Man With a Pan (24 page)

In my experience, it’s the person who shows initiative—the person who shows up on time, makes the decisions, and does the actual work—who takes most of the flak for any project, however large or small, almost always from the people who sat idle on the sidelines and contributed nothing. This is truer in the kitchen than anywhere else. Let’s pause here to consider the scorn we’ve heaped on cooks throughout our lives. Most people can’t so much as order a grilled cheese without silently reproaching the cook for something he could have done better or differently, and never mind the fact that he just saved us the effort of making it for ourselves. My mother, stationed so frequently at the stove, suffered the pernicious effects of this carping worse than anyone in our family. In her case, the criticism arrived in the form of “Oh God, are we having this again?” and “I hated this last time we had it.” Anyone who’s been saddled with the unsexy responsibility of feeding a group of people over and over and over knows what’s at work here: even the most capable cook can keep only so many recipes straight in her mind, which means reliable recipes are bound to be repeated at some interval—and repeats, it turns out, are easy targets for teenage scorn. Old grudges are revived for the reappearance of the chicken pot pie, the baked fish, the spaghetti squash. And even if you
did
like it last time around, familiarity eventually breeds a faux contempt. A mutinous air often hovered over our dining table, and many recipes that might have been well received were scuttled by a single withering remark.

Then, seemingly without warning, it would be Saturday night, and my father would arrive on the kitchen scene. These were alternate-side cooking days. We were already in a good mood (it was the weekend, after all), so a quality of carefree delight colored the proceedings, perhaps abating some of our suspicions. What would he make this time? Who knew? Venison stew, perhaps, or maybe steak Diane. What about smoked brisket? He’d had all day or even all week to think it over. My father would chop and sear and stir with no small amount of pleasure. When the dinner bell was rattled (literally: we had a cowbell), the four boys, who’d been playing Wiffle ball or chasing Hail Mary passes or doing laps in a pool all afternoon and were therefore extremely hungry, would bolt to the kitchen table and begin shoveling down whatever was on offer. Without the reliable “Oh God, are we having this again?” ammunition, and with the added enhancement of the exercise-amplified hunger, these weekend meals tended to be better received. Dad would enjoy the moment; but my mother would feel the slight sting of resentment. She’d cooked all week long, after all, but he got the glory. Neither spouse was at fault—marriage and modern life were exerting their normal pressures. My mother was working hard to run the household; my father was trying to contribute on the weekend, when he had more time around the house. Yet the difficulty was unmistakably there, and the
situation
showed its sinister designs. There were no tickets written up in those days for alternate-side cooking violations, not literally—but the tally was kept. Fines were levied and infractions were noted. In my childhood household, alternate-side cooking led to quite a few recriminations and even some outright arguments.

Twenty-five years later, a similar antipathy is making itself known in my own household. My stove is under siege. The assault is being staged by my wife, Jessica, who was all too happy to leave the cooking to me for half a decade but has recently discovered a desire to cook again. Worse still, she’s begun dreaming up meals for our three-year-old daughter, Grace. Worst of all, Grace—who has always loved my cooking and regarded me as a striding knight of
santoku
and whisk and waffle iron—likes my wife’s cooking as much as, and sometimes more than, mine. Soups, in particular, are a tense battleground. Cooking has always been my favorite way to connect with my daughter—I love knowing that even if I’ve been away from her all day at work, it’s my food she’s eating at every meal. But the tenuous father-daughter mealtime thread is being threatened.

For most people, this would seem to be a sort of antidilemma. Most people want the other spouse to do more in the kitchen, and welcome the presence of someone trying to muscle in on their territory. I suppose the surprise and hurt and (yes) jealousy I felt was amplified by the fact that the change took place through a keen prism of female cunning, which means it happened without my even realizing it—suddenly the change was just
there,
like a new window treatment in the bedroom, or a vase of tulips on the hall table. The signs of the takeover were subtle but unmistakable: First, my chicken stock began to go missing. (And any serious cook knows that you don’t filch someone’s homemade chicken stock without asking. You just don’t do that.) Then I noticed that leftovers I’d casually set aside for Gracie had gone uneaten. “Did you have lunch out?” I’d ask, and Jessica, to throw me off the trail, would answer with an enigmatic “No.” One afternoon she casually inquired as to my secret for cooking a quality lentil soup (onions, deeply caramelized). Days later I caught her in blazing crime, as guilty as Lady Macbeth, when I discovered the remains of a batch of lentil soup in the refrigerator that was not of my making!—meager remains, I might add, as if the party it was served to had seriously enjoyed it and was reluctant to leave any behind.

I stood gaping at the remains of this soup, probably with my mouth open, and then, acting on instinct, I hollered into the next room, “Did someone bring over lentil soup today?”

Again, that enigmatic “No.”

Well, I put two and two together and figured out what had happened: My wife had cooked a meal for my daughter. Worse, Gracie had
liked
it. Mentally I wrote Jessica tickets for a number of alternate-side cooking violations: Failure to Yield Right-of-Way, Failure to Signal a Lane Change, Driving without Proper Identification.

