Man With a Pan (6 page)

MANNY HOWARD

Stunt Foodways

Manny Howard, a James Beard Foundation Award–winning writer and a former senior editor and former contributing editor at
Gourmet
magazine, is the author of
My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm; A Cautionary Tale,
published by Scribner.

To secure the love of a beautiful woman, I loaded a dead pig into the back of my late-model Chevy Blazer. It was August 2001. I pressed my buddy Malachi into service, purchased four fronds from a banana tree, a yard of chicken wire, and two yards of burlap. I liberated two dozen granite cobblestones from behind the flimsy fencing of a municipal landscaping project and drove the Blazer one hundred miles east, straight out to sea and the tip of Long Island. I had a promise to keep. It mattered little that I had only the vaguest notion about how to deliver on it.

Lisa and I met one night in the dead of winter. If her affection for her “summerhouse friends” wasn’t the first topic of conversation, it was the second. It became very clear very quickly that if I didn’t win their approval, Lisa and I were going to have a problem. This was going to be trouble if I fell hard for this hard-charging beauty from Jackson, Mississippi.

Spring came quickly; summer, too. A reckoning was upon us both. No stranger to the grand gesture, early one Wednesday morning, over coffee, I announced that the coming weekend I would prepare a special feast for her summerhouse friends. I would roast a whole pig.

The declaration had the desired effect. I received an e-mail from Lisa shortly before lunchtime notifying me that the entire house had been made aware of my plan and everyone was excited by the prospect of a roast pig for dinner on Saturday night. As an aside, Lisa inquired where I intended to roast this pig.

On the beach, of course, was my confident reply.

“Have you ever roasted a whole pig
anywhere
before?” asked Malachi after I described the caper, a fever dream revealing itself to me as I spoke.

“How hard can it be?” I replied, incredulous.

Malachi said that he thought roasting a whole pig might be quite difficult, never mind enormously time consuming. “How about burgers?”

I explained that the whole point was to put the residents of the summerhouse on their heels. Get them watching the food. Take the focus off me. Everybody loves burgers, but this was too big a job for burgers. Lisa had told me that her friends were enormously curious about this new boyfriend named Manny. She said that more than one of the guys (protective of her in a brotherly sort of way, she preempted) had inquired about my lineage.

Malachi and I arrived on Friday evening; Lisa met us in the drive-way and made the introductions. I barely retained a single name. To my surprise, there were nearly two dozen residents of the summerhouse. The alarming numbers had nothing to do with my inability to engage socially, however. The pig was all I cared about. We needed to dig a deep pit in the sand, as well as prepare a fire and superheat those granite bricks, all before breakfast the next day.

That night, with help from Lisa’s protective brotherly types, we dug the pit. Just after dawn, while the cobbles baked, Malachi and I stuffed the pig with papaya, jalapeños, limes, and other bright fruits. We wrapped the critter in banana fronds, sealed the leaves with soaked burlap, and encased the package in wire. Finally, we lowered the ungainly cocoon onto the granite bed and covered it with four feet of sand. Everything was going just the way I had planned.

I spent the intervening hours trying to learn everyone’s name and attempting to limit my beer intake. We unearthed the pig. It was hot and fully cooked, but to my horror it looked like an East River floater. The beast wasn’t roasted. I had steamed it in the sand. At best you could call it poached. Whatever it was called, dinner was a wrinkly abomination—not the least bit appetizing.

The assembled crowd had doubled in size, but no one in it understood what had happened. They were all drinking, and they were getting hungry. We only had moments to make it right. The sun was setting and the women were rooting around in beach bags for sweaters and shawls.

Malachi delivered a clearheaded appraisal: “We’re fucked.”

Not yet, I thought. The meat might have been ugly, but it was cooked. To make it attractive and that much tastier, we just needed to hack the carcass up into grill-size hunks and caramelize it. I retreated inland to buy as much charcoal as I could find in town. Malachi took up a surreptitious collection of kettle grills from neighboring decks. We finished off the pork on an assembly of flaming
taiko
drums set at odd angles in the sand. Their orange glow was the only light to eat by.

