Man With a Pan (15 page)

Men learning to cook often start with the BBQ grill, perhaps because they have been roasting meat over fire for a couple of hundred thousand years. Of course women do it equally well, but then they must think, Let the dickhead go at it, I’m tired of doing all the cooking. There is no better insurance for a long-lasting marriage than for couples to cook together or for men to engineer the meals a few times a week to release their beloved from the monotony.

It is quite impossible for a man to do anything without a touch of strutting vanity, and as the years pass, a man will trip over his smugness in the kitchen or at the grill. A friend who is normally a grill expert got drunk and literally incinerated (towering flame) a ten-pound prime rib in front of another friend who had laid out the two hundred bucks for the meat, which tasted like a burned-out house smells. And there must be hundreds of thousands of one-dish neophyte cooks. You hear, “Wait until you try Bob’s chili,” or “You won’t believe Marvin’s spaghetti sauce!” as if there were only one. Bob’s chili had a large amount of celery in it, which exceeds in heresy the idea that God is dead, while Marvin’s pasta sauce had more oregano in it than a pizzeria would use in a week.

Currently the overuse of rosemary among bad cooks in America must be viewed as a capital crime. The abuse of spices and herbs is a hallmark of neophyte cooking and enjoyed only by those with brutish palates. I admit my guilt early on in this matter, recalling the upturned faces of my daughters and recalling their glances: “What in God’s name did you put in here, Dad?” Trying to cater to youthful and captious appetites is demanding indeed.

I admit to obsessions that by definition can’t be defined, as it were. Once on my way north to the cabin, I stopped in an Italian deli in Traverse City, Folgarelli’s, which helped enlighten the eating habits of the area, and told the proprietor, Fox, that I needed seven pounds of garlic. Fox was curious about what restaurant I owned and I said it was just me at my cabin, where the nearest good garlic was a 120-mile drive. To start the season in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where many years there still was remnant snow on the ground in May, I needed to make a rigatoni with thirty-three cloves of garlic, in honor of the number of years Christ lived. Fox, aka Folgarelli, seemed sympathetic to my neurosis as he built my sandwich out of mortadella, imported provolone, salami, and a splash of Italian dressing. Food lovers are sympathetic to each other’s obsessions. Many years later when I sat down in France with eleven others to a thirty-seven-course lunch (only nineteen wines) that took thirteen hours, no one questioned our good sense. Nearly all the dishes were drawn from the eighteenth century, so there was an obvious connection to the history of gastronomy, though in itself that wouldn’t be enough to get me on a plane to Burgundy. When asked dozens of times what it cost, a vulgar American preoccupation, I have a uniform answer: “About the price of a Volvo, but none of us wanted a Volvo. We also saved money by not needing dinner.”

So I muddle along, learning and relearning. The biggest corrective in my cooking was to become friends and acquaintances with a number of fine chefs. Early on it was Alice Waters and Mario Batali. My friendship with Mario led me on to Tony Bourdain. When my seventieth birthday came up, Mario, April Bloomfield from the Spotted Pig, and Adam Perry Lang came out from New York City, and Chris Bianco from Phoenix. We had a dozen lovely courses, ending with 1937 Château d’Yquem, 1937 Madeira, and 1938 Armagnac to get close to my birth year. On another trip, Mario brought Loretta Keller from San Francisco, and Michael Schlow from Boston, the fastest knife I’ve ever seen.

The immediate lesson of being in the kitchen with a fine or great chef is humility. You properly want to go hide behind the woodpile until the dinner bell. You are a minor club player from South Dakota in the presence of Roger Federer. What astounds you, other than the product, is the speed and dexterity with which great chefs work. You feel like a sluggard because you are a sluggard. I can truthfully say that I wrote my novella
Legends of the Fall
in nine days, but then I had twenty years plus of practice: the same with chefs. There are no accidents or miracles, just hard work accompanied by taste.

It is a somber situation with the best home or amateur chefs. When I watch my oldest daughter, Jamie, forty years after our first forays into French cooking, I am aware that I have fallen behind her to the point that I’m around the corner out of sight, but then after the university, she worked in New York for Dean and Deluca catering. When I cook and learn from my friend Peter Lewis from Seattle, I remind myself that he owned the restaurant Campagne for more than twenty years. In France, my friend the writer and book dealer Gérard Oberlé, who hosted the thirty-seven-course lunch, can bone a lamb shoulder in minutes, while I take a half hour. And who else makes a lovely sixteenth-century stew out of fifty baby pig’s noses? The owner of the vineyard Domaine Tempier, Lulu Peyraud, now in her mideighties, has cooked me a dozen meals, and a few courses of each have caused goose bumps. You watch closely and hopefully manage the humility of the student again.

A few weeks ago, my wife cooked an antelope meat loaf for friends that was the equal of any rough terrine I have had in France. There is simply no substituting wild game with the pen-raised variety. If you want to make Bocuse’s
salmis de bécasse
(an improbably elaborate recipe), you have to take up woodcock hunting. I love ruffed grouse and Mearns quail, but neither can be raised in captivity, so you better train a bird dog and head to the field and forest with a shotgun.

Cooking becomes an inextricable part of life and the morale it takes to thrive in our sodden times. A good start, and I have given away dozens of copies, is Bob Sloan’s
Dad’s Own Cookbook.
There is no condescension in the primer. Glue yourself to any fine cook you meet. They’ll generally put up with you if you bring good wine. Don’t be a tightwad. Your meals in life are numbered and the number is diminishing. Get at it. Owning an expensive car or home and buying cheap groceries and wine is utterly stupid. As a matter of simple fact, you can live indefinitely on peanut butter and jelly or fruit, nuts, and yogurt, but then food is one of our few primary aesthetic expenses, and what you choose to eat directly reflects the quality of your life.

