Man with a Pan

by John Donohue

  Taking things out of it can be a hazard. I make sure neither of my children is nearby. If a frozen block of chicken stock were to tumble out and hit one of them, it could be devastating—the impact might scare them off good food for the rest of their lives.

  Recipe File

  Weeknight Chicken Parmigiana

  This is a very fast, very simple, stripped-down version of the Italian American classic. It’s made without bread crumbs, but browning the chicken in a cast-iron pan compensates for the lack of breading.

  1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil

  1 small onion, chopped

  1 28-ounce can peeled plum tomatoes

  3 or 4 sprigs fresh basil

  6 to 8 ounces spaghetti, linguine, or other pasta of your choice

  1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts

  ½ pound fresh mozzarella cheese, thinly sliced

  ¼ pound Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, thinly sliced

  Prepare a simple marinara sauce as follows (this can be made in advance):

  In a large, heavy-bottomed sauce pot, sauté the onion in the olive oil over moderate heat until completely translucent and soft. Be careful not to brown.

  Crush the tomatoes with a fork or use an immersion blender to puree.

  Add the tomatoes and their juice.

  Reduce until thick, about 20 minutes.

  Top with copious amounts of chopped or torn basil before serving.

  Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Salt heavily. Start cooking the pasta (timing varies based on type of pasta, but plan on about ten minutes for something like spaghetti).

  Slice the chicken breasts in half horizontally, so they are thin.

  Heat a cast-iron skillet, add olive oil, and continue heating until the oil is nearly smoking.

  Place the chicken breasts in the skillet in one layer and brown intensely.

  Turn on the broiler.

  Flip the breasts in the frying pan once they are browned.

  Turn off the stove.

  Top each breast with marinara sauce, basil, mozzarella, more sauce, and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

  Put the skillet under the broiler until the cheese bubbles.

  Place the chicken on a plate.

  Drain the pasta, arrange it on the plate next to the chicken, and top it with the sauce.

  Not-So-Basic Black Beans

  When you eat these beans, you’ll taste why there’s nothing basic about them—they are so rich I sometimes think of them as more of a condiment than a side dish. Long ago, black beans were a staple of my diet, and I used only onion and cilantro to make them. I ate them so often (mostly because they were very cheap) that I couldn’t tolerate them anymore. When I wanted to return black beans to my repertoire, I was determined to make them taste unlike any I’d had before. This is what I came up with.

  3 cups dried black beans

  1 3-inch or so strip kombu seaweed (optional) 1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil, or other oil of your choice

  1 medium onion, diced

  2 strips bacon, finely chopped

  2 carrots, diced

  1 stalk celery, diced

  4 cloves garlic, diced

  ½ cup dry white wine

  1 quart chicken stock

  1 6-ounce can tomato paste

  1 tablespoon cumin, more or less, to taste

  2 teaspoons dried thyme

  Salt and pepper to taste

  Soak the beans with the kombu overnight.

  Rinse and cook the beans in a stockpot with the kombu for at least 2 hours, or until the beans are soft. The kombu will more or less dissolve.

  Rinse the beans and set aside.

  In a second stockpot, sauté the onion in oil until it is translucent, about 5 minutes.

  Add the bacon, carrots, and celery.

  Continue to sauté until the bacon fat is rendered and the vegetables are soft.

  Add the garlic and cook another 2 minutes.

  Turn up the heat and add the beans.

  Add the wine and cook for 3 or 4 minutes.

  Add the chicken stock, tomato paste, cumin, and thyme, and water if necessary.

  Cook for 30 minutes to 1 hour longer to reduce to desired consistency. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  Note: Dried beans need to be soaked overnight, so plan ahead. If you don’t want to spend the time, you can substitute canned black beans; use at least 3 12-ounce cans here and skip the soaking, rinsing, and initial cooking steps.

  I make a big batch of these beans and freeze them. When I want to have dinner, I pair them with rice (which can also be made ahead and frozen), a bag of prewashed spinach sautéed in a pan, and a package of boneless chicken thighs, seasoned with salt and pepper, and sautéed in a frying pan. It makes a delicious, well-balanced meal that comes together with next to no active labor when you want to eat it.

  Kombu is also known as kelp. It helps soften the beans and adds various nutrients to the dish, along with salt. It is available online and at health food stores. To make the beans universally appealing to children, puree them with an immersion blender until smooth.

  JACK HITT

  Putting Food on the Family

  Jack Hitt is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the public radio program This American Life. His work also appears in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and Wired. He is the author of Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain, which has been made into The Way, a motion picture starring Martin Sheen.

  You’re working hard to put food on your family.

  —Presidential candidate George W. Bush,

  Nashua, New Hampshire, January 27, 2000

  I became a man, one might argue, the night I was completely unmanned by a cup of celery leaves. On a frigid night, Lisa, the woman who had just agreed