Man With a Pan (12 page)

The test was designed by University of Washington psychologist Anthony Greenwald. It is intended to measure how easily people associate home- and career-related words with either men or women. If you can, time yourself as you do part 1, and compare the result with how long it takes to do part 2. Many people find grouping men with home words takes longer than grouping women with home words—evidence of a possible gender bias. Do you think your results occurred because you took the tests in a particular order? You can repeat the tests again, this time pairing men with career words in part 1 and women with career words in part 2. Whichever part took longer the first time should be shorter this time, and vice versa. To take the gender-career Implicit Association Test online, where results are more reliable, go to
https://implicit.harvard.edu
.

PART
1

The words in this first list are in four categories. MALE NAMES and FEMALE NAMES are in CAPITAL letters. Home-related and career-related words are in lowercase. Go through the list from left to right, line by line, putting a line through only each MALE NAME and each home-related word. Do this as fast as you can.

executive LISA housework SARAH entrepreneur DEREK silverware MATT cleaning TAMMY career BILL corporation VICKY office STEVE administrator PAUL home AMY employment PEGGY dishwasher MARK babies BOB marriage MIKE professional MARY merchant JEFF garden KEVIN family HOLLY salary SCOTT shopping DIANA business DONNA manager EMILY laundry JOHN promotion KATE commerce JILL kitchen GREG children JASON briefcase JOAN living room ANN house ADAM

PART
2

The following list is the same as the one above. This time, go through the list putting a line through only each FEMALE NAME and each home-related word. Again, do this as fast as you can.

executive LISA housework SARAH entrepreneur DEREK silverware MATT cleaning TAMMY career BILL corporation VICKY office STEVE administrator PAUL home AMY employment PEGGY dishwasher MARK babies BOB marriage MIKE professional MARY merchant JEFF garden KEVIN family HOLLY salary SCOTT shopping DIANA business DONNA manager EMILY laundry JOHN promotion KATE commerce JILL kitchen GREG children JASON briefcase JOAN living room ANN house ADAM

RESULTS

Most people who complete this test find they can group men with professional activities and women with domestic activities much faster than the other way around. This is because it is easier to conform to the unconscious stereotypes that reside in one’s hidden brain than it is to fight against them.

“I’m a stay-at-work dad.”

Recipe File

Yashoda’s Potatoes

Serves 4 as a side dish

2 to 3 potatoes
2 tablespoons canola or other vegetable oil
2 teaspoons black mustard seeds
½ to 1 Thai green chilies (or to taste), finely chopped
2 teaspoons urad dal (white lentils)
¼ teaspoon turmeric powder
1 tablespoon lime juice
2 tablespoons cilantro, chopped
Salt to taste

Boil the potatoes in water until they are cooked; peel and chop them into cubes.

Heat the oil in a heavy pan.

When the oil is hot, add the mustard seeds.

When the mustard seeds pop, add the chilies and urad dal (white lentils) and sauté until the white lentils turn golden brown, about 30 seconds.

Add the cooked potatoes.

Add the turmeric.

Salt to taste.

Mash and mix everything together.

Turn the heat down to low for 5 minutes.

Add the lime juice and sprinkle with thinly sliced cilantro.

Serve hot.

On the Shelf

Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian,
Madhur Jaffrey. This is a wonderful book for cooks of all ages and all stages. The recipes are delicious, and following the measurements precisely invariably produces happy results. As a cook who is always pressed for time and always on the lookout for things that can simplify my work in the kitchen, I appreciate that the book is organized by ingredient rather than by categories like “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” “Salads,” “Desserts,” and so forth. Look in the fridge and find an eggplant? The vegetable section is organized alphabetically; turn to the section describing eggplant recipes, with the dishes organized by their nation of origin. You will find appetizers, entrées, and maybe even a dessert. There is a strong preponderance of recipes from the Indian Subcontinent, which is the food I grew up with and love the most.

IN THE TRENCHES

Adam Bonin is a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer who lives in Philadelphia. He has two daughters, aged eight and three. His wife is Jennifer Weiner, the author of, among other books,
In Her Shoes.

When I started dating Jen, I decided that I wanted to learn to cook. It was something I felt was important to do in a relationship, and to challenge myself, in a way.

Once, we were in a Williams-Sonoma store and I was thumbing through books. I came across the
Cook’s Illustrated
book
The Best Recipe.
The way they described things fascinated me. They wanted to figure out how to make scrambled eggs, and so they tried thirty-six different ways. Is it best to mix the eggs with whole milk? Do we mix them with skim milk? Do we mix them with half-and-half? Do we use no milk at all? Do we use a hot pan? Do we use a cold pan? Their process appealed to the nerd in me.

It was a very interesting way to get into cooking, because it helped me understand the science of what was going on. So I grabbed the book, took it home, and just kept trying different recipes. I started off with relatively simple things, like pan searing and basic roasting, and I’ve kept ramping it up. I wanted to impress Jen. I thought it would be really cool if for special occasions, or even for ordinary occasions, I could whip up something that was restaurant quality.

A lot of my interest is in the process. Take, for example, under-standing the importance of butter and salt. My mom, for whatever reason, is very adamant about the point. “I never cooked with salt. I never used salt,” she would say. I had to learn as I cooked that salt is actually really important. You just have to know how to use it. If you want things to taste right, you need salt.