This instinct for the culinary high-wire act has manifested itself regularly since Lisa and I married and started a family. I’ve shucked hundreds of oysters for a driveway crammed with parents in order to celebrate our daughter’s second birthday (and I’ve found numerous, similarly flimsy excuses to repeat the effort). I have tempted the fates by preparing paella for fifty, cooked outdoors on the grill. “This is the traditional way paella is prepared,” I boasted to any guest who dared approach their host, the dervish at the grill. Nobody needed to know I’d never made the dish before.

I can trace the source of this unwieldy urge to overreach directly to my father, a trained chemist from England who worked here as a rocket scientist on the
Mercury
rocket mission for NASA. He made a mythical, breathtakingly spicy curry whenever he entertained at home. In fairness, though, my impulse for stunt cooking is a dangerous mutation of his much more benign intentions.

I can recall sitting cross-legged in my footy pajamas under my parents’ kitchen table, the bare bulb at the ceiling casting a harsh light over the mayhem beyond the table’s unvarnished maple legs. Every time my father assembled his friends, he served a curry. I marveled at his ability to single-handedly prepare a massive pot of fiery food while presiding over a riot of 1970s booze- and dope-fueled, shaggy manliness. It was a meal he encouraged me to share, always with the same disastrous, and apparently hilarious, results.

I know now that this vindaloo was less the orthodox hot-and-sour stew, with its uniquely Goan amalgam of the Portuguese colonial influence married to the region’s countless culinary traditions, and more the Brick Lane pot of fire. But like most things my father bothers doing, this curry was imbued with potent storybook origins. According to Dad (though, mind you, he had me convinced that he was a Spitfire pilot during the War, and I believed him right up to the moment I could do enough math to suss that when the conflict ended, he was not yet eight years old), his recipe came to our kitchen directly from a much grander one half a world away in Africa.

One evening long ago, while he was completing his postdoc at Imperial College in London, Dad succeeded, after many failed attempts, to convince his roommate, Amir “Johnny” Tar Mohammed, to phone his mother, originally from India, at home in a wealthy suburb of Entebbe, in Uganda. Dad wanted the recipe for a proper Indian curry. The two of them squeezed into a public phone box, and Dad fed coins into the slot to keep the line open while Johnny interrogated his mum. “And you know, old Johnny had never once been in the kitchen of his own house,” he’d remark with equal incredulity whenever he retold the story.

When Mom and Dad immigrated to America, Dad carried his curry with him. In Brooklyn, he measured the single tablespoon of red chili flakes, counted out six green cardamom pods, leveled a tablespoon of dried celery seeds, and measured one teaspoon of turmeric with masterly precision, brushing excess grains of the impossibly yellow powder from the spoon back into the plastic bag. Resealing it with a red paper-covered wire twist tie, he’d return the bag to its place in the cupboard. And though much of Dad’s work was done with a steadily emptying glass of Johnnie Walker Red in one hand, his fidelity to that recipe, scribbled into a laboratory ledger and delivered across thousands of miles all those years ago, served as his keel. It drew Dad and his posse—Peter, Richard, Mark, and their wives and girlfriends—together as they free-poured drinks, cracked endless quarts of Rheingold, and fired up yet another joint. I sat spellbound, uniquely privy to the secret rituals of grown-up joy.

