Man With a Pan (22 page)

Now it was 8:48. Some irrational thing clicked inside me and I rushed to my Vespa and sped through the streets, possessed of a kind of mania I thought I had left behind in New York, decades earlier, when I worked as a bike messenger. I went so far as to pass a slow-moving SUV on State Street, after which I turned around and offered the finger to the glare of headlights and the anonymous driver beyond them.

Whole Foods was still open. I burst through the glass doors and ran to the meat counter. I bought some flank steak, an onion, and four mushrooms for $7.90 and rushed home to fire up the grill. My daughter, as ever, asked to come with me to watch me cook. She is three. It was late for grilling, and dark. I held her on my hip, standing in front of the closed grill, opening it now and then to reveal the flames and hissing sounds while she tucked in her toes.

2.

A few years earlier, in 2006, I moved to Roanoke, Virginia, to be a visiting professor at a small university, and was for the first time faced with a prolonged separation from my extended kitchen, which had comprised all the restaurants in New York, especially the ones that delivered. I have lived for periods of time in two other cities—London and Phnom Penh. But London and Phnom Penh, for all their many differences, share with New York a cosmopolitan array of restaurants that made home cooking feel not entirely necessary and maybe even a little wasteful given the many options for eating out.

This was not the case in Roanoke. It sat in far western Virginia, in a dreamy green valley surrounded by mountains. It turns out there is a culture of organic-minded farmers up toward Lexington, and up the mountain in Floyd, but I did not see that upon arriving in Roanoke. Instead, the phrase that I first encountered, a phrase that set the tone for my expectations, was a Hardee’s promotion that was reiterated on signs all over the place:
TRY OUR JALAPEÑO THICKBURGER!

There was a grotesque musicality to the words
jalapeño thickburger,
especially
thickburger.
My wife and I tossed them into the air over and over, laughing. The campaign must have been a success. We saw the signs for months. The word
thickburger
imprinted itself on my consciousness. And not in a good way. Also, up the street from Hollins University, where I was teaching and where we lived, was an establishment called Lou’s, which had an ever-changing sign out front featuring slightly heartbreaking aphorisms:
THE BEST DAMN PIZZA IN TOWN. PERIOD
was one.
HOME OF THE ORIGINAL OVEN-TOASTED SUB
was another.

3.

“Life is weather. Life is meals. Lunches on a blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled.” I was in college when I first encountered this famous quotation in
Light Years,
by James Salter, who spent a few days as the writer-in-residence at my school. Each of the advanced-writing students made a pilgrimage to his quarters for a chat; the men got tea, the women got wine. I drank tea with the man who more or less wrote, “Life is tea.” I felt like I was living. There was snow on the ground outside, and sun. When he went to the bathroom, I walked across the room and read the page in his typewriter, a letter beautifully describing the room in which I stood. “Life is meals” is a statement of ethos by Salter, whose approach to life is that of a connoisseur who is tuned to the resonance of moments. Salter is resigned to the fact that moments are all we have, and is therefore prepared to champion them. He writes in a way that encourages savoring—of sex, food, travel, the book in your hands.

My culinary interests were for a long time focused on eating, not cooking. A passage from Leonard Michaels’s short story “I Would Have Saved Them if I Could” sums up my approach. In the story, the main character, a man, is at home on the Lower East Side, where he lives with his parents. It is 3:00 a.m. and he is alone after a date and he is preparing a snack of a buttered bialy and sliced onions. “My parents should be asleep in their bedroom, about twenty feet away. Since my father is dead, imagine him. He snores. He cries out against murderous assailants. I could never catch his exact words. Think what scares you most, then eat, eat.”

Salter excited in me a sense of recognition of the elegant cruelty of fate and also seemed to be giving me pointers on how to live. Michaels excited in me a sense of recognition of the cruelty of fate—straight, no chaser. In these two authors, these two lines, I recognized opposing sides of myself—a kind of aspirational largeness in Salter’s world of moments, food, occasions, versus Michaels’s hunger, fear, hysteria, and comedy.

