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Baking a cake

September 4, 2020
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I hadn’t baked in years. I used to do so regularly, just to have fresh-baked bread to eat with cold butter. It is the food they must eat in Paradise. Hot crusty bread with hard cold butter: There is nothing better. 

Neither had I baked a cake, but then I had a slight hankering for chocolate and I didn’t want to go out in the Covid night to shop, so I decided to make my own dessert, a small chocolate cake — a sort of brownie thing, but more cakey. 

I have never used a recipe for baking and I didn’t this time, either. Years ago, when I lived with friends, I wanted to bake a cake and my friend’s wife warned me that you simply had to have the measurements right for a cake to turn out. I took it as a challenge. I threw together what I thought would make a cake and slid it in the oven. The cake was delicious. 

That was something like 40 years ago. And it was, I believe, the last time I baked a cake. I’m not a big cake eater. 

But bread, yes. I love bread and I always thought bread making was the easiest thing in the world. I don’t know why so many people think it is a persnickety project. I see TV chefs giving conflicting instructions. One says you have to be careful to measure your flour and to slide a knife across the top of the measuring cup to get an accurate amount. Another says you can’t measure the flour; you have to weigh it on a kitchen scale (preferably, I think, in grams). 

I have never measured my flour. I just dump what feels like the proper amount in a mixing bowl, add my yeast and a bit of salt and stir around the dry ingredients, then add warm water until I get a dough. You can’t know just how much, because the air humidity and barometric pressure change the needed proportions. You just do it until it feels like dough. 

Of course, you can add things if you want to make a different sort of bread. You can put in an egg and substitute some milk for the water if you want to make a challah. You can mix in some rye flour if you want a rye bread. 

But you do it until you get a dough that feels right. I can’t tell you what that is: It is something you learn in your fingertips. Book knowledge is no help, anymore than it is when learning to ride a bike. The same goes for the proper amount of kneading. It will feel ready when it feels ready. 

Then you can either put it in bread pans, or make a boule or a baguette. Bake it in an oven with a pan of water to help make a good crust. It will be done when the kitchen smells right. 

There is so much that is not verbal and cannot be put down in print. Driving a car, facial recognition, offering condolence, playing music in tune, making love, knowing why life is worth living: Words are inadequate at best, impossible to be precise and often utterly misleading. Only experience really helps, along with an openness and willingness to pay attention. 

These days, many people, locked in their homes avoiding tiny spiky bugs, fill their empty time with the baking of bread. They share sourdough starter recipes and “secrets” for a good loaf. It’s a fine hobby and the eating is a great reward. But there is a difference between a non-cook poring over a cookbook, following its instructions step by slow step, biting on their lips while reading; and a seasoned veteran who has the whole process recorded in muscle memory. It provides the confidence. 

So, anyway, there I was, wanting a bit of sweet, about 8 in the evening. I set the oven for 350F and got out a mixing bowl. 

I dumped some flour into the bowl. I don’t know exactly how much, maybe two-thirds of a cup or so. Measurements-shmeasurements. I added  roughly three-quarters of the same amount of sugar and another hefty dose of cocoa powder, a dribble of vanilla, an egg, some butter I melted in the microwave, and used the tip end of a measuring cup handle to get some baking powder. I added about six grains of Cafe Bustelo instant coffee — barely enough to notice, and a squirt of Hershey’s syrup, and enough milk to make a batter. No measurements of anything, just the right “feel” for it. Baked it all for 25 minutes and waited for it to cool. It was yummy. I had a piece, then I had another piece, with a cold glass of milk. 

So, maybe I had three pieces. Sue me. I did a little dance. Perhaps it was the caffeine from the grains of coffee. It’s about the only thing I’ve accomplished this past week of self-isolating — other than writing. Oh, and I took out the garbage and walked the dumpster down to the street so the trash delivery men could get it. 

And I know what I’ll be eating for breakfast. Hah! I still got it. 

History of Cookbooks: Part 2 — Going into Print

May 27, 2020
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“Kitchen” Vincenzo Campi, 1580

Between the 14th and 16th centuries two big changes came over cooking and cookbooks in Europe. The first was a change of taste, leaving behind the spices of the East and taking up the herbs of the garden; the second was the invention of the printing press. 

It needs to be remembered that until 1450, all cookbooks were written in manuscript and copied when needed. Their reading public was limited by the literacy of the populace when only the very few could “reckon letters.” And so, those cookbooks were aimed at the kitchens of the wealthy and aristocratic, and their instructions were given to those who already knew the basic techniques. The cookbooks rarely mentioned quantities or explained widely understood preparations. 

And, beginning in 1517, as northern Europe emerged, and Protestantism grew, it shifted the locus of thought there away from the Mediterranean. Rome saw Paris flex its muscles and a rivalry began. 

Le Viandier and Le Managier

The first of these European-aimed cookbooks is Le Viandier, traditionally credited to Guillaume Tirel (1310-1395), aka Taillevant (“Cut Wind”), who was chef to the court of France during the Hundred Years War, although the earliest of four surviving manuscripts is dated from 10 years before Taillevent was born, making the attribution a bit dodgy. 

The book contains about 130 recipes and they are still heavy on exotic spices, such as this one for a Fish Grané:

Take pike or carp or other fish. Scale and fry the fish. Then toast bread and soak it in a puree of peas. Strain it and put in large slices of fried onion. Boil it all together with ginger, cinnamon and other spices, infused with vinegar. Add saffron for color. 

Other 14th century manuscript cookbooks include the Portuguese Llibre de Sent Sovi from 1324 and the German Daz Buch von der guter Spise from 1350. And the English The Forme of Cury, by “The Chief Master Cooks of King Richard II.” From 1390, it is written in Middle English and sounds very like Chaucer.

The Forme of Cury, pages

One recipe begins: “Sawse madame. Take sawge, persel, ysope and saueray, quinces and peeres, garlek and grapes, and fylle the gees therwith; and sowe the hole that no grece come out, and roost hem wel, and kepe the grece that fallith therof.”

Translated into modern lingo, the whole recipe runs:

Sauce Madame. Take sage, parsley, hyssop and savory, quinces and pears, garlic and grapes, and stuff the  geese with them, and sew the hole so that no dripping comes out, and roast them well and keep the dripping  that falls from them. Take the gelatin and dripping and place in a posset (a hot drink made by curdling milk with ale or wine). When the geese is roasted enough, take and chop it in pieces, and take what is within and put it in a posset and put in wine if it is too thick. Add to it powder of galangal, powder-douce and salt, and boil the sauce and dress the geese in dishes and lay the sauce on. 

Here is the original recipe for rabbit in gravy:

Translated, it reads: “Take rabbits, smite them to pieces. Parboil them and draw them with a good broth with blanched and brayed almonds. Do therein sugar and powdered ginger and boil it and the flesh therewith. Flour it with sugar and with powdered ginger and serve forth.” 

I love that “smite them to pieces.” The language has an almost biblical feel to it. Another recipe says to “Shell the oysters and seethe them in wine and in their own broth.” 

In 1393, Le Ménagier de Paris, or “The Householder of Paris” was published. It is less a cookbook and more a treatise on how to be a good wife, presented as an older husband counseling his young bride. It includes gardening tips, etiquette and even sex advice. Its second section contains recipes. It set the model for many books in the coming centuries aimed not at professional kitchens but at the edification and instruction of women. 

Other Medieval cookbooks include Du Fait de Cuisine (On the making of cuisine”), written in 1420 by the master chef of the court of Burgundy; and the mid-15th century Venetian book, Libro per Cuoco. Who knew that the name of the star of TV’s Big Bang Theory was “Kitchen full of Kale?” Perfect for a Hollywood actress.

Bartolomeo Sacchi, aka Platina

Then came Johannes Gutenberg and cookbooks ever since have been largely printed in large numbers for a growing literate public. The first real bestseller cookbook was printed first in 1475 and called De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine, or “On Honorable Pleasure and Health,” by Bartolomeo Sacchi, better known as Platina. He was a courtier and soldier born near Cremona in Italy and wrote dozens of books on diverse subjects. 

De Honesta Voluptate was written in Latin and cribbed from the notes of Martino da Como, who some have described as the world’s first “celebrity chef.” He was kitchen-master in the Vatican. Sacchi credits him in De Honesta Voluptate. The book went through untold editions and translations for the next century or so. 

Sacchi tells us that the lentil is “digested with difficulty, generates black bile and creates scaly skin disease, causes flatulence and a stuffed feeling, harms the brain and chest, dulls the eyes and represses passions.” 

A recipe for eel pie includes almond milk, rosewater, raisins, sugar and spices, but why he includes this is questionable. His comment on the dish: “When it is finally cooked, serve it to your enemies, for it has nothing good in it.” 

The shift from the Mediterranean to more continental tastes should, in part, be credited to Martin Luther. His insistence that people learn to read the Bible for themselves caused a great increase in literacy in northern Europe, and with Gutenberg’s press, led to a new profusion of cookbooks in vernacular languages.

