Man With a Pan (41 page)

This all worked out because, with a few exceptions, the girls who wanted to cook for me were not the ones to whom I was attracted. I wonder if just the fact that they wanted to cook for me made them unattractive to me. In any event, with little introspection, a lifelong pattern seemed to have been established.

There were two girls in particular who were regular visitors to my house, and they always wanted to cook. One was interested in my roommate, who reciprocated the feeling, and the other came along, without any encouragement, because she seemed to be interested in me. She was a nice girl, but what was this domesticity? And they always made brownies.

One evening, perhaps because I was in a bad mood or maybe just tired of this ritual, I told them that I did not like them cooking for us, that I did not think it was their role in life to always be cooking for men, that this was not the way they should treat themselves.

They were offended. And they left. It was clear that I had hurt their feelings. There really is no reason to hurt people. And truthfully, it wasn’t anything so terrible they had done. I owed them an apology. And wouldn’t it be a nice gesture if, when I apologized, I brought them food—some brownies. After all the brownies they had baked me, it was time I brought them some.

I had never made brownies, but how hard could it be? A brownie should taste like chocolate, which means dark, bitter chocolate—say, about three ounces. I melted that with lots of butter, about a stick and a half, which would be some six ounces. This was really the pivotal thing. Julia Child was wrong about a lot of butter making everything better. But it is a solid rule for baking, which is why, in a kosher home where they keep the dessert pareve by not using butter so it can be served after any meal, you do well to skip dessert. After it was all melted, I added sugar. This amount of chocolate would take almost a cup and a half of sugar. And I added a few drops of vanilla, which for some reason makes chocolate taste more like chocolate even though you would think it would make it taste more like vanilla. And a pinch of salt, which, with equal mystery, gives butter its flavor.

It took about three eggs, beaten in one at a time, for the mixture to lighten to the color of hazelnut shells. I do not remember if I beat the eggs in whole, which would make a denser version, or if I beat the whites separately and folded them in. Either way, the resulting mousse would be good for anything. You could just eat it with a spoon. It couldn’t fail. If the batter tastes good, the cake will taste good. I just had to throw in some flour, slightly more than a cup, sifted and folded in gently, a little at a time. The secret to baking is to add good ingredients in the right order. The only remaining trick to making brownies was not to overcook them, which, with the oven I had in college, was not easy. I had not used the oven a lot but had noticed that it was the undoing of many of the visiting bakers. I only turned it up to two hundred degrees. It was a vengeful electric thing, and this was the equivalent of three hundred on any other oven. I checked the brownies about every two minutes, but there was no need. They were ready when the room was filled with the scent of chocolate.

I was feeling pleased as the brownies cooled. What a nice thing to do, what a lovely gesture. It had not occurred to me to wonder why the girls’ brownies were irritating but mine were a lovely gesture. I cooled them, I cut them, I brought them over. The girls seemed appreciative that I had come to apologize, but when I produced my surprise box of brownies, they looked at it like I had brought my pet rodent for them to play with. No, but try them. I made them sample.

No doubt about it, my brownies were a lot better than theirs. They didn’t use enough butter and misused baking powder. They never forgave me. In fact, I am not sure that they ever spoke to me again. So it seemed that if you were to get involved with a woman who cooks, it would be important to find one who cooks better than you. But it’s not as though I were testing; I wasn’t thinking about the issue at all. And if on some unconscious level I was, it was less a question of what kind of women I liked, and more one of what kind of man I wanted to be.

My parents had a complex and well-ordered division of labor in the kitchen. My mother cooked, I think most of the time. But my father always mixed drinks, did all grilling, including roasting outdoors in the New England winter, and was always the one to cook the lobsters. He first let them crawl on the floor while my brothers and I laughed and my sister screamed—great fun—and then killed them with the point of a knife while they furiously slapped their tails. Then he would make clam stuffing and bake them.

But I saw a lot of men who came home, installed themselves at the table, and shouted, “What’s for dinner, hon?” When I lived in Mexico, I met many campesinos, especially ones from indigenous backgrounds, who in all seriousness said that the ideal woman they would like to marry was one who made her own tortillas by hand. This was in the 1980s and tortilla machines had taken over for about the past decade, and those tortillas were just not the same. These young men were serious about this, and their requirements for homemade included hand-grinding the corn on a stone metate. So they really were talking about the wife as slave.

In the eastern Caribbean, men say a good wife is one who makes a good
cou-cou.
Curiously this has the woman grinding corn again.
Cou-cou
is a kind of corn mush made by slowly stirring over low heat. It takes a lot of time and patience, and it is said that if lumps form in the
cou-cou,
it is a sign that your marriage will not go smoothly. But of course, a smooth marriage requires more patience than
cou-cou.

I did not want to be the kind of man who would allow his wife to be a corn slave. And I didn’t want to be involved with a woman who was willing to be one. But I also didn’t want to be the kind of man I have seen for years in Basque country. The typical Basque man “lets” the woman cook the daily meals but takes over for a special occasion when he thinks real skill is required. I know many American men like this, too. Sorry, fella, it doesn’t count unless you are doing it every day.

I realize that it could be argued that I want to do all the cooking in order to get all the credit, but anyone who has ever cooked for a child knows that you don’t get any credit.

But maybe I have overreacted. Just between us, I hope my wife reads this and decides to cook me something.

“I can’t cook, but I can pay.”