There is a part of me that wants to throw dinner parties for which I cook with a casual flair, sitting down for a prolonged act of eating and languorous, maybe decadent, companionship. And there is a part of me that is stuffing my face alone in the small hours of the night. One is a wish occasionally achieved. The other is, more often than I would like, the reality of my nights.

4.

The first weeks in Roanoke were unsteady. Mostly we got used to the landscape. The main commercial strip near Hollins is Williamson Road, permeated with a sense of dereliction and lost America, used-car lots, and a Hooters. On the horizon were rolling hills, a gorgeous, verdant landscape, all of it scored by the pervasive whooshing sound of the interstate, speeding people elsewhere. The most dramatic landscape was the ever-more-rolling hill of my wife’s belly, within which grew a baby.

We made explorations of the city and found some nice restaurants. Nice enough. And there was a Kroger nearby, which, for the first few weeks, I thought was going to be our only food supply. It was open twenty-four hours. I liked to visit late, after midnight, when the aisles were populated by lonely, lost characters and the whole nocturnal scene reminded me of city streets at odd hours. But the food itself was disorienting. To say I was spoiled or made lazy by New York was only part of it. There are lot of New Yorks. I had gravitated to the fey, prettified emporiums that flatter you with dazzling displays while insulting you by charging a fortune for a kumquat.

Until I moved to Roanoke, shopping for food was a lark, divorced from the day-to-day. I enjoyed the dense aisles of Balducci’s. I savored the salty possibilities of Zabar’s. (I mention Zabar’s as though it is a known quantity worldwide. It feels almost impossible to define its essence. A Jewish delicatessen? OK, that. A lot of smoked fish. Smoked meats. Smoked people. A lovely sort of crankiness pervading. Little morsels handed over. People demanding things be sliced very thin. Crowds. Chocolate. Various baskets and nebulous stuff hanging down from the ceiling. A souk. A bazaar. Rich and nonrich, Jews, non-Jews. Eighty-first and Broadway, four blocks away from where I grew up.) And then there was my favorite way to shop, to wander among the nearly grotesquely gorgeous vividness of the markets of Chinatown.

In Roanoke, I was in the world of the supermarket. Processed food. Easy food. Food for the everyday. I lectured myself that I was strolling amid abundance and only needed to be creative. I berated myself for being addicted to presentation and flair over substance. Politically, I was in enemy territory (though not entirely, as the heinous George Allen had just made his Macaca remark and would soon lose to Jim Webb), and I was aware of a hypocrisy in my tastes. I pined, mildly, for organic food, but this was a cover for the longing I had for the spectacular and the expensive.

I found a chain called Fresh Market, nestled in the more yuppified southern end of the city. Nothing that special, just a fancy supermarket. But after a few weeks of Kroger, it was a revelation. Harold Brodkey famously wrote of his character Orra Perkins, “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die,” and the same might be said for peppers. Some women are more beautiful than others, and some peppers, and cheeses, and lettuces, seem more beautiful than others, too.

The peppers—and everything else—at Fresh Market seemed fresher and brighter than the ones at Kroger, though if I were presented with evidence that the peppers had been grown at the same farm and harvested and delivered at the same time, I would not be totally surprised. At Fresh Market I was under a spell of abundance, and this influenced my perception of everything. Shopping there, even though we couldn’t afford it, really, was justified by the rationale that we had already made the greatest cost-saving sacrifice we could imagine: we had left New York.

And so began the dawn of a new era of my cooking. I had plunged into the depths of my Manhattan Mini Storage empire before leaving and extracted several boxes of wedding gifts that had not fit in our place on Eleventh Street. In the neat bungalow in Virginia, adjacent to a horse paddock and so redolent of postwar optimism and modesty, all sorts of kitchen items came to life. The enormous ceramic bowl, so shallow and outrageously wide it could barely have fit into our old kitchen on Eleventh Street, was now the go-to for salad; the decadent French copper pots and pans, which should have been hanging from the ceiling, I suppose, though I was not sure that ceiling could support them, were unpacked, too, and set on the stove.

