Man With a Pan (4 page)

Outside of special occasions, the idea that a man might make a salad or cook a pot of rice insinuated provocative things we did not speak about. I would have to grow up and lose several closeted gay friends to self-imposed exile or AIDS before we’d ever begin to talk about such things.

But it’s not as if, despite our repressed childhoods, we didn’t experience the love of good food. That was always there; the how-to of it all, though, just wasn’t much of a conversation. One of my favorite dishes of all time is red rice, a Gullah dish that pulls off the neat trick of getting long-grain white rice to take up a hefty tomato sauce as it would water or stock. When I was little, this dish was cooked all the time, not merely in my house but throughout the city. I’m not sure there is another dish that qualifies as more comforting comfort food for me—maybe shrimp and grits. My mental landscape of 1970s Charleston was charted in part by the landmarks of other people’s red rice. My friend Lucas Daniels had some of the best red rice ever cooked. Because it’s a dish that is arguably better cold than hot, his family kept a pot of it in the refrigerator, essentially, all the time.

We ate it as a break from playing outside. Sometimes I might ring the doorbell at his South Battery home to find out Lucas wasn’t there. I’d go on in anyway, eat some red rice, and then head off to find him. Getting a bowl of red rice from someone was hardly more of a bother than asking for a glass of water on a hot day.

But it never occurred to me to learn how to cook it. Red rice was … red, and so, something of a mystery. It simply emerged from the heated sweatshop of the kitchen, out from behind the folding screen. Why ask? But eventually, when I was sent away to school, I did ask. I wanted to be able to carry a few things with me, and one of them was how to cook red rice. How did one get it to come out fluffy and not gunky? When I asked Lucas’s cook Delores how she cooked her red rice, I got only the universal smile of a chef: I’m not telling.

When I asked my own family cook back in those days, Annie Oliver, how she cooked her red rice, she just shrugged and said, “You put it all together.” Gullah traditions were still considered state secrets and protected knowledge, stories held and transmitted on a need-to-know basis. Without explaining too much here, every white family I knew growing up employed a black woman as a cook. It was the early 1970s. She was either a young mother, like Delores, or a venerable ancient like Annie (who’d also raised my mother). My generation’s struggle to understand just what really underlay our relationship to those cooks is part of the untold story of the civil rights epic—untold because it’s so cringe inducing. And yet, without too much trouble, I could probably tell the whole racial history of the South through my attempt to learn how to cook really good red rice.

Of course, in those days, all recipes were considered secrets, regardless of race, creed, or color. People just didn’t talk about food casually. That would come later. It was all very intimate and happened in that secret chamber behind the swinging door. Especially the everyday dishes. Teaching someone how to cook red rice implied a profound level of trust and love.

All popular dishes have a couple of little tricks that always get left out in the pointillist prose of recipes. In Charleston, the grand old white ladies of my grandmother’s generation created a locally famous cookbook in 1950 called
Charleston Receipts.
It’s an archaeological wonder. Each page is decorated, at the turning corner, with a tiny silhouette of a black mammy in an apron, working at the kitchen table or presenting a tray of food. (Like I said, cringe inducing.)

Many of the recipes are accidental time capsules. The recipe for string beans lists its top ingredient as

1 package frozen French-cut string beans

And then it suggests this handy instruction: “Cook string beans by direction on package.” Others are simply inscrutable and epigrammatic. As a result, the red rice recipe always left me with a pot of burnt red glop.

It took me almost twenty years of talking up red rice with old society ladies, black islanders, and a few drunken sailors to cadge enough of the secret cheats that will yield excellent red rice. The final tip, to do nothing at the end, came from another childhood friend, my godmother’s son, Thomas Barnes. Here, as a public service, is my favorite way to cook South Carolina Low Country red rice (with no haiku and my love to Thomas).

Cook three or four pieces of really good hickory-smoked bacon in a cast-iron skillet. It should be
smoked
bacon, or what’s the point? What you really want out of the bacon is, OK, bacon, but also: the smoke. So don’t skimp. Buy the good bacon. Fry it at a low temperature for a while so that it slowly loses its fat and gets really crispy.

