Man With a Pan (25 page)

A Moveable Feast,
Ernest Hemingway. Not only do I like good food and wine—I also happen to like reading about good food and wine. Many scenes in
A Moveable Feast
stick with me precisely because they revolve around a yearning for food, whiskey, and wine. The car trip Hemingway takes to Lyon with Fitzgerald, for example, is somehow tied to an indelible image of Hemingway lying in bed reading, his head propped up on a pillow as he drinks whiskey with
citron pressé,
while Fitzgerald heads downstairs to the phone to take his particular form of medicine. There is something wistful and wanting to be found in the various prowling hungers at work here, which makes this a dangerous book for a man to read while at an impressionable age; the problem is that everyone reads this book while at an impressionable age. Reading the scene where young Hemingway—flush with dough from his discovery of a paycheck at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop—heads to Brasserie Lipp for an indulgent afternoon lunch always makes me hungry and even a little sad, as I think of the motivating hungers—both food-related and non-food-related—of one’s formative twenties. For years I hoped to travel to Paris and try the potato salad EH invokes so wonderfully in that Lipp chapter, and in fact I did get to try Lipp just a few years ago, during a quick two-day visit I wrangled at the front end of a business trip. The event was marred by the fact that I did not speak one syllable of French and discovered, the moment I was literally trapped in my bench seat in the back room (the waiter had to slide the table out to let me into my seat and slide the table back in after I was seated), that I had to urinate terribly and didn’t have the slightest idea how to ask about the restroom or to ask if the waiter would let me out—which meant that I spent what would have been an otherwise perfect meal in a state of eye-watering anxiety. There is something awfully undignified about finding oneself at Lipp after many years of longing and suddenly discovering that one is transformed into an inarticulate kid who has to take a whiz but cannot. I managed, somehow, and returned for dinner the next night. They allowed me to sit on the glassed-in front terrace, and the visit was greatly helped by a half bottle of chardonnay and the fact that this second time I managed to visit the restroom of my hotel room before arriving.

Bistro Cooking,
Patricia Wells. This one’s a matter of reliability and taste—my wife and I often remark, only half-jokingly, that with
Bistro Cooking
you can flip to any page, make whatever you find there, and you’ll be guaranteed of two things: the recipe will work flawlessly, and you’ll like what you made. The recipes for potatoes (an entire section of the book) alone are worth the price of admission. Pied de Cochon’s onion soup turns those ink-black, bone-marrow-ridden onion soups we’ve come to know on their heads with chicken stock and white wine, and shames them. I haven’t the guts or the scratch to make the duck stew in Sauternes, but I hope to someday. And Tante Paulette’s chicken stew with fennel and saffron gets my vote as the single greatest dinner-party recipe of all time; I have never found a recipe with such an astonishingly high pleasure-to-effort ratio.

Alfred Portale’s Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook,
Alfred Portale. This was the first serious cookbook I ever owned, which is not to disparage the entry-level cookbooks we are given as gifts when we’re first learning how to cook—those twenty-pound doorstops that do everything but tell you how to boil the water. A quick visit to the shelf reveals two things about my copy of this cookbook: first, that it’s stuffed with recipes clipped from other publications, which suggests that I bought it while I was in a learning state of mind; and second, that the book’s spine is about to explode, which suggests that it got a lot of love. Interestingly, I did as much idle reading of this book as I did cooking from it. At this stage of development, my interest was more in finding out the strange and wonderful things people actually did in the kitchen. I’d flip the page and then think, Huh—so you can pair shellfish with pork (penne with Manila clams and chorizo sauce). Then I’d flip again and think, Huh—so you don’t just shovel the stuff you’ve cooked onto a plate, you actually organize the ingredients on the plate so that they work together during the meal (tuna tartare with herb salad and ginger vinaigrette). Then I’d flip again and think, Huh—so you can stick a whole fish in a pan and roast it? (whole roast red snapper with tomatoes, lemon, and thyme). Portale was also the first chef to get me using ginger—he uses it fearlessly in things like mayonnaise and crème brûlée. And though I last made the recipe about ten years ago, his seared tuna with caponata,
pappardelle,
and red wine sauce is probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever made, and certainly one of the most satisfying. The experience of discovering these new things was analogous to getting behind the wheel of a car for the first time. I wasn’t very capable at what I was doing, not yet, which means that all involved were certainly placed at risk of bodily harm—but the cookbook expanded my universe immeasurably and, being the first serious cookbook I ever owned, was the first book ever to cause me to take cooking seriously.

JESSE GREEN

Who the Man?

Jesse Green is a contributing editor at
New York
magazine. He is the author of
The Velveteen Father: An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood
(Villard/Random House) and a novel,
O Beautiful
(Ballantine). His short fiction and essays have been published in various magazines and anthologies.

My father may be able to scramble eggs; no one knows for sure. During my childhood he kept as far from the inner life of the kitchen as possible. His one food-related job—drying the dishes—wasn’t much of one, as he ritually noted, since the result he achieved with much squeaking of the dish towel could be produced as well or better by the mere passage of time. It was not a rule, but might as well have been, that he turn a blind eye to what went on in that midcentury modern galley, not just for his sake but for ours. That he never volunteered to defrost the freezer, or ventured to muck about behind its frontline rampart of ice cream containers, allowed my mother to conceal for decades her stores of bacon. Out it would come on Sunday mornings, when he went to the synagogue for board meetings: a secret pleasure for her and for me, the more pleasurable because it took nothing away from him.

