By HENRY ALFORD


Like many things located at the intersection of obligation and potential pleasure, leftovers are a source of complicated emotion. Just ask Diana Abu-Jaber, a novelist who once wrote a memoir told through food, “The Language of Baklava.”

At a party she held at her house in Portland, Oregon, in 2001 to celebrate her marriage, two of her neighbors brought her a gift: a Mason jar with a jaunty red bow on it. “It seemed to contain chunks of some sort of appalling turgid brownish oozing cake,” Ms. Abu-Jaber said. It came with a note of explanation that read: “This half loaf of zucchini chocolate bread was a (failed) experiment. But maybe you will like it. Happy marriage!”

“To this day, we marvel at whatever might have possessed them to pass that on to us,” Ms. Abu-Jaber said.

We think of leftovers with special frequency during a recession because they represent our efforts to be economical.

In some instances, unusual leftovers- inspired behavior is motivated less by a neurotic compulsion to dispense than by a vigorous attempt to deplete.

Clement Gaujal, a customer quality representative for Nissan who grew up in Paris, recalled that his mother had a tenuous grasp of batch size when it came to lentils, and often ended up serving their leftovers for three or four days in a row. So, after buying a small notebook filled with graph paper, Mrs. Gaujal started a lentils diary: she and her husband and four sons would chronicle how the lentils were prepared at each meal, how much was eaten by various members of the family, what was discussed during the meal, and, of course, what percentage of the offerings were left uneaten.

The way we deal with leftovers can say a lot about who we are.

As Marvalene Hughes, now the president of Dillard University in New Orleans, wrote in her essay, “Soul, Black Women, and Food,” one reason leftovers are so prominent in black American culture is because most of the foods that are labeled soul food, from chicken backs to ham hocks to oxtails, were once foods that white slaveholders deemed undesirable and gave to their slaves.

“The survival-oriented black woman trusts her creative skills to ‘make something out of nothing,’” Dr. Hughes wrote. “She acquired the unique survival ability to cook (and therefore use) all parts of everything.”

By the 19th century, deliveries of ice for iceboxes were common in America; in the 1920’s and 1930’s refrigerators started showing up in American homes in large numbers. The ‘40’s brought Tupperware; the ‘50’s, Saran Wrap; the ‘60’s, Ziploc storage bags; the ‘70’s, the first affordable home microwave ovens.

As Ms. Abu-Jaber put it: “Lots of dishes improve with time, and leftovers can be the sweetest sort of offering. They imply that you share a home-style friendship, that you aren’t company, but family. But sometimes leftovers are just that - the stuff no one wanted to eat the first time around.”