Years later, bound for college and committed to the recreation of the social magic conjured by that vindaloo, I hectored Dad for the recipe. By then, it had been at least a decade since Dad had made a vindaloo. He and Mom split when I was eleven, and adventurous, time-consuming, boozy curries had been replaced by dutiful dinners that sacrificed ambition on the altar of practicality. (The rotation was as follows: a consistently medium-rare roast top round, rubbed with salt and diced garlic, served with steamed broccoli and what was then, in the eighties, called wild rice but came out of a cardboard box; a sautéed quartered chicken served on top of a large helping of Uncle Ben’s white rice and covered with a tomato ragout, next to steamed green beans; spaghetti accompanied by a sauce of tomato and ground meat, seasoned primarily with bay—or on occasion, fresh clam sauce with a side of steamed cauliflower.) Dinner was served promptly at 7:30 every evening that my sister, Bevin, and I spent at his apartment. We were latchkey kids, free to do whatever we wished until then, but attendance at dinner was an immutable rule.

He got no argument from us. The ritual was a balm; his studied resolve, a legitimate anchor. Raising children takes determination, dedication, and, most of all maybe, a keen sense of timing. If dinner had not been ready for the table as Bevin and I tumbled through the front door every evening, the delicate table fellowship he worked so hard to build would not have stood a chance.

What I could not know then was that Dad was locked in what he believed was a life-and-death battle with entropic collapse. As best I can tell, for those first few years, the failure of his marriage was the epicenter of an emotional disaster, the shock waves from which threatened his status as our father.

My birthright, that curry, my demand for its secret, signaled the end of his battle for family coherence and the age of the family dinner. When I asked him for the recipe, he balked at first and insisted that he’d forgotten all about it. But I pressed and he succumbed, quietly pleased, I hope, by my plan to carry his vindaloo into the future. And so, from memory, he recited the recipe while I scratched it in black ink onto the unlined pages of a black composition notebook. And in time, his vindaloo in my hands achieved minor celebrity status on campus.

With the family dinner a thing of the past, Dad and I occasionally teamed up for a cooking adventure. Easter was the occasion for one of our most desperate acts. In a moment of perverse revelry we conspired to cook a rabbit. “The Easter Bunny! Brilliant!” we chortled as we drove to a live market in Sunset Park, one of the few places in the city where a rabbit could reliably be found back before the dawn of all this culinary to-do. We used a cookbook as our guide, but we must have gone terribly off course along the way because the result was a soggy, pallid sop.

In stunt foodways, success is always preferable, and an at-the-buzzer save is a delight, but it is not a necessary outcome. Carrying the plastic shopping bag with our still-hot, skinned rabbit across the street from the urban slaughterhouse to the car was its own discreet victory. While Easter supper lay in ruins on the plates before us, we were, of course, horrified, confounded by the unpalatable pulp, but the yuks and sniggers that dish has generated in the decades since puts stewed Easter Bunny solidly in the win column. Effort is its own reward.

The time for the family dinner has come for Lisa, the kids, and me. But I have not given up on stunt cookery. I spend a portion of each day dreaming up the evening’s meal. Along the route from work, I gather ingredients at a dead run. Arriving home, I blow through the front door, march to the back of the house, and plunk the groceries on that same maple kitchen table of my youth. I fire up the stove. The patter of public radio news is the only companion I can abide. There are onions to dice and wilt, wine to reduce, greens to blanch, and marginal meat to braise. Each evening I set out, fully intending to make every family dinner an adventure. And just about every evening I fail.

My daughter, always an unwilling participant, refuses to eat anything that isn’t whiter than she is. My son is as eager to please as I once was, and just as sensitive to some of the more outlandish ingredients and preparations. Lisa is appreciative, but she has her limits. This never ends well, she reminds me, and it is just dinner.

There is no such thing.

Every time dinner is dismissed as an event designed to simply deliver the day’s final load of calories and nutrients, an opportunity for adventure and fellowship is lost. So I persist. If I possessed an operative sense of myself in time, I might stand a chance. Usually, though, dinner, in all its inventive glory, is served late. The kids are exhausted. And because of my repeated, unrealistic insistence that unlike its predecessors this meal will be on time, Lisa has been forced to feed the kids stopgap cheese and crackers. They are usually not the least bit hungry.