When Linda Celeste Sims arrives in a hotel room — a common occurrence in the nine months she spends on the road each year as a lead dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater — she unpacks her hot plate, pot, sauté pan and Cuisinart food processor. For china, utensils and napkins, she calls room service; her suitcase is only so big.  If a trip to the nearest grocery yields the right ingredients, she may whip up tomato soup, steak and quinoa on the desk or dresser. She often invites other dancers over to share the bounty. “They say, ‘Mami!’ ” she said with a laugh. (Ms. Sims is half Dominican, half Nicaraguan.) Touring so much, she explained, “you get tired of really bad food.”  The itinerant food processor is a miniature of the battered and scratched seven-cup model that she keeps at home in New Rochelle, N.Y. Her most trusted cooking tool, it has been in constant use since she and her husband, Glenn Allen Sims, a fellow Ailey dancer, received it as a wedding gift 14 years ago. Ms. Sims, who at 38 may still be described as a tiny slip of a girl (albeit armed with a fine cartography of muscle), notes that age has not diminished the machine’s power.  Shortly after the Cuisinart first appeared in the United States in 1973, Craig Claiborne wrote that its invention “ranks with that of the printing press.” To Ms. Sims, it’s a “lifesaver.” On Mondays, her one day off during performance season, she uses it to make sauces and marinades that will last the week. She sets meat and fish to steep while she’s at rehearsals, and maintains a supply of sofrito, the voluptuous garlic foundation of many Latin dishes, in a repurposed ice-cream tub.  Ms. Sims grew up in Parkchester in the Bronx, where her father provided a steady soundtrack of Latin music (“If you go in his car right now, he probably has maracas,” she said) that inspired her to start dancing. She learned to cook by watching her mother and paternal grandmother, who spent whole days in the kitchen. Her mother’s turkey recipe is legendary among Ms. Sims’s Ailey colleagues, some of whom place orders for it at Thanksgiving.  “It’s because of the sauce” — a shrewd alliance of garlic, onion, tomato, cilantro and cubanelle and ajicito peppers, intensified over three days — Ms. Sims said. Her cooking is in demand, too: The company’s artistic director, Robert Battle, orders her pernil (roasted pork) five times a year.  Since Ms. Sims joined Ailey in 1996, she has been lauded as a dancer of exceptional elasticity and force, marrying the propulsion of modern dance to the exactitude of ballet. These gifts will be on display when the company performs at Lincoln Center beginning June 10. Offstage, for lucky friends, she has other, equally fierce gifts: Mason jars filled with a homemade chile sauce of habaneros and peppercorns — “big ones,” she said.  Close at Hand celebrates the objects, practical or precious, that cooks find indispensable.
With her itinerant food processor, the lead dancer makes sure room service isn’t the only option for her and members of the company on the road.