“Never hunt when you’re hungry.”

Recipe File

Grouse Surprise

Once at our cabin in a slow hunting year we had only three grouse for five people to go with the usual grilled woodcock first course. I cut the grouse into small chunks along with equal-size pieces of sweetbreads. You marinate both in buttermilk and lots of Tabasco for a couple of hours, flour, and sauté until delightfully brown. The sauce is made with a cup of marinade plus a stock made of grouse carcasses and woodcock leavings. We always kept a stock going throughout hunting season. You whisk the sauce vigorously so that the buttermilk doesn’t curdle. I always like a Le Sang des Cailloux Vacqueyras or a Domaine Tempier Bandol with this meal, though if you’re rich, head for a Burgundy or a Bordeaux.

Elk Carbonade

This works well also with venison or antelope or even the domesticated buffalo I buy shipped from Wild Idea in South Dakota. You have to learn stews and soups to take advantage of lesser cuts of your game. Shanks and their marrow are especially valuable. This version of the generic Belgian dish is adapted from Julia Child.

Cut 5 pounds of elk in ¾-inch cubes. Brown in pork fat in Le Creuset. Set aside. Sauté 10 cups of sliced onion and 7 cloves of garlic, salt, and pepper. Assemble, adding 1½ cups of beef stock and 4 cups of pilsner beer, 3 tablespoons of brown sugar, and an herb bouquet of bay leaves, thyme, and parsley. Bake at low heat, about 275°F, for 3 hours. Add a little cornstarch and 3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar and cook for 5 minutes on the stove until thickened. Serve with Rustichella
pappardelle
noodles.

On the Shelf

To be honest, which is very difficult for me, though we have hundreds of cookbooks, I use only a few, while my wife uses many. Perhaps I am not all that imaginative outside my work. I use all the Italian cookbooks of Mario Batali. In Montana and along the Mexican border, we live far from acceptable Italian restaurants, so we cook Italian a couple of times a week. I’ve memories of my French bistro favorites. Haute cuisine is beyond my talent. We frequently use David Waltuck’s
Staff Meals from Chanterelle,
and I’ve lately become fascinated with Colman Andrews’s
Catalan Cuisine.
A worn family classic is
James Beard’s American Cookery.
Anything by James Villas is good.

IN THE TRENCHES

Brett Thacher is a fifty-eight-year-old father of three boys, the oldest of whom is closing in on his teenage years. He lives in Canton, New York, near the Canadian border. His wife, Pamela, is a professor of psychology at St. Lawrence University. He’s what’s called a trailing spouse in the academic world. When he files his income taxes, he usually lists his occupation as “Housekeeper/homemaker.”

About a year ago, Pamela and I pretty much went vegetarian. We still eat fish, but we’re completely off red meat. My brother-in-law had had a kidney stone attack. And somebody suggested to him, “Well, maybe you should be looking at your diet. And why don’t you read this book called
The China Study.
” The book makes the argument that not eating meat, eating a completely vegan diet, is healthy and is actually good for some of the various ailments in life.

I didn’t become a vegetarian entirely for health reasons, though. A lot of what drives me is the fact that meat consumes a lot of our resources. And if you’re going to be serious about global warming, and also about reducing our reliance on energy, getting close to the source is much better, I think. Pamela picked up the book first, and I was pretty much an easy sell. Years ago I had toyed with a vegetarian diet when I was at UMass, when I was going to college, but then I trended back to eating meat.

Our oldest boy, Eben, interestingly enough and completely on his own, is a vegetarian. It wasn’t so much a cognizant decision. He tried meat once or twice in his youth, but he never liked it. And he really eats a diet of tofu and other vegetables and fruits and some things like noodles. Charles, my second, and Sam, the youngest, still like chicken nuggets, and I’ve got to admit that they still like to go out and get a burger once in a while, but Charles, he’s eating more and more a meatless diet. Sam, he’ll still go for everything. We haven’t pushed going meatless for them. We kind of like them to make their own decisions. But certainly we have plenty of meatless menus and diets available to them.

Pamela and I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, when we were first married. A restaurant there called New Rivers had as part of their winter menu a veal Bolognese sauce. I used to love to make it. I wouldn’t always use veal; we’d use just regular beef quite often. When we switched to a vegetarian diet, I said, “Ha, I think I could adapt broken-up frozen tofu to substitute for the veal in this recipe.” I tried it, and it worked quite well. Now I substitute ground-up frozen tofu for meat in chilies and other dishes all the time. If you freeze tofu and then thaw it, and then crumple it up, it’s very much like ground meat. Almost indistinguishable. It’s really a clever little trick. And I think I read it in one of the Moosewood cookbooks.

I also bake all the bread that we eat. Just to date myself, probably thirty or forty years ago there was a fellow who was the baker at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California—I think they’re up near Ojai, but I’m not sure. Anyway, he wrote a baking book,
The Tassajara Bread Book.
It has a very basic bread recipe that’s pretty easy to do. I just take three cups of water, dump it in a bowl, put in a tablespoon and a half of yeast. Then I usually put in about a third cup of honey for the sweetener. And mix up the sponge with enough flour to make it look like good, thick mud and let that rise.