courgettes, skin on and roughly cut
1 can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed  

Warm-up your broth. In a separate casserole, brown the leeks with some olive oil. Add the courgettes and about three quarters of the broth (keep in mind that courgettes release water when cooking). Bring to a boil, lower the heat and leave to simmer until the courgettes are tender. Puree with an immersion blender. Add the chickpeas and the rest of the broth. Simmer for another five minutes or for as long as the pace of your life requires. Season with salt and pepper to taste (I enjoy a sprinkle of shaved ricotta salata on top), serve in a cup to sip in bed. 

a big casserole of soup (this one keeps well in the fridge)

On days when cooking doesn’t appeal, my go to is take-away pizza. The dough of a simple Margherita, bready and chewy, treats an afternoon hangover while a topping of anchovies heals a broken heart. 

Eating in bed is warm, regardless of what you’re choosing to eat. Two, final pieces of advice from a fellow bed-cook: avoid crumbly food. Crumbs will scratch your skin, crawling back for guilt the next day and, quite frankly, they’re annoying. When it comes to the logistics behind writing-up a menu for a meal to serve in bed, a spoon is a good measurement reference. 

Margaux