Man With a Pan (38 page)

I have a good enameled dutch oven and I’ve got a good All-Clad sauté pan, and I’ve got an omelet pan and I say, “Nothing gets cooked in here but eggs, guys. Don’t use that for your grilled cheese.” Just basic stuff. That and my grandma’s corn bread skillet, and my mother’s iron skillet, too. Those are the ones that you really can’t replace. I’m not big on tools. I don’t have any fancy-shmancy cooking stuff, but I do have good knives. And I think that’s really important.

Once you get a little experience, recipes start to make more sense. But recipes can’t always be trusted. I have an interest in the Shakers. I have some of their artifacts, and I’ve been to all the Shaker museums. They had a recipe in an old cookbook for a lemon pie. I thought, Lemon pie, that is so strange sounding. But it intrigued me, and I made the pie for a Thanksgiving dinner about twenty years ago. It was a really long recipe, and it took forever to make. When I was done, the crust looked perfect, just like the picture in the book. My mother, who’s no longer with us, she was an eater. She never found anything she didn’t like. She took the first bite. And she had this look on her face like something had just bitten her on the tongue. It was the most sour pie in the history of pies. Nobody could eat more than one bite. It was the biggest flop. The recipe was written wrong; they must have left out a step. There was a lot of sugar in it, but something happened to the rind that just tasted awful. It was hard to get the taste out of your mouth.

Recipe File

Lone Star State of Mind Chili

2 pounds lean pork, coarsely ground
4 tablespoons of chili powder (use McCormick’s cocoa–chili powder blend or add 2 teaspoons of unsweetened cocoa to regular chili powder)
Fat from 2 strips of bacon plus 2 tablespoons of olive oil
3 pounds of sirloin tri-tip cut into small cubes (gristle and excess fat removed)
1 large onion, diced
4 large jalapeños, seeded and minced
5 cloves garlic, minced
3 or 4 poblano chilies, roasted, peeled, and chopped
1 large bell pepper, roasted, peeled, and chopped
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon Mexican oregano
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 bottle of any Mexican dark beer
1 32-ounce container unsalted beef broth
1 28-ounce can diced Muir Glen fire-roasted tomatoes
¼ cup finely ground cornmeal or masa harina

Brown the ground pork in a heavy dutch oven with 1 tablespoon of chili powder, then drain into a colander and wipe the pan clean with a paper towel.

Add the bacon fat and oil, then brown the beef quickly over high heat—don’t cook too long or it will be tough.

Remove the beef with a slotted spoon and set aside in the colander with the pork.

Lower the heat, add the onions, jalapeños, garlic, chilies, bell pepper, and remaining chili powder, and cook until the onion has wilted.

Add the cumin, oregano, salt, and pepper and cook briefly.

Deglaze with the beer, then add the beef stock and tomatoes and cook for 1 minute.

Return the beef and pork to the pan and very slowly bring to a boil, then simmer uncovered on low, being careful not to let it bubble, for at least 3 hours.

When the meat is tender, remove ½ cup or so of the liquid and mix in the cornmeal or masa harina until the lumps are gone and it has a smooth, thick consistency.

Stir this mixture into the chili and let it simmer another 15 minutes.

Cover and let stand for 1 hour.

Cooked black beans can be added in the final 15 minutes. Garnish with chopped cilantro, extra-sharp cheddar cheese, chopped sweet onions, sour cream, or plain Greek yogurt with savory corn bread from Grandma’s skillet on the side. Then eat it like John Wayne in
The Searchers
!

WESLEY STACE

Patience Rewarded versus Instant Korma

Wesley Stace is the author of three novels,
Misfortune, by George,
and
Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer.
Under the name John Wesley Harding, he has made fifteen albums of deliciously dark folk rock. He was born in Hastings, East Sussex, England, and has lived in the United States since 1991.

The photograph was stunning: a cooking pot vibrant with the color riot of autumn—oranges, reds, and yellows—stuffed with onions. Heaven knows what else. Experience tells me tomatoes, peppercorns, dried chilies, cardamom pods, bay leaves, cayenne, and a pinch of turmeric for the yellow. When I first saw it, all I could identify were the onions. It’s a prime example of the stylist’s art, for sure, but I’d seen well-groomed food before. Looking back, it’s difficult to work out what specifically I saw that changed my life, that stopped me being a noncook.

Of course, it wasn’t just the visual. Context is important. The image took up a full page of the color magazine of the British newspaper the
Independent on Sunday.
That’s the immediate context but not the whole story, for if I’d been in London and this newspaper had dropped onto my lazy Sunday doormat, I’d most likely have ignored its lifestyle agenda altogether. But I was living abroad, in San Francisco, and as it was, I’d bought the Sunday paper on a Monday (as an exile, you got used to getting your news a day or two late) on Twenty-fourth Street in Noe Valley. I preferred to buy that paper, and never the
San Francisco Chronicle,
because I missed home and I didn’t feel American. I didn’t understand the tone of American news. (To a certain extent, nothing has changed. I still prefer the
Guardian
Web site, particularly for news of my adopted country.)

My work as a musician had brought me to America, but my private life kept me here. I missed Britain, more specifically England, so I became, unavoidably, one of that shady group of people who get up at 5:00 a.m. to go to Irish bars to watch important games of football over a pint of Guinness. Having moved for the romance and the music, I found myself missing Marmite and
Match of the Day.
This was before the Internet, of course: 1994. Now it’s all changed: you watch the games at home and order your Marmite online.

