5 Years Ago the Pandemic Had Just Begun, and These Were the Dishes That Helped Us Through It

Five years ago today, I started a new job while working from my parents’ kitchen. My two siblings and I were all young adults — my brother in medical school, my sister an undergraduate — but the three of us were doing work at the family dining table together, just as we had during our school years.

The first few days of the COVID-19 shutdown in March 2020 likely had similarities for most people, but simultaneously, each person’s experience was drastically different. I’d guess everyone, like me, was filled with anxiety and uncertainty, but I know I wasn’t confronted with the grief that others faced when their loved ones were affected by the virus.

The five-year anniversary of the onset of the pandemic offers an opportunity for remembrance and reflection. It’s a time to thank the first responders who couldn’t shelter in place during those early, harrowing weeks, and to pay tribute to those who died or were left with lifelong health issues from COVID. But it’s also a time to look back on the small moments that provided hope during such a challenging time. Even as we panicked and grieved, people discovered joy in activities and connections they might not have experienced otherwise.

During the weeks I spent holed up in my parents’ house — before I returned to New York to hunker down in my own apartment — I explored the very limits of my boredom. I’m not complaining; I faced the least devastating consequence of the pandemic, and my boredom fueled unexpected social developments. 

I FaceTimed friends I’d lost touch with and made cocktails with my family as if we were out at a nice bar. I watched Tiger King at record speed and joined the online debate about whether Joe Exotic killed Carole Baskin. And I baked banana bread.

Has there ever been a time when people across the United States cooked the same foods so universally as in the early months of COVID? Sure, we still have food trends (hello, Dubai chocolate bar and all of its offshoots), but the lockdown prompted individuals nationwide to engage in the communal act of preparing the same recipe — all from the comfortable distance of their own homes — in a way unlike anything else.

Not only did we need to cook at home because we couldn’t dine at restaurants, but for many, the pandemic likely stoked greater fears around food security. The future of jobs and the economy felt uncertain, and making meals at home was far more cost-effective than ordering takeout every day. The freedom to do so was a privilege. I could afford the ingredients to cook from scratch, and my job allowed me to work from home. These are luxuries I acknowledge not everyone had, and they enabled me to fully immerse myself in the food cultures that emerged during that time.

The dishes that became wildly popular during the pandemic were less about creating something visually appealing or geared toward social media fame, and more about the experience of cooking itself. We found ourselves attracted to time-consuming projects, like the frenzy of sourdough baking that popped up everywhere.

As people eagerly started baking to occupy their time, grocery stores reported shortages of yeast. Home bakers then turned to sourdough starter to create their own bread, eliminating the need for scarce store-bought yeast. And if you have all the time in the world to carefully nurture your sourdough starter, weighing and feeding it daily, then why wouldn’t you give it a try?

Of course, there eventually was a shortage of flour, too, fueled by the combined enthusiasm for baking sourdough and one of its COVID companions that has a much lower barrier to entry: banana bread. A loaf of banana bread doesn’t take much time to make, but for those who hadn’t baked at home before, it could easily seem like a big undertaking. (Plus, it requires at least a few days for your bananas to reach the ideal overripeness you need.) 

Banana bread is a comforting, heartwarming treat. When I was in college, my grandmother would mail me Tupperwares full of her banana bread to remind me of home and bring a little happiness during finals week. Perhaps we were seeking the same kind of comfort through our anxiety-driven batches of banana bread during the early days of lockdown.

In April 2020, chef, James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, and host of Salt Fat Acid Heat, Samin Nosrat called on people across the internet to join a sort of virtual dinner party. She invited audiences to participate in a day-long Instagram Live as she took on a time-consuming and labor-intensive cooking project: lasagna. In an essay for The New York Times, Nosrat encouraged anyone who was “craving a shared meal, a shared project, a shared sense of purpose” to prepare what she simply titled “The Big Lasagna” at home.

Nosrat’s lasagna took zero shortcuts. She offered that you could buy noodles if you wanted, but she made them from scratch. Once finished, the recipe yields about eight to 12 servings — it really is a big lasagna.

The cooking project provided a tangible distraction — while you rolled out lasagna sheets and layered them with sauce, cheese, and béchamel, perhaps you wouldn’t think about the pandemic for a few hours — but Nosrat also hit on something we were profoundly missing: the act of cooking and eating together.

These communal cooking endeavors were just one of the many strategies we employed to cope with the tragedy unfolding around us in 2020, but they provide insights that are important to remember and can still be relevant today.

Sometimes, it’s worth investing time and effort into cooking something just for yourself. You don’t need to schedule a date night or start a home bakery to make that pasta from scratch or try your hand at bread baking. Just do it for yourself, whether it’s because it sounds delicious, you want to learn a new skill, or you simply feel an inexplicable urge to spend all day making lasagna.

The way we all rallied around cooking for community — even when we couldn’t physically be together — serves as a reminder of a truth we’ve known for centuries: food is comfort. I doubt many of us forgot the power of a good meal to soothe sadness, but during that time of extreme stress, it was proven yet again.

We bring meals to people when they’ve lost loved ones, we take a friend out for dinner or drinks after a breakup, and it turns out, when there’s a global pandemic, we all bake a lot of banana bread.