Pour off the fat until you have about a tablespoon or so of chunky bacon gunk in the pan, and in that, sauté a diced medium onion and half a green bell pepper. When they’re soft, toss in a couple of pinches of salt and add a large can of diced tomatoes. Skinned fresh tomatoes are great, but only in high tomato season, late summer. Otherwise, go with canned. Many add tomato paste here (as in
Charleston Receipts
), but the problem with tomato paste is that it makes everything taste pasty. Skip that. Go with canned diced tomatoes—not whole, not pureed—because the diced ones break down
mostly
but not entirely, giving the final result the perfect (I hate this word, but what can you do?) mouthfeel.

Simmer that concoction for ten more minutes; then add a cup and a half of rice—preferably Uncle Ben’s parboiled long-grain rice. I don’t quite understand why. There is something about how the parboiled works at taking up the tomato concoction more easily than any other kind of rice. Anyway, there’s about a decade’s worth of Christmas-party chats with Mom’s friends and creekside beers with acquaintances of friends invested in that little tip. And it works like a charm, so just do it and you’ll be happy.

If the result is stiff to stir, then add a splash or two of chicken broth. Most recipes suggest that you cook thereafter on the stove top. But don’t do that. Instead, cover the skillet with tinfoil and put it in a 375°F oven for thirty minutes. Remove the skillet from the oven and put it on the back of the stove. Do not peek under the foil. No one knows what mystery is taking place under there, but it has something to do with liquid and rice, and like the spontaneous combustion of heavy-metal drummers, it’s best left unsolved. As Thomas told me: “It’s best not even to look at it.” Remove the foil eventually—after ten minutes, say—and sprinkle the rice with bacon bits. All leftovers are better the next day, served either hot or cold, or you can fold them into an omelet like my nephew Jim does for a brilliant breakfast.

One day, not all that long ago, my twelve-year-old daughter, Yancey, announced that she and her friend Emma would cook dinner. I was having some friends over and had already put together my own menu. But no, she insisted, waving photocopies of recipes in my face. She and Emma would do it. They had already scoped out what ingredients were lacking in the kitchen. All I had to do was drive them to the store. Once I got them going, they shooed me from the kitchen, and thus began an afternoon that quickly swelled into family legend.

This production in the kitchen involved putting up a rampart of chairs to keep out unwanted spectators. Whenever any adult’s orbit would wing near the kitchen, a squall of girlish gestures would erupt near the barricades, ordering him away. The entire Saturday afternoon took on that feeling of an earlier time, not that many years ago, when the kids would seal off a room and announce they were practicing to put on a play for the adults. Under no circumstances were we to peek.

Those plays were hilarious because the kids were trying to show off their ability to mimic the world as they knew it—the plot of a bedtime story or some recent event that struck them as crucial in their lives. What made them especially entertaining was the kindly recognition of just how bad they were at acting and writing dialogue and improvising. The pleasure for the parents and the kids was always laughing generously at the boffo display of sheer ineptitude.

Translate this comedy to a room full of fire, sharp knives, whole chickens, and several jumbo canisters of (redundantly purchased) Costco oregano, and you have the makings of a tragedy, if not a fiasco.

But at the beginning of the evening, the two girls brought out a bewilderingly brilliant four-course meal, all made from scratch: gazpacho salad, chicken-barley soup, pork loin, chocolate mousse. When Yancey brought in the gazpacho salad, the room reacted to the bright array of color nestled on the Bibb lettuce. She said proudly, “Look how we plated it!”

We all thought: Way too much Food Network for this kid. But actually that wasn’t it. The girls didn’t really watch the Food Network. If anything, that whole
Iron Chef
vocabulary has simply permeated the culture, creating a generation with the descriptive powers of a sommelier and an easy ability to use “savory” and “umami” in a sentence. What accounted for the quality of the dinner was the fact that the girls had been watching us, really studying us, the adults, as we prepared meals.

I realized that the story of the generation raised in the postfeminist era—my generation—was one that could be told as a history of a single room, the modern kitchen.

The avoided place of my childhood had been a battleground in the 1970s, the place from which all women had to be emancipated. Now it had been reentered by men and women alike. Its repute as a ghetto for women’s work was as remote to these kids as the reputation of colonial frontiersmen for being smelly. That room had been completely renovated—often literally, definitely metaphorically.