It was autumn, and Lowe’s had grills on sale. I bought a gas grill for a hundred dollars, an outrageous bargain, I felt, given the universe that was now open to me. The grill was stationed outside the kitchen door, overlooking the horse paddock, and I used it in good weather and bad. I especially enjoyed it when, later, it snowed, and I would stand watching the flakes fall through the harsh outdoor light and onto the black surface of the hot, closed grill, where they would vanish in a puff of steam.

There are few things that give a man the sense, however false, of being in control of his destiny. Driving on an open road would be on that list. So would having sex, or rather the moment when you have just begun. So would grilling.

When you are grilling, you are running things. You are in charge of important matters that require your attention. Fire is involved. Here I could joke about grilling lasting longer than sex. But it’s not true. Grilling can be very fast, very quick, especially if you subscribe, as I do, to a culinary aesthetic that values the charred, the blackened, and their close cousin the burnt.

There was no system. I could never bring myself to consult a cookbook. It was a shortcoming, a form of hubris, that I tried to elevate to a style. The style was that of the gloriously charred piece of meat, fish, or vegetable. I did not have a light touch. Somewhere in my soul I was living some medieval fantasy where burnt offerings were strewn abundantly over a table. In our case, a table with flowers and a nice tablecloth.

5.

The baby was born. I like the chaos of crisis—or is it the crisis of chaos?—and my cooking became even more elaborate. I had by then crossed the salad Rubicon. For years I simply could not grasp salads, though I had witnessed my mother make many excellent ones. Then one day I brought home all sorts of disparate vegetables and went into a mad fever of chopping. Mushrooms, peppers, cucumbers, scallions. I grated Parmesan cheese on top, sprinkled onion salt, rock salt, drizzled olive oil, balsamic vinegar. Later I went out on a limb with
ponzu
sauce. Out there in the wilds of Virginia I went a little salad-mad. One of our wedding gifts was a huge chopping block. The sound of metal on wood made me very happy. I contemplated getting a machete.

6.

Sometimes I think about some of the delicacies of my youth, by which I mean after I was nine. Memories of the years before nine—which is when my dad died—are obscured. They have in some ways been cauterized. I have snapshots, but they are removed and abstract, like pictures of pictures. You see the essential image, yes, but you also see the reflected glare of light coming off the picture or the glass that covers it: my father comes home from a trip to Philadelphia, he comes through the door with trench coat unbuttoned, something faintly glamorous about him in that coat, and a bit like a private eye, a hint of Bogart’s Sam Spade, though could I ever have seen or heard Bogart at age six?

I remember the three of us sitting around the kitchen table at meals. I remember joking with him. But for some reason I do not remember the food. I also do not remember the sound of his voice. I wonder if there is some connection: Images are facts that can be stored, but sound and taste are too closely interwoven with emotion. If you can’t handle the emotion, the sensory memory gets squashed along with it.

What did we eat?

Not mayonnaise.

Which is why, perhaps, my encounter with it felt so momentous.

One summer, at our country house, I discovered tomato sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise. It was around this time, too, that I first tasted marshmallow fluff, which also drove me into a state of high excitement. It was a summer of white food. The bread was important: it had to be white. The tomatoes—their ripeness, their flavor—were very important. But the secret druglike ingredient that drove me into a tree, literally, was the mayonnaise.

I don’t know how I came to eat tomato sandwiches on white bread with mayo, but after the initial big bang of discovery, I made them constantly, and always ran to the same tree in our backyard and either sat at its base or climbed with the sandwhich up onto the first branch, like an animal that wants to devour in the safety of solitude. My parents were both immigrants. This was a statement: Mayonnaise was American food. I was an American.