The night before my wedding, my mother presented me with my first cookbook -- a handwritten collection of index cards in an enameled box. Inside was a recipe for St. Cecelia's Society Punch, which called for exotic fruits marinated in a fifth of cognac. Added was a pint of Jamaican rum, a quart of green tea infusion, a fifth of peach brandy, a quart of sauterne, finished with a bottle of champagne.

Ours was a very unsophisticated family and never had we such ingredients in our home, much less a bottle of champagne. My wedding ceremony was held in my backyard where my father served highballs and beer. Champagne was nowhere in sight.

My father worked in the mill and spent his vacation time "putting in a garden," as he called it. Our meals were rich but simple.

Gravy ran like a river of plenty over a mountain of mashed potatoes, slabs of my mother's meat loaf tumbling from the black iron pan. A little sweet mustard sauce, spiked with rosemary, floated like a small pine tree on a storm-swollen stream. When harvest time came, we sometimes ate an entire meal of fresh corn, gorging on ears, slobbering butter. The idea of champagne never crossed our minds. But my mother's gift spoke of inspiration and aspiration and a lifestyle she envisioned far beyond the boundaries of our humble kitchen.

After the wedding, my new husband and I plunged deeply into gourmet paradise, moving to New York, consuming the unheard-of -- beef and kidney pie at Gallagher's Steak House; Oysters Rockefeller at King of the Sea; German at Luchow's; Italian at Mama Leone's; tiered hors d'oeuvres from 21. Even Horn & Hardart's legendary automat spilled luxury -- creamy macaroni and cheese and rice pudding.

The recipe that elevated my cooking expertise to the big league (or so I thought) was bouillabaisse. It was featured at a tiny, six-table French restaurant in Greenwich Village, where the chef looked as if he were prepared for surgery, garbed in a white coat and elegant, pleated toque.

He presented the main fare, pronouncing it bull-ya-bess, an elocution I tried to emulate at the fish monger's. The recipe appeared on page 56 of Craig Claiborne's "New York Times Cookbook," a virtual tome next to my recipe box, but it didn't explain how much tension cooking can create in a marriage.

First of all, my husband was anything but a sous chef at our parties. He would appear as one of the guests, arriving home after the lawn chairs had been placed, taking a leisurely shower, patting himself with cologne and appearing just seconds before the first guest rang the bell and things got out of hand in the kitchen.

The heat was too high and so, instead of simmering the delicate chunks of fish, a rapid boil disintegrated the fragile chunks. The only thing that saved it all was a small lobster claw atop each plate and the wonderful flavor of the broth -- a delicate turn of wine, clove in the rouille, a snip of orange zest and fennel seeds. I learned my first lesson in cooking (even though I was flunking Marriage I): You're supposed to sweat, feel as though you have rescued the most difficult meal from disaster and elevated it to perfection.

As my cooking expertise grew, I delved into Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." My husband began to be late for dinner -- often telling me in a last-minute phone call just as I was trying my hardest to lure him home with some delicious dish.

Once I'd made a feast of glazed duck with orange sauce, delicately stuffed with wild rice and pate-filled prunes, enough to feed four people, or so I thought. As the evening waned, I picked at the duck until there was nothing left but the skeleton, then placed the remains in the baking pan, put on the lid and slipped it back into the oven. Later, much later, I could hear him in the kitchen, rattling the oven rack and declaring, "Ummm, duck," as he opened the roasting pan and painfully cried, "Hey ... !"

Somehow my single-handedness at parties finally elevated my gatherings to the level of St. Cecilia's Society Punch. This would be the cocktail party of the century, I told myself.

I'd prepared the most intricate, time-consuming hors d'oeuvres. Carefully layered, pastry was rolled out laboriously on my narrow hallway floor, then folded, chilled, refolded and rolled again and again.

An entire pot of marrow bones reduced into a few cups of precious demi glace. Tiny meat pies of homemade crust, Caviar a la Scalora (the recipe didn't say where or who Scalora was), mussels buerre blanc, foie gras topped with pickled cherries, and fillet pouches, which the men attacked like barracudas as the punch made its way through their systems.

Guests got uproariously drunk. One couple fell asleep under the piano. I found my husband ensconced in the pantry with our friend, Sylvia, who was attired in a green suit, tight as a tourniquet.

Predictably, the punch was a landmark in my life, except not the one my mother envisioned. Instead of launching a successful social life, it introduced a broken marriage, the end of a life of grandiose parties and social climbing.

As a single, I became another liver spot on the hand of humanity, longing for times when I could dazzle a crowd with my recipes. But the days of masterful cooking and stuffing oneself eroded with the arrival of Twiggy and Jack Lalanne. Trans fats and organ meats were verboten. Then came the entourage of Richard Simmons, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and models swallowing moistened cotton balls to satisfy their hunger.

Worse, it wasn't even a sin to admit that you couldn't cook.

And why cook? The whole notion of feng shui and the arrival of grandiose culinary developments like the Marketplace in San Francisco taught that you could literally buy an entire party in one fell swoop, from flowers to dessert -- glasses, place settings, even the candelabra.

Cooking became the science of shortcuts and arrangement. The emphasis was on semi-homemade cooking, where you purchased prepared ganaches and demi glaces, enriched them with some easy ingredients, and voila! Delicately prepared hors d'oeuvres in tiny bento boxes could be purchased, along with intricately layered desserts from catalogues by Neiman Marcus, Williams-Sonoma, Dean & DeLuca. (Ever wonder how much preservatives they use?)

Social mores also broke down. It was nothing to forsake your wife of 30 years and appear in public with a trophy mate, and people like my ex showed up at parties with their latest 20-year-olds.

It occurred to me that my cooking phenomenon was an elaborate screen for my husband's lack of interest in the life I created.

Cooking and entertaining was a way of structuring a social setting in which I could be surrounded by people, wooing them but not a husband who was slowly slipping away.

My fervor for cooking meant that HE was last on the list. Though he was a part, he was not the prime mover in our relationship. Maybe he needed to be first with someone.

Perhaps I surrounded myself with vacuous people who were only interested in being seen in the right company at the right party.

So-called friends deserted me. They vanished once there was no husband for their husbands to talk to, play golf or hunt with while women got together and salved themselves with whatever it was that women did when men were busy with their thing.

Shortly after our divorce, I went back to teaching English.

Instead of charming my so-called devotees, I had an honest interchange with students. The more I put into my job, the greater the satisfaction. By helping them get connected to their pursuits, I experienced a buzz that far surpassed my cooking endeavors.

Still, my mind kept wandering to various famous meals: What did Madame Bovary make for the doctor? And what was in Mrs. Ramsay's boeuf en daube in Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"?

And what of Proust's madeleines?