Or did it? When my mother died of leukemia, at seventy-one, she left a widower who had never made himself a cooked meal. As with many men of his generation—my father was born in 1926—he had moved directly from his mother’s house to his wife’s. (The food of his youth was awful, and only after marrying a good cook did he realize he’d spent the previous twenty-five years with heartburn.) Altogether lost in that one-step transition was the now-common intervening period of male self-reliance. Yes, that self-reliance often amounts to street pizza and delivered Chinese, but even that is more than my poor father could call on. Do not ask what happened to the dishwasher in his first weeks alone. (Imagine a gender-flipped episode of
I Love Lucy.
) If he proved safe against the onslaught of casseroles bearing vaguely flirtatious messages from nearby widows (“Call me anytime to return the dish”), that was perhaps because of my mother’s postmortem catering. During her last weeks of life, apparently acknowledging what was coming even if we refused to, she had not only denuded the freezer of contraband but also stocked it with carefully labeled packages of his favorite foods.

In some people, the habit of nurture is the last thing to go. In others, it is the habit of being nurtured that persists. I was reminded of this when my partner recently learned that he would need to have a hernia repaired. I panicked. It was minor surgery, to be sure, but nevertheless it provided an opportunity for him to engage in several days of Percocet and licensed malingering. It was therefore likely to derail the gravy train of meals Andy provided daily for me and our two boys. How would we survive his absence from the kitchen?

In our two-dad family, Andy is the one who cooks. That is not to say he is the one who likes cooking the most or is best at it. But he is the one to whom the lot fell. If there was a time when newlyweds automatically divided up household responsibilities by traditional gender roles, that time was long past when we met fifteen years ago; in any case, lacking contrast in our genders, we were unable to benefit from the shorthand. When people unused to gay couples asked, absurdly, who was the woman and who was the man, we could answer with some complacency, “Yes.” Put another way, we were free to apportion our jobs based on proclivity and skill—a freedom that seemed, to many straight couples we knew, worth envying. And yet freedom is not the same thing as ease. That I would do the laundry and make the beds and honcho the homework (once the boys were older) fell naturally from my personality; likewise that Andy would shop for the boys’ clothing, arrange their playdates, and park the car.

But feeding a family is a different beast entirely, both in its importance and in its difficulty. This might not be evident to those who have not attempted it; sadly, it is not usually evident even to those who benefit by it. Cooking every day without fail for the fifty years she ran a home—not just providing a hot multicourse dinner but making the shopping lists and washing the dishes—was not something my mother did because she enjoyed constant praise for it. She was lucky if anyone noticed at all, and even when she returned to school and took on a full-time career, she rarely entertained an offer to share the burden. By then, sharing would have been more difficult than doing the job herself: such is the cost of expertise. There were a few years when, knowing she might not be home some nights by six o’clock, she relied on one of us to help, but that help took the puny form of defrosting the large batches of chicken or hamburgers or tomato sauce or soup she had spent the weekend preparing and freezing. What I did in those years (and thought so highly of myself for doing) was not cook but thaw.

Still, she taught me some of the techniques she’d learned from Julia Child and some of the secrets she’d inherited from her mother: how to deglaze a sauté pan, how to enrich—not to say falsify—chicken soup by dropping in a veal bone. Thanks to such tips, by the time I was living on my own in New York, I fancied myself a good cook. And I was, if knowing how to follow a recipe counts as good cooking. Making elaborate meals for myself and perhaps a friend, but only when I felt like it, I worked myself into a culinary ghetto as surely as I had worked myself into the cultural one of Greenwich Village. I came to think of what I made as gay food: pretty, complicated, unsuitable for children. Did my mother ever whip up an asparagus soufflé for a Tuesday night? Or anything
sous vide
?

If my solitary writer’s life was itself, in a way,
sous vide,
Andy’s was as eventful and richly provisioned as a bouillabaisse. Even before he adopted the newborn boys who would later become my boys, too, he thrived in a traffic jam of friends and exes intersecting at all times, and he had developed cooking habits to match. He practiced a kind of cuisine informed more by the exigencies of the communal kitchen and the rule of thumb than by anything Julia Child had to say. In the late sixties, the pantry of the overpopulated frame house in Madison that he’d shared with University of Wisconsin classmates was stocked at all times with a twenty-five-pound bag of brown rice, a two-pound box of MSG, and a Betty Crocker one-pot cookbook. The carrots may have been diced the size of D-cell batteries, but no one starved. He brought that skill set with him when he returned to Brooklyn after college, whereas between bouts of crème Senegalese in my bachelor apartment on MacDougal Street, I was more likely to eat a bowl of cold cereal than waste my energy on an only moderately challenging dish.

When we met, the foodscape ahead was not quite clear. Dating sanded down the edges of our culinary eccentricities. I hid the multipage recipes when I cooked for him; he hid the sacrilegious jars of preminced garlic. But as we came together as a family, and especially as the boys graduated in turn from the bottle, it was evident that Andy would be the cook. There was no other way, really. Even if the boys, under instruction from Jane Brody herself, had thrilled to the idea of sharing whatever sophisticated adult food I might make, I didn’t have it in me to render my mother’s salmon with leeks, let alone Marcella Hazan’s spinach and rice torta, on a daily basis. Nor did I have the fortitude to eat them so often. Some nights, I still wanted cold cereal, or less.

It turned out that my fey repertoire was not the problem so much as the preciousness of style it masked. I was no short-order cook, able to keep several dishes going at once, with a third eye for what’s left in the larder and a fourth for what the traffic will bear. I typically shopped to make one meal at a time, not to stock what amounted to a cafeteria, and would probably go bankrupt if I applied my usual selection methods (choose the most expensive version of whatever food is needed) to the feeding of a family. Furthermore, I could not produce anything, even salad, in a hurry. Andy’s greens may not have been prettily composed, but they would usually be on the table at six.