In 1570, a second Bartolomeo came out with his cookbook, both printed and in ordinary Italian. It was the Opera dell’Arte del Cucinare, or “Works on the art of the kitchen,” by Bartolomeo Scappi (1500-1577), who was chef to three popes. It continues the old tradition of exotic spicing, but it is the first cookbook to include illustrations. 

The book is divided into six parts and contains 1000 recipes. It begins with a dialog between the chef and his apprentice, laying out the workings of a smoothly operating kitchen, its implements and ingredients. A second part discusses meat from quadrupeds and birds, and how to make sauces. A third covers fish, eggs and vegetables. The fourth lists foods by season. The fifth teaches the making of pastries, cakes and a miscellany of things. The book ends with a chapter of food for the infirm; so many of these early cookbooks mingle food and medicine, as if they were two sides of a single coin. 

Scappi’s braised beef

He writes of preparing frogs for Pope Pius IV “in the way the pope was used to eating them.” He writes, “Frogs abound in Lombardy, and especially in Bologna, where they are transported in bags on carts.” 

And although it was published some seven decades after Columbus sailed to the New World, the only Columbian Exchange item to show up is the turkey. No potatoes, chiles, tomatoes or chocolate. 

So far, most of these cookbooks are written by cooks for popes or royalty, and their menus are often exotic and call for an abundance of spice. But as the printing press pumped out more and more material, their buying audience widened to include middle class cooks, too. And that also means that their demographic shifts from male chefs to women at their home hearths. 

And this shows up in the number of books aimed at teaching women the best or proper way to make their homes. Often the recipes are only a portion of the books’ contents, which spreads out to include etiquette, home finances and household management. This is a trend that expands in the 17th century and exponentially in the 18th century. 

Thomas Dawson published The Good Huswifes Jewell in 1585 and Gervase Markham wrote The English Huswife in 1615. 

The Jewell gives recipes for pancakes and haggis and is the first in English to mention sweet potatoes — a New World ingredient. It also has a recipe for “A Sallet of All Kinde of Hearbes:”

“Take your hearbes and picke them very fine into faire water, and picke your flowers by themselves, and washe them al cleane, and swing them in a strainer, and when you put them into a dish, mingle them with cowcumbers or lemmons payred and sliced, and scrape suger, and put in vineger and oyle, and throw the flowers on the toppe of the sallet, and of every sorte of the aforesaide things and garnish the dish about with the foresaide things, and harde egges boyled and laide about the dish upon the sallet.”

The full title of Markham’s book is quite long and runs: The English Huswife: Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman: as her Phisicke, Cookery, Banqueting-stuffe, Distillation, Perfumes, Wooll, Hemp, Flaxe, Dairies, Brewing, Baking, and all other things belonging to an Houshold.” Which gives some sense of the direction cookbooks in general will be headed in the following centuries. 

Markham was by profession a soldier, and he shows some humility in his introduction: Thou mayst say (gentle Reader) what hath this man to doe with Hus-wifery, he is now out of his element,” but goes on to say that he had his manuscript vetted by an honorable lady of quality. But no doubt, he was not the original mansplainer. 

There are quite a few 17th century cookbooks, and I cannot include them all, but I can’t avoid The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Knight Opened, from 1669. Digby was a courtier, diplomat, natural philosopher, astrologer and Roman Catholic intellectual, once called “The Ornament of This Nation.”

If you open his closet, as it were, you find many directions for alcoholic drinks, but also a fair number of delicacies, such as Capon del Conte di Trino, which calls for ambergris (from the intestines of a whale), dates, raisins, currants and sugar, all boiled inside an ox bladder. 

To boil eggs: “A certain and infallible method to boil new-laid Eggs to sup up, and yet that they have the white turned to milk, is thus: Break a very little hole, at the bigger end of the shell, and put it into the water, whiles it boileth. Let it remain boiling, whiles your Pulse beateth two hundred stroaks. Then take it out immediately, and you will find it of an exact temper.”

The language and spelling are a delight. Here is another:

“A FLOMERY-CAUDLE — When Flomery is made and cold, you may make a pleasant and wholesome caudle of it, by taking some lumps and spoonfuls of it, and boil it with Ale and White wine, then sweeten it to your taste with Sugar. There will remain in the Caudle some lumps of the congealed flomery, which are not ungrateful.”

Markham in An English Huswife defines flummery as a soft, starch-based sweet pudding: “From this small Oat-meale, by oft steeping it in water and clensing it, and then boyling it to a thicke and stiffe jelly, is made that excellent dish of meat which is so esteemed in the West parts of this Kingdome, which they call Wash-brew, and in Chesheire and Lankasheire they call it Flamerie or Flumerie.” A caudle, by the way, is potion or porridge for infants or the infirm. 

And to feed your chickens and make them plump and juicy, Digby writes:

“AN EXCELLENT WAY TO CRAM CHICKEN — Stone a pound of Raisins of the Sun, and beat them in a Mortar to Pulp; pour a quart of Milk upon them, and let them soak so all night. Next morning stir them well together, and put to them so much Crums of Grated stale white bread as to bring it to a soft paste, work all well together, and lay it in the trough before the Chicken (which must not be above six in a pen, and keep it very clean) and let a candle be by them all night. The delight of this meat will make them eat continually; and they will be so fat (when they are but of the bigness of a Black-bird) that they will not be able to stand, but lie down upon their bellies to eat.”

Chickens gotta eat, too. 

Next: The 18th Century where we will not forget the ladies. 

Tasteful reading

May 9, 2020
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Walk into any used bookstore — or if you can find it, a new bookstore — and you will find an entire aisle devoted to cookbooks. Perhaps there may be more romance novels, if it’s a used paperback store, but in most, cookbooks take up more space than anything else. Of the making of cookbooks, there is no end. 

Reading a good cookbook is a pleasure and collecting them is a vice. When I got married, 40 years ago, two collections joined as one. Over the years, many have gone to feed the shelves of used bookstores and now I’m whittled down to the most essential ones. But I still love them all; many I have let go I have since rebought. 

But not all cookbooks are of the same ilk. There are four distinct classes of cookbooks and they offer differing rewards. 

ONE

The first group are the recipe books, and they make up by far the largest class, maybe even 80 percent of the total. Their purpose is to give homemakers directions to the preparation of the standard day-to-day fare of the family table, or to instruct how to make more exotic dishes from exotic cultures. There may be intercalary text, a few stories or some background information, but the heart of such a book is the individual recipe, divided into an ingredients list and a procedure directive. 

We can divide these up into actual bound books and the plethora of booklets and pamphlets, many of them promotional items.

Among the books we run from the big comprehensive volumes  covering everything from soup to roasts and desserts, to the specialty book, such as have Christmas recipes, or baking secrets, or how-to for Chinese food. 

And each cook has one of these compendiums as her primary source: either Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook, the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, the Gold Cookbook, or the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book: America’s #1 Cookbook Since 1930. 

And most have a collection, too, of smaller books — a McCall’s paperback on pastries or a Southern Living collection of casseroles. Such books, often mere pamphlets, have been produced at least since the end of the 19th century. 

I have lived in the South for a good portion of my life, and have come to love, even need, Southern cooking, from barbecue to Brunswick stew, from fried okra to hushpuppies. There have been Southern cookbooks from way back, when it was still OK to use an African-American mammy on the cover. Edna Lewis is a great step upwards. I have owned three editions of Mrs. Dull’s book.

As American food culture expanded, beginning in the 1970s, the range of cookbooks of exotic cuisine expanded. Julia Child taught us French; Joyce Chen taught us Chinese; Madhur Jaffrey brought us India and Diana Kennedy made us long for varieties of chile pepper we had never heard of and never even imagined. 

Before then, most cookbooks were good ol’ American family fare, and  magazines gave out monthly ideas for how to turn loaf bread, Jell-O packets, a can of soup, and some Shake ’n Bake chicken into a meal fit for a junior assistant vice president in charge of sales. 

And from the 1920s through the 1960s, various corporations put out pamphlet-size promotional books with recipes for their products. A Jell-O cookbook; a Diamond Walnut cookbook; a Gold Medal Flour cookbook; a Sunbeam Mixmaster cookbook — hundreds, maybe thousands of them. 

For anyone interested in graphic design and typography, these promotional cookbooks are a treasure trove of historical fashion. They popped up first in the years before World War I, became popular again in the 1920s, served the war effort with helpful kitchen shortcuts in the 1940s, and became hip and cartoonish in the 1960s. Each era has its look and seasoned eyes can date one from its cover alone, to an accuracy of less than five years. 

A subgenre of the recipe book is the celebrity cookbook. Many of these have a short shelf life, as movie and TV stars come and go. 

And television series and movies with sequels spawn similar entries. Want a Star Wars cookbook? There are at least six of them. 

A Harry Potter Cookbook? Game of Thrones? Walking Dead? Outlander? 

A kind of gender spread from boy-aimed Star Trek to girl-aimed Gilmore Girls, with Doctor Who in the middle, pitched to both. 

For Downton Abbey, there are official and unofficial versions. 

Every church has, at some point, published a spiral-bound book of the favorite recipes of its parishioners, usually with much use of crushed corn flakes and cream of mushroom soup. 

But I’m getting sidetracked. I love my collection of these ephemera, not for their recipes, which I never use, but for their design and typography. They are an unnoticed art gallery. Others find the same in classic cars or vintage clothing, but for me, it’s the changing trends in publishing, and the cheapest source of old book design comes on the cookbook shelves of your favorite used bookstore. 

TWO 

The second class of cookbook is the instructional — those books whose purpose to to show how to bone a chicken or julienne a carrot. The most famous is probably Jacques Pepin’s La Technique and La Methode, with their photographic step-by-step. 

Of course, the boundaries of these classes is blurry. Most procedurals also contain recipes, and even the big recipe collections give some help in the basic techniques. But it is a question of emphasis. You can look at Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a roster of gourmet recipes, but its greatest virtue is its explication of technique. (And no, I am not forgetting Louisette Bertholle or Simone Beck). 

And it is easy to think of the perennial Joy of Cooking as a recipe book, but while I would never consider being without my own copy — which is the single volume I would keep if required to disinvest in all but one cookbook — I never cook from its recipes, but depend on it to consult on how long to cook a pork roast or how to poach a trout. For me, it is my go-to technique book. It has never let me down. 

The importance of technique is that once you have learned all the basics, you can abandon all your recipes and begin cooking on your own, with full confidence that you know how. 

THREE

The third type of cookbook I might call the travel book, the book that explains culture and geography through cuisine. Television has largely taken over this genre. One of the best at this was Anthony Bourdain, although his work was in TV rather than in books (although he wrote his share of them, too). 

Amber Hoffman wrote The Food Traveler’s Guide to Emilia Romagna: How to Taste the History and Tradition of Italy. David Lebovitz wrote The Sweet Life in Paris. Yemisi Aribisala wrote Longthroat Memories: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds. Fuchsia Dunlop gave us Sharks Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. 

There are also historical books that take us through the history of a single ingredient, such as Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World and his Salt: A World History. Or Beans: A History by Ken Albala. 

Kurlansky also translated Emile Zola’s novel about the food markets of 19th Century Paris: The Belly of Paris. 

Finally, there are a series of books about the kitchens of famous artists — three Monet alone. Others cover Van Gogh and Matisse.

 

FOUR

The fourth class is similar to the third, so that even the line between them is blurred, which is the food memoir and the food essay. 

Bourdain had a best seller with his jaundiced look at the backstage antics of restaurants in his Kitchen Confidential. Jacques Pepin is a bit more nostalgic about the hardships of his long culinary training in The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen. 

Three food writers wander back and forth between memoir and essay: M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David, and Ruth Reichl. Fisher wrote The Art of Eating, David wrote An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, and Reichl published Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table. 

I feel I have to mention one of my favorite food writers, Calvin Trillin. Where others are rhapsodic, he is ironic and quirky. His essays were usually published in The New Yorker, and some were collected in three of his books on food — American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater; Alice, Let’s Eat: Further Adventures of a Happy Eater; and Third Helpings. The three were later published in a single volume titled The Tummy Trilogy. 

The genre was born in 1825 with the publication by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin of his Physiologie du Goût, or to give it its full title (translated): The Physiology of Taste, or, Meditations on Transcendent Gastronomy; a Theoretical, Historical and Topical Work, Dedicated to the Gastronomes of Paris by a Professor, Member of Several Literary and Scholarly Societies. Brillat-Savarin was a man who liked to eat and what is more to write about what he ate. 

He is perhaps most famous for having said: “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” 

All of these books are a pleasure to leaf through, to look at the pictures, to read the introductions, to read the recipes and imagine their tastes — the way a musician can look at a score and hear the music in her head. 

Of the enjoyment of cookbooks, there is no end.

Next: A history of cookbooks

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Sinfonia Domestica

April 11, 2020
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I have cooked for most of my life. Even as a small boy, my mother made sure her kids could be self-sufficient in the kitchen; In grade school, I  made sandwiches, Chef Boyardee ravioli, and baked my own brownies. All through my life, I have been happy with the pots and pans. But I’m a cook, not a chef. Nor am I one of those suburban dads who takes credit for culinary skill by charcoaling a chunk of beast over a grill on a weekend. 

No, I’m a day-to-day sort of cook; a plan a menu for the week kind of cook; the sort to check the pantry to see what we’ve got. Through two marriages and two unofficial marriages, and during those years I slogged it alone, I always kept my hand in. Several times, I was the primary cook; my second unofficial wife had no interest in the kitchen and I cooked daily for those seven years, and I spent a year an a half cooking for the family that took me in when I was on the verge of being homeless. The kitchen has become the room in the house I am most intimate with. 

Through it all, I’ve never had a really great kitchen, the kind you see on TV or in glossy magazines, with kitchen islands in the middle and a butcher block and maybe a $200 food processor with a hundred horsepower. But I’ve had perfectly usable kitchens, mostly rather small, in all the houses I’ve lived in. Never enough counter space, but one learns to make do with a tiny patch of clear space to slice and dice. 

The first I remember was when I got married to my first official wife and we lived on the top floor of a duplex. The stairs were on the outside of the house and rather treacherous in the snow. The kitchen had metal cabinets and a small electric stove. Our pots were cheap and nearly thin as tinfoil. Our dishes were Melamine and our flatware bent if the steak was too tough. She did most of the cooking, but I did the baking. For some reason, even if we did exactly the same things, my bread turned out steamy and crusty and delicious and her bread came out of the oven ready to be used as a deadweight anchor or doorstop. I’ve always been mystified by the juju of baking. Some people seem born with it, others not. 

We were poor and planned our meals from a book called Dinner for Two for $1 a Day (Dorothy Neiswender Kent, 1967). We’d buy a chuck steak and split it into three parts, the two bony parts cut for stew beef, the middle filet for a kind of steak. 

One winter, when the refrigerator went out, we left our perishables outside on the windowsill. When you are that young, poverty can actually be quite romantic. 

First kitchen; second; Phoenix kitchen watercolor by Jo Leeds

After that, my second unofficial wife — the one who didn’t cook — and I had a side-by-side duplex with a long thin kitchen and a window over the sink. Outside was a patch of garden and some woods that told of the season. We had splurged for Dansk dinnerware and felt quite sophisticated. But our frypans and pots were all dented and crappy and I longed for some quality cookware. One evening, we hosted a kind of Tupperware party for All-Clad cookware and I drooled over the saucepans. Unfortunately, they were way out of our price range — might as well have been a Maserati — and I could only gawk. 

At one point, I got a job working for the Black weekly newspaper in Greensboro, N.C., and among other things, I wrote a cooking column. I was the “Kitchen Magician,” and used my home cooking as the source for my material. (I also wrote stories, laid the paper out, wrote the headlines, wrote the editorials and managed an advice column: “Dear Carol.” I was factotum.)

World’s Most Obscene Man

When Second Unofficial moved on, I relocated to Seattle to share a house with two lesbian doctors and The Worlds’ Most Obscene Man™️. We shared cooking duties, but almost everything we made was tongue-crippling spicy. I remember making our weekly cauldron of hot sauce. It was an easy recipe: one-third onion; one-third jalapeño peppers; one-third garlic; and one-third tomatoes. It simmered all day on the stove. When TWMOM came home from work one day, he saw the pot and grabbed a spoon to taste the brew. “Great soup!” he yelled to the house. His motto: “If you ain’t sweatin’, you ain’t eatin’.” 

The year after Seattle was the low point of my life. I came home to North Carolina with no money and no job and a big, swollen and bruised case of depression. But my two saviors were my college best friend and his wife, who took me in and gave me a room in exchange for my cooking and housekeeping. It was an old multi-cat farmhouse with a woodstove in the kitchen, which was the only heated room in the house. In the winter, when I woke up, sometimes the glass of water next to the bed was frozen. Those months, we spent almost all our waking hours in the kitchen, stoking the fire, breathing the smoke and watching Masterpiece Theatre or Bob Newhart and Suzanne Pleshette.

It was 1980 and I kept notes that included our daily menus. For the week of Jan. 20, we had spaghetti on Sunday; sukiyaki on Monday, chicken and broccoli on Tuesday; souvlaki and eggplant with lemon soup on Wednesday; papas con chorizos on Thursday; hamburgers on Friday (evidently I was slacking off); and braised pork chops to end the week. We had several regular recipes to save money, including something we called “sausage and rice mess,” and there was always tuna casserole. 

Because I always cook without recipes, there was the occasional complaint: “This was really good; how are you going to make it again if it isn’t written down?” Except for a few reflexive dishes, such as spaghetti or that tuna casserole, I never cared to make repeat meals. But a few did get stuck with names, like “Chicken Motocross” and “Linguine Nilsenesca.” (My brother, who also cooks, is famous for his “Mock Hawaiian Chile.”) A few had rude names that I won’t repeat here. 

To my host’s horror, I even baked without recipe. “You can’t make a cake without measuring ingredients,” she said. But I did. A bit of this and of that and voila: cake. (In retrospect, I think there may have been some luck involved that time, but boy, I loved the look on her face when it came out of the oven looking perfect.)

Carole

I got married again a couple of years later, to the woman I spent the next 35 years with, until her death three years ago. Although Carole could walk through walls, and took no guff from anyone — she once stopped a knife fight in Norfolk, Va., by jumping out of her car and scolding the belligerents in her best schoolmarm voice — she had a surprisingly retrograde view of gender roles. “Cooking is the woman’s job,” she said, and kept me out of the kitchen for years. I couldn’t argue with her; she’d beat me up. Changing burnt out light bulbs and unclogging the toilet — those were “the man’s job.” But when she began to get sick, I took back the kitchen and I’ve held it ever since. 

Carole was crazy for red, and so we have a red Kitchen-Aid mixer and a dozen red bowls, casseroles and a dutch oven. Open pretty much any cabinet and you will find a burst of red, like roses in a garden. 

When I retired and we moved to Asheville, N.C., I got the current kitchen, which is still small, but nice enough. And with my buy-out money and pension I have been able to supplement the kitchen arsenal with some of the nicer tools I have long coveted. Over the next several years, I acquired heavy-duty triple-layer professional-grade saucepans, each weighing enough to clobber a bear. 

I have used T-Fal Pro fry pans recommended by America’s Test Kitchen. I’ve had to replace them every 18 months or so. 

But now, I got my perfect non-stick pan from Ikea

and I have kept it bright and shiny for more than a year. It is for me, the perfect 12-inch pan. I use it almost every day. 

I found a series of Ikea knives that have taken over from all the others I have owned. They are one-piece with stainless steel handles and I love them. 

I’ve owned many a knife. Before the current set, I used some really cheap ceramic knives I bought for about $4 each from Target. They each held their edge for about six months before I needed to replace them. But Target doesn’t seem to have them anymore. I miss them. 

And I have added some specialty knives I always wished I had, like a blunt-ended carving knife, a flexible boning knife, and an Asian-style cleaver. 

There is a kind of fetish I have for pots and knives. When I was young, I threw anything in the dishwasher or left them soaking in the sink. Now, I cringe when I see anyone doing that. I wash everything carefully and dry it immediately. I keep a polished gleam on the bottoms of pots. I have always loved dishwashing almost as much as cooking, and almost as much as eating. 

I have settled on a cutting board and I have a drawer full of the implements I use regularly, including a spider and tongs. Almost an antique, I have the shallow-bowl ladle that my grandmother used when I was a wee bairn. It’s one of the few heirlooms in my kit. 

The bane of my existence is storage. I have not enough cabinet space and I really don’t know what to do with all the pot lids: They seem to multiply like gerbils. 

But the cupboards are upholstered to overflow with the ingredients I need: flour, cornmeal, olive oil, baking powder, panko crumbs, canned tomatoes, dried beans and lentils, rice — the cast of thousands. 

And over the years, I’ve collected many sets of dishes, changing them out every few years for variety, which had left me with a pile of back-catalog plates and bowls that I used to have to find a place to store. Finally, I gave most of them away. But I have found a couple of old Dansk dinner plates that are my current standard, along with a nice set of elegantly simple blue-rimmed white-ware. 

So now, to the left of my flat-top electric stove I keep the pots I use regularly

and to the right is my work area, with the salt and oilcan, cutting board and garlic bowl. 

The kitchen is the place you can be creative every day; you build a chemistry experiment out of things you love to put in your mouth. It is an utter delight to have the implements of construction in your toolbox and the means in your larder. 

I love my kitchen, especially now that none of us dare venture out of the house. The kitchen has always been the beating heart where I make my offering to those I love. 

Washing dishes

April 7, 2018
Uncategorized
3 Comments

I am not a religious man, but I have a ritual that I perform every day: I wash my breakfast bowl.

It doesn’t seem like much, especially in this age of dishwashing machines and takeout food on paper plates, but my ritual has a long and meaningful history.

There was a year in my life when I didn’t have a job. I lived with friends in North Carolina and did their cooking and cleaning. Every morning, after breakfast, I washed all the dishes.

To others, dishwashing may seem a boring chore, but to me, it was a time to regain contact with the eons. I could stand at the sink with my hands in the steamy suds and stare out the kitchen window at the leaves blown from their trees.

I stared out the window as I worked, mentally walking down the path behind the house past the tin-roof barn and the wide rolling field where old Mr. Price grew beans and tobacco. On the far side, there was a brook that meandered into a small ravine about a dozen feet deep, wet on its north, sunless side, and dry on the south.

And across the granite that forms the streambed as it cascades through this ravine was a long white stripe of quartz, an igneous dike where molten lava once inched up a joint in the surrounding rock and cooled into quartz bright and shiny against the black of the basalt streambed.

And standing at the sink with my hands glossy with detergent, I could travel upstream into myself the same way, finding, eventually, the glistening evidence of my own deepest thoughts: people I had long forgotten, places I hadn’t remembered being, songs I had sung with my grandmother, and sometimes even peace.

And so I rinsed the hot soap from a dish with scalding water and left it in the drain rack. I reached for the next dish and I thought about other times I have washed dishes.

I recalled the night my son was born. I had been at the hospital for his birth, in the delivery room as he entered the world screaming and miry. After I had taken the usual photos and Annie went back to her room for some well-deserved sleep and the kid was cleaned off and sent to the nursery, I drove home and found a kitchen full of dishes, greasy and smeared, waiting to be cleaned. Annie had been in labor almost two days and, though I had been with her through most of it, I also had gone home periodically for meals.

Those dishes and the ones left over from the dinner at which she started feeling her contractions were scattered all over the house. I filled the sink with hot water and divided up the dishes from the pots and set the plates and silverware into the sink to soak. Steam rose from the suds.

I remember that night; I was in knots, loaded with the new responsibility of a child and desperate with the empty feeling that my wife and I no longer could live together. I stuck my arm into the water and my guts began to relax.

I rinsed the first plate and my mind went blank – the blankness of meditation. My belly loosened and my teeth, which had been gnashing through the nights as I slept for months, relaxed. I rinsed the next plate, and it clicked against the first as I settled it in the drain rack. Soothing.

My problems were not solved, but I could look at the dilemmas I faced without the desperation I had been feeling. My frenzy abated.

Dishwashing became my mantra.

I recall camping with the redhead who succeeded my wife. We were staying in an abandoned farmhouse in a hidden valley of the Blue Ridge. Looking out over the balustrade, we saw the cliff across the glade, the rocky stream that poured down the valley bottom, the second growth in the old farm fields, millions of black-eyed Susans swaying in the breeze. As the sun dropped behind the cliff, I took our supper dishes down to the stream and washed them, scouring them with sand from the creek bottom and rinsing them in the icy water. Billions of fireflies made Fourth of July for us. I left the cold dishes on a large rock to dry overnight.

I recall once seeing a twisting globe of blackbirds rise from the trees and stretch out like the Milky Way across the sky. Hundreds of thousands of birds roosting took flight and spanned the evening sky. I dipped the last pan into the darkened suds and scrubbed it.

When the student asked Zen master Chao-Chou for instruction, the sage answered, ”Wash your bowl.” All philosophies else try to figure out logical ultimates, leaving us, at the end, only a useless ash.

No matter if Plato be right, or Whitehead, or Sartre, the one action that we all share is ”washing our bowl.” No matter if everything Wittgenstein ever wrote is absolutely true, we must act as if he never wrote anything. We still must wash our bowls. If everything is explained, nothing is explained, and we are back on square one. Better to wash your bowl.

So, as I wiped the final grease from the stove top and wiped down the counters and cutting board, I replaced the salt and pepper in the middle of the table and wiped off the tabletop.

All that remained was to rinse the dishrag and dump the greasy suds down the drain, setting the washbasin out to dry. That completed, I dried my hands on a fresh towel and began on one of the day’s other tasks.

Once, long ago, when I visited a friend, Judy Crawford, no longer with us, at her mountain house up near the Plott Balsam mountains of North Carolina, I cooked her a giant meal of coq au vin and I made French bread. We had several friends over and feasted, making such a pile of greasy dishes that we all agreed to let the mess sit overnight. ”I can’t look at the kitchen tonight,” Crawford said.

I woke early the next morning and dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen. It was a little after 6, and the sun was hours from rising over the first peak. I filled the sink and started the dishes. Boonie, her cat, crawled around my ankle, looking up at me, squealing for milk. A few robins and a bluebird were scratching at the ground outside the kitchen window. It was quiet – calm and silent. I finished every last dish before Crawford woke up.

”Golly. You didn’t have to do that,” she said when she saw her shining kitchen. No, I didn’t have to, but I enjoyed it. I was at peace.

Most of what we do in our lives is frivolous – watching TV, fixing the car, reading books, waiting for the bus – but the washing of dishes is important: It is necessary. And it is something humans have been doing since before the days when Abraham lived in Ur. Washing dishes is part of being human.