She looked again at the cookbooks. There must have been thirty of them. She took one down off the shelf at random: a French cookbook, paperback. It had clearly been well used; it was spattered all over with all sorts of sauces, its pages warped from spills. She opened to a dog-eared page, a chicken recipe, reading it as if it were a story—like many people who cook only spaghetti, she was fascinated by recipes—but soon she noticed something unusual about this recipe. Someone had edited it. Wherever the recipe called for butter, someone—was it Jake’s handwriting, or someone else’s? the capitalized letters made it hard to tell—had crossed out the word “butter” and written “margarine.” She flipped through to some of the other folded pages. In a steak recipe with a light cream sauce, someone had crossed out “cream” and written “non-dairy creamer.” She flipped again, assuming she was in the hands of a lactose-intolerant cook. But then she saw a recipe for vegetables with hollandaise sauce, circled with the word “Good!” written next to it. And as she flipped again and again, she saw that the revisions were everywhere, and everywhere consistent—the dairy products were omitted only from the meat recipes, scallops replaced with mushrooms in the bouillabaisse, the chapter on pork obviously untouched. It was the same thing Leora’s mother did at home: editing the cookbooks to make them kosher. There were some kosher cookbooks on the shelves too, but those looked much newer. She put the book back quickly as Jake began bringing the food out to the table.

The meal was stupendous, better than any she had had in any restaurant in recent memory. He accepted her compliments with regret, as if he had intended something much better and had cooked this meal almost by accident.

“How did you become so interested in cooking?” she asked him toward dessert. She expected an answer involving some sort of lifelong fascination with food—which would have made sense, considering the bookcase—or a cooking class somewhere, or perhaps a relative who was a chef.

“Necessity,” he said. “My mother was the one who used to cook for us, and after she died, my father didn’t have time to learn. I decided that I might as well try to have fun with it. The alternative was to spend the next five years subsisting on spaghetti.”