I cook about three or four nights a week. My wife also cooks, of course. She can roast a chicken like nobody’s business. She is great. But there’s a whole array of stuff that I have since learned how to do. One night about ten years ago, we were snowed in, and we had friends over. This was when
Iron Chef
was really starting to take off. I said, “Jen, go to the local gourmet market in our neighborhood. Bring me back something to cook, and I will figure it out.” She brought back a duck. I had never cooked a duck before. I started scrambling around, poking around online for recipes and just seeing what we still had in the pantry. I ended up doing some kind of orange glaze that did not work out well. And it took friggin’ forever, which, given that we were snowed in, made it a frustrating experience.

After that, I decided, My God, I’ve got to learn how to cook duck. It seemed like something that most people don’t do, can’t do, and don’t even think about doing, but if I could figure it out, I’d have a real leg up. So I kept looking for recipes. And then I found a Mark Bittman recipe for pan-roasted five-spice duck. More than anything else in my repertoire, this is the one thing I’m most proud of. Everybody in my family knows—and most of our friends know—that Adam can make duck, and he can make this duck. And he can just nail it.

Recipe File

Duck Breasts with Five-Spice Glaze

This recipe is a combination of two different Mark Bittman recipes. His “Duck’s Day in the Pan”
(New York Times,
December 3, 2003) taught me how to make roast duck by quartering it and braising it in its own fat in the pan, then preparing the glaze. The problem is that fresh whole ducks aren’t always easy to find, and it’s a lot of work (and food) if it’s only two people eating.

Duck breasts, on the other hand, are easier to find and simpler to make in convenient, per-person serving portions. Plus, it becomes a meal that can be prepared midweek. As for how to prepare the breasts, Bittman’s duck
porchetta
(“An Italian Classic Redone with Duck,”
New York Times,
December 19, 2008) has proved reliable in terms of the times and temperatures. Therefore I make the following:

2 boneless duck breast halves
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry
3 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons water
½ cup brown sugar
1 cinnamon stick, about 3 inches long
5 or 6 nickel-size slices ginger
4 pieces whole star anise
2 cloves
1 teaspoon coriander seeds

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Liberally sprinkle the breasts with salt and pepper.

2. Heat a heavy, large, ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Add the duck breasts, skin side down, and cook until nicely browned, about 8 minutes. Turn the meat and transfer the skillet to the oven; roast 8 to 9 minutes for medium rare. (An instant-read thermometer inserted into the meat should read about 125°F.)

3. Remove the duck to a plate and pour off all but 1 tablespoon of the fat; leave any solids in the pan. (One thing I like to do is to take that fat and blend it in with a simmering pot of jasmine rice. It’s a bit decadent, but so is eating duck midweek.)

4. Place the skillet back over medium-high heat, add the rice wine, and bring to a boil. (Remember during all of this: that pan handle is hot.)

5. Add the soy sauce and 2 tablespoons water and bring to a boil; stir in remaining ingredients. Once the mixture starts bubbling, return the duck to the skillet and cook, turning it frequently, until the sauce is thick and the duck is well glazed, 5 to 10 minutes.

6. Remove the duck, then scoop the solid spices out of the sauce and discard the spices. (If the sauce doesn’t seem thick and glazy, keep reducing it for a bit.) Spoon the sauce over the duck and serve.

MARK BITTMAN

Finding Myself in the Kitchen

Mark Bittman has been writing and speaking about food for thirty years, much of that time for the
New York Times.
He is a regular on the
Today
show, a star on three PBS food shows, and the author of three blockbuster cookbooks, including
How to Cook Everything,
which won three international cookbook awards, the IACP Julia Child Award, and the James Beard Foundation Award—twice—and is now the bible of cooking for millions of Americans. His seminal book
Food Matters
broke new ground in exploring the links among food, health, and the environment while providing tangible guidance for Americans to rethink their diet.

Parenthood and the necessities of daily life taught me, as they have billions of others, to cook. And while I was learning to cook, I learned to work (and ultimately to love, corny as that may sound; but that’s another story). I did not, however, set out to teach my kids to cook. I didn’t have to. They figured it out on their own.

My first child, Kate, was born in 1978, when I was twenty-seven. I had been cooking for ten years, but not regularly, and really not in any kind of concentrated fashion. I was curious about the process, but I wasn’t disciplined; there was no need to be, and discipline was not yet a part of my character.

I was self-taught (that is, book-learned) in cooking—as I was in many other things—but I picked it up pretty quickly once I began; it isn’t, after all, very difficult. My dad, of all people—he can barely scramble an egg—showed me how to scramble an egg in 1954, when my mother was in the hospital giving birth to my sister. My mom didn’t directly teach me much, but she set a pretty good example, which is precisely what matters. She cooked daily, and for the most part she started with real ingredients. She wasn’t inspired (you might say she didn’t care), but she got it done, and without fuss.

There was a self-defensive quality to my earliest cooking, the cooking that happened before Kate was born. It began when I was in college, in Worcester, Massachusetts; this was the late sixties. The dining-hall food was unsurprisingly abysmal, even worse than that of the cafeteria in my New York public high school. The differences, however, were stark: In high school, confronted by sliced meat and reconstituted mashed potatoes covered with shiny brown glop, I could bolt out one of the unguarded doors and hit the local greasy spoon (thirty seconds away) or deli (forty-five seconds) or pizza joint (maybe a minute and a half); this was risky—it was rule-breaking—but it wasn’t uncommon. And there was always a real dinner, and there was New York all over the place. Even in the sixties, the city had real food, perhaps more so than now; while there wasn’t the same diversity we see of styles or ingredients, many of those ingredients were of higher quality—they hadn’t yet been industrialized—and much more of the cooking was done from scratch, using truly traditional methods.