“Hot Grills” is a chapter that puns on picnic cookery and adultery; unpacking the picnic basket is a metaphor for undressing; eating is a metaphor for sexual intercourse. Picnics are he release from everyday routine and the displeasures of a sour academic marriage.
“Picnickers who are determined to picnic will always find a spot somewhere. Ours were full of gnats and mosquitoes, even at high noon, and they were as hungry as we were. I had brought a particularly delicious picnic and had requested a bottle of chilled white wine because were starting with butter-milk-battered deep-fried chicken-legs and thighs, for the sake of the juicy dark meat-then a salad of avocado and sweet onion and pear in lime vinaigrette, to be eaten with forks on real plates. And then a quart of Jersey strawberries, toped with a few grown in my own garden. I had brought salt and pepper in small waxed-paper packets, and powdered sugar in a much larger packet for dipping strawberries. I brought everything, including corkscrew and cloth gingham napkins, in a wicker basket. Packing each item in the basket had been like putting garments on the body with the intense anticipation of taking each of them off.”
See Betty Fussell. “Hot Grills.” In My Kitchen Wars, 120-46. New York: North Point Press, 1999.