So I bought the
Independent on Sunday.
And there, as I leafed through the magazine, was the photo—of a curry: chicken
dopiaza.
In Hindi,
do
means two and
piaz
means onions, so it’s a dish, the accompanying text told me, that involves either twice the normal proportion of onions or in which onions are used twice in the cooking process. The unique selling point is an unnatural amount of onions.

Curries were another thing that I missed about England. What could be more English? It is apparently a fact, often repeated on BBC cookery shows, that chicken tikka masala has overtaken fish-and-chips as Britain’s favorite dish. And there: this inviting picture of
curry.
How hard could it be to make?

When I say I was a noncook, of course, it’s not entirely true. I’d cooked before, but I’d never made the effort to follow a recipe. I remember, in an early attempt at bacon and eggs, burning a girlfriend’s mother’s frying pan and smoking out a kitchen, to her unsympathetic annoyance (as if I’d meant to). I don’t remember cooking anything at university except rice, a staple ruined for me for years afterward. Having said that, I can’t remember eating at university at all. I may have had five meals total at my college canteen, four more than the number of lectures I attended. I went to plenty of tutorials and did quite a bit of work—it was just eating and lectures I avoided. I vaguely recall trying my hand at a shepherd’s pie (in which, for some reason, I put water chestnuts) in Shepherd’s Bush, and even a joint of lamb, the most impressive thing one could possibly cook. There was the odd, uncharred breakfast. That accounts for the previous twenty-nine years of my culinary life.

I came from a family of cooks. Is it odd I didn’t cook? No, because it was the women who did the cooking. What did the men do? The men carved what the women cooked (a remarkable piece of last-minute scene stealing), as though sharp knives were too dangerous for women outside the kitchen. The men also handled the wine. They ate, of course, alternately praising the food and joking good-naturedly about it, and they oversaw the resurrection of ancient family jokes. Then they stayed at the table reluctantly when the football came on, wondering how to avoid the washing up. (My great-grandfather used to lock himself in the toilet with the Sunday paper.)

My grandmother was not only a remarkable family meal-giver but she was also a restaurateur in Rye, a cobbled tourist trap in East Sussex, in which area once lived, at the same remarkable historical moment, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells, and Henry James. Just around the corner from Lamb House, where “the squire” wrote
The Ambassadors
and
The Wings of the Dove,
is the birthplace of another Rye writer: Shakespeare’s collaborator, John Fletcher.

Once upon a time, John Fletcher was spoken of as a family friend, though I’m sure none of us had ever read one of his plays:
Two Noble Kinsmen
wasn’t on the syllabus at my school. And in Fletcher’s House, a crooked, oak-beamed Tudor building with creaking stairs, my great-grandmother opened the Platonic ideal of the English tea shop, packed with antiques (for sale), Sussex trugs (look them up), musical boxes (wound often), fires (always roaring), and a ghost (rumored but reluctant). This sounds like imagination, but memory assures me that’s how it actually was. The window overflowed with homemade cakes and imported fudge. Those cakes—almond slice, flapjacks, meringues, date slice, sponge cakes of every variety—were made in the kitchen by my mother, and when I wasn’t getting in her way, or killing wasps in the outside larder where the sweet things were kept, or being sent down to pick up the fresh clotted cream when it arrived by train from Devon, or getting the meringue mixture to the perfect consistency, or idly twiddling my thumbs waiting for puberty or Rye Record and Denim to open (whichever came first), I watched her. And then ate the cakes.

There’s a probability that I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Fletcher’s House. It was there that my grandfather met my grandmother (he left his hat in the restaurant on purpose so he could go back and see her) and through the window that my father saw my mother (he wrote a letter to “the girl in the lilac gingham dress,” asking her to meet him at the sluice gates.) Later, when I somewhat grew up, I worked there on my holidays, spending my first wage packet at my favorite shop, on records rather than the denim: David Bowie’s
Lodger,
Roxy Music’s
Manifesto,
and
The Cars.
I noticed that the cakes were less appealing than the young women of Rye who served them. But I was away at school most of the time. Although the world of tea shops was full of new promise, it would not provide me with a future wife.

So the family was in food; food was in the family. And in Noe Valley, in San Francisco, 1994, family is probably what I, a young professional (of a sort) far from home, wanted: the bright picture of the chicken
dopiaza
did it for me. It was time to cook. The recipe required onions (obviously, hundreds), potatoes, and chicken, but also cardamom pods, ghee, whole red chilies, garam masala, turmeric, and cinnamon stick—nothing too exotic now, but at the time an “ethnic” store seemed the only answer. I knew one within walking distance, and there I went with my first-ever recipe-based shopping list, entertaining misguided thoughts like, I have to buy that whole thing of cumin just for one teaspoon, and I’ll probably never use it again.

The first thing that hit me was the smell, so pungent and exotic that it actually wormed within me and caused a sweet, powdery belch. I’ll never forget it: asafetida, an Iranian seasoning with a powerfully strong aroma used (ironically) as an antiflatulent. The scale of the store, the burlap bags of rice and sacks of nuts, the unfussy Ziploc presentation of curry leaves, the bricks of frozen breads, and the buckets of ghee reminded me of the jolly days at the cash-and-carry in Hastings where my grandmother shopped wholesale and I bought that copy of
The Everly Brothers’ Greatest Hits
on vinyl for forty-nine pence. Indian food stores have brought me not only ever-more-obscure spices but also an immense amount of cheerful children’s jewelry and some wonderful music—there’s always a dusty pile of CDs and cassettes to get your teeth into. On that first trip, I was unable to resist a Bollywood sound track with an amazing cover of a sexy cricketer.