New York City kitchens aren’t engineered to be occupied by three people. Our kitchen is larger than most, but still, every other minute or so I whirl around, boiling saucepan in hand, and find myself mere kissing distance from my wife. More often than not, she’s carrying a boiling saucepan, too. We do the Excuse Me Tango and the Let Me Sneak By You Waltz. I watch what she has going in her pan out of the corner of my eye and notice that she’s doing the same.

Gracie pounds her spoon on the chopping block and says, “Eat! Eat! Eat!”

Jessica and I look at each other.

I think, Well, who’s going to feed her?

Eventually we get that worked out, and if the person tapped to cook was Jessica, I watch how Gracie receives her dinner with no small amount of interest. Sometimes I’m sure these women are in cahoots. Symmetrically, Gracie has begun an amusing mealtime habit—she loves to spoon what she has in one cup into the contents of another; she also loves to take whatever we’ve served her to drink (milk, juice, soda water) and mix it into whatever food we’ve served her, making a point of following this with a stir, stir, stir motion. What she would appear to be doing here is a Gracie version of cooking.

I think of the Plexiglas sign my mother had on the windowsill of the kitchen for many, many years:
AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY KITCHEN.
(She was making an oblique suggestion for people to pitch in with the dirty dishes, but anyway, the admonition was more often than not met in some way.) I would love nothing better than to cook
with
Gracie in the future—and perhaps the price of this future is the elimination of my absolute power in the kitchen. Perhaps the best thing to do is to show her that cooking is something the whole family does together, in an
equal opportunity kitchen,
and not something Dad does off on his own.

So I cede a portion of my proprietary rights over the stove, try not to fume and fret, and set aside the thought that this is a competition.

Anyway, it’s my chicken stock that Jessica’s using in her soups.

Recipe File

Roasted Celery Root, Potato, and Cauliflower Soup with Tarragon

Yield: 4 servings

Jessica and I often mix equal parts of celery root and cauliflower in with our mashed potatoes—it occurred to me that this addition would work nicely in a potato soup, too. To give the traditional flavors a boost, I roast the primary ingredients in the oven until they’re deeply caramelized.

½ pound Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and diced into 1-inch cubes
½ pound celery root, peeled and diced into 1-inch cubes
1 head cauliflower, divided into florets
8 garlic cloves, whole and unpeeled
7 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
1½ cups chopped onion
4 bay leaves
2 sprigs fresh thyme
3¾ cups chicken stock, preferably homemade
2 cups dry white wine or dry vermouth
2 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon (substitute parsley if you don’t have tarragon)
Salt and pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 425°F.

2. Place the potatoes, celery root, cauliflower, and garlic cloves on a baking sheet. Add ¼ cup of the olive oil and toss with your hands to coat all the pieces equally. Season with salt and pepper and slide in the oven. Roast 15 minutes, turn the vegetables, roast 15 minutes more, turn once again, and roast for a final 10 minutes. Remove from the oven. Peel the garlic cloves and discard the papery skins. Reserve 2 of the handsomest cauliflower florets and set apart from the remaining roasted vegetables.

3. Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and sweat until soft and transparent, about 4 minutes. Add the roasted vegetables (but not the 2 reserved cauliflower florets), bay leaves, thyme, chicken stock, and wine or vermouth. Season aggressively with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, cover, drop the heat to low, and simmer 15 minutes to allow the flavors to mingle.

4. After the soup has finished simmering, discard the bay leaves and thyme sprigs. Pour the soup into a blender and pulse until just pureed (or use an immersion blender). Return to saucepan and bring to a simmer.

5. To serve, ladle servings of soup into bowls. Slice the 2 reserved cauliflower florets in half. Place half a roasted floret in the center of each bowl of soup. Top with a large pinch of fresh tarragon. Drizzle the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil over the soup bowls and serve immediately.

On the Shelf

Daniel Boulud’s Café Boulud Cookbook,
Daniel Boulud. There are, I think, two types of cookbooks: those that inspire and those that teach. The former tend to be spectacularly well art-directed, to the point that the photography seems to frame the material and not the other way around. This can be a good thing, now and then, because about half the time the problem in the kitchen is not the how but the what.
Daniel Boulud’s Café Boulud Cookbook,
happily, is of the latter kind of cookbook—I say “happily” because a chef with talent as blinding as Boulud’s would be shamefully wasted on a mere piece of eye candy. Every single recipe in the book, it seems, teaches you an indispensable piece of kitchen knowledge, and the simpler the better—I first learned to blanch the basil for my pesto, for example, while making Boulud’s zucchini-ricotta layers with zucchini pesto. Until then, my pesto had always turned a repellant brown the moment it met hot pasta, and I’d been resorting to the less-than-perfect fix of rinsing pasta in cold water before mixing in the pesto. (My wife would sometimes sneak off to the microwave to warm her plate before eating it.) Boulud saved me by showing me that blanching the basil leaves sets the color and flavor. His recipe for short ribs braised in red wine is a utilitarian master class in the essentials of braising meat; I just didn’t know how to do it right until I’d made that recipe. His chicken grand-mère Francine will transform you into a comfort-food ninja who knows a thing or two about a chicken fricassee. And as for his
Pommes boulangères
—but just go buy the cookbook already. They don’t get much better than this.