It had been remodeled, not only because we now admitted guests and friends there, but because a lot more was going on in there than the preparation of food. Today’s kitchen is to our time what, say, the front parlor or salon was, at least in our imaginations, to the late nineteenth century. It is more than a place where people gather; it is a place where ideas are hatched, practiced, learned, and acted upon. It is a gathering spot for chance encounters and the millworks of family values.

When I bought the house I currently live in, I found the old kitchen door in the basement. It was the exact same one from my childhood home—same plastic push guard beside the same fossilized handprint of generational grime. The previous owner had remodeled the kitchen and made it into one of the showcase rooms in the place. My kitchen now boasted panoramic views of a large green backyard and participated with the rest of the house via a wide, generous, inviting hallway. There was no door at all; rather, the space was merely another grand architectural staging area on par with the living room.

For us, this reinvention of the kitchen was not a deliberate act. It just sort of happened after we brought our first and then second child home from the hospital. We ended up in the kitchen a lot. Almost all of the first two years of child rearing involves putting food into babies’ mouths. Sometimes that food gets thrown across the room or splattered from beneath a slammed fist or reappears along projectile trajectories. The kitchen is unquestionably the best place in the house to be in when any of these amazing events occur.

As a dad who spent a lot of time with the babies—when they were infants, my wife was in medical school and then a resident—I remember pondering one single conscious kitchen-related question: Was I going to spend the next few years eating Annie’s mac and cheese and hot dogs? That’s when I discovered Mark Bittman’s Minimalist column in the newspaper, and the future became clear. With only a little more effort than it would take to produce crappy toddler crud, I could make meals I myself wanted to eat.

In other words, “I love to cook” would actually become: I love to cook.

So the center of gravity of my little family quickly became the kitchen. This was not a feminist pronouncement or a political decision. It had a lot more to do with easy cleanup than with anything so noble as an idea or an intention.

But soon enough, the simplicity of our location turned into all kinds of things. When the kids were two or three, I sat them down and gave them instructions on how to cut up a carrot with a knife. I showed them the secret of making grits (salt must go in before the grits are added, or all is lost). Naturally, pancakes and waffles were in abundant supply on a weekend morning. And precisely because Lisa, the resident, came home exhausted, she felt compelled to cook her mother’s comfort foods—tuna fish casserole, chicken à la king, homemade chicken pot pie (for a Swanson refugee, the latter is a revelation). Our little family menu grew. Then one summer, there was a trip to Paris. The taste of a sidewalk crepe became a critical moment in the life of my oldest daughter, Tarpley. It is now her own private madeleine.

After we returned, she retrieved a recipe and became the house specialist. Soon thereafter, we purchased a crepe pan, and it was her crepe pan. Later, Yancey received her own block of kitchen knives. Even the equipment—from my ancient cast-iron skillet dating back two generations, to Lisa’s hand-thrown pots, to the kids’ stuff—became a map of a family that lived in the kitchen and visited the other rooms in the house when time permitted.

In the years that followed, Tarpley also figured out the buttery secrets of popovers. Then Yancey mixed some salad dressing, and somehow she got our favorite mustard-vinegar ratio perfect every time. So most nights, dinner became a big, noisy, jostling event—full of chores dictated by custom and history. Even stories of accidents became part of the epic tale. One afternoon, I grabbed a Cuisinart pot by the handle when it was accidentally parked over a low but hot blue flame. The kids saw Dad hold his hand under running water for an hour, squeezing out tears. Later, though, having the distinctive Cuisinart handle shape branded perfectly into my palm—including the nonblistered hole where one would hang up the pot—was not merely a puritan lesson in life’s dangers but pretty funny to look at.

We stumbled upon little secrets. We figured out that broccoli with a dash of balsamic vinegar is surprisingly great. A visit to an Asian market found us taking home some bok choy. And a lifetime of cooking chicken had resulted in a foolproof method of cooking a basic but really great whole chicken. (Several tricks: Gash a lemon twenty-five times with a knife, stuff the chicken with a small handful of rosemary and tarragon, then shove the lemon in and sew the cavity shut. Cook the chicken at a blazing-hot temperature: twenty minutes at 500°F breast side down, fifteen minutes breast side up. Then turn the oven down to 350°F for thirty minutes. The insanely hot temps will seal the skin but also evaporate the lemon juice, which will force itself out, flavoring the meat with the herbs along the way.)