Recipe File

I have some strong, and perhaps eccentric, views on recipes. I believe they should be something worth reading, and not a pseudoscientific formula, which was a bad idea—made popular by people such as Fannie Farmer—that has ruined the craft of recipe writing.

Cou-Cou

In many places in the world, cooking that involves the more tedious manual labor is generally deemed “women’s work.” In the Americas, where corn is indigenous, this generally involves anything using corn, both because it is traditional and because the grinding of it is tedious. So in the eastern Caribbean, the women make the
cou-cou
. They also make
funchi,
which is the same thing without okra, and
foo-foo,
which is
funchi
with mashed bananas. I think
cou-cou
is the best choice because the green okra—bright green if not overcooked and slimy—adds a nice touch of color, and the crossing of native corn and African okra is a taste of Caribbean culture. Also, okra thickens the water and gives a better result than the plain water of
funchi.

Take a handful of okra pods and scrape the fuzz off with a paring knife. Then slice them into disks about ¼ inch thick. Fill a fairly deep skillet (cast iron is often used) with well-salted water and bring to a boil. Add the okra disks and reduce to a low heat and cook for about 10 minutes until the okra is soft but not sliming apart.

Here’s where the good woman comes in. With the skillet still on a low heat, hold a wooden spoon in one hand and with the other pour a slow, steady stream of finely ground cornmeal into the water. You could use a coarser meal, stone-ground by hand, if you can find it, but blending it will also take more work. While adding the corn, vigorously stir with the spoon until there is enough corn to make a liquid the thickness of chocolate sauce. Too much cornmeal, and you will get lumps and ruin your marriage; too little, and it will take you forever to thicken it. So you want enough for it to be thicker but not pasty. Keep stirring over heat. Keep stirring. More. A little more. After between 5 and 10 minutes, you should have a smooth paste that lifts off the pan. Smooth it on a plate like a very thick pancake. And melt butter on top. Since there is no butter produced in the Caribbean, this may seem inauthentic, but reflecting Caribbean history, many local traditions involve imported food.

Baked Sea Bream

The Basques have an entirely different approach to culinary sexism. Dishes that involve hard manual labor are generally considered a man’s dish.
Bacalao pil-pil
is such a dish.
Pil-pil
sounds strangely like
cou-cou
or
foo-foo
, but presumably it has nothing to do with those African words. Despite the Basque habit of studying every aspect of their unique language, it is not certain what
pil-pil
means, nor is it certain why it works, but if you take a prime cut of soaked and poached salt cod, a thick piece with the skin still on, and place it, skin down, in a large, heavy earthen crock, add olive oil, and swirl it in a circular motion for a really long time, the oil will thicken into a creamy sauce. Clearly a man’s work.

But men seem to take over even the less physically demanding fish recipes. Their culinary clubs exclude women. In San Sebastián’s culinary societies, the men fish the mouth of the river, which is in the center of town, on winter nights and catch sea bream. The fish are gutted, scaled, and baked whole in a casserole, which takes about half an hour in a medium oven.

Vinegar is put in a skillet on high heat—about 3 ounces, which is cooked down to about 1½ ounces. The juice that forms in the casserole when the fish have been baked is then poured into the vinegar. In another skillet, olive oil is heated, and 4 or 5 cloves are left in until they turn golden. The heat is reduced, and 4 or 5 round slices from a red
guindilla
pepper (a small, narrow, not very hot red Basque pepper) are added for 2 minutes. Then the oil mixture is combined with the vinegar mixture and poured over the fish.

This is an excellent way of making almost any fish small enough to eat whole on a plate, and one that is not too oily. Bluefish or mackerel, for example, would not work well with this recipe. Sea bream is sometimes available in U.S. markets, but it is a European fish, not caught in American waters. The recipe works very well with a small snapper. Women can make it, too, though of course they never have for me.

On the Shelf

When I was cooking for a living in restaurants in New York and New England, I was very influenced by Henri-Paul Pellaprat’s
L’art culinaire moderne,
Escoffier’s
Ma Cuisine,
and, since I ended up a pastry maker, Gaston Lenôtre’s
Lenôtre’s Desserts and Pastries,
which was a new book in the 1970s when I was doing such things. These books had no influence on me as a writer, but when I was young and writing for the
International Herald Tribune,
there was a magnificent octogenarian—the kind of American in Paris who would soon vanish forever—named Waverley Root, who wrote a food column. Few writers have had the influence on me of Root. He showed me that food was a worthy topic if approached with wit, a broad grasp of history, and an impish sense of fun. I don’t think I have ever run into a newspaper food column its equal. I still enjoy his completely arbitrary and unscientific encyclopedia titled
Food.

Another food journalist I have always admired is the Basque writer José Maria Busca Isusi, who has written many books and articles on Basque food and its cultural significance. I have also been influenced by a number of novelists, usually, and not surprisingly, Spanish, French, Italian, or Chinese. Foremost among these is Émile Zola, whose novels use food to illuminate social issues. It is now some thirty years since I picked up a paperback edition of
Le ventre de Paris
(
The Belly of Paris
), at one of those little bookstalls along the Seine for a few francs. I have never recovered from the impact of this book. I kept recommending it to friends, but they would read it in English and the English did not capture it. Finally, in frustration, I did my own translation for the Modern Library, but I still think nothing compares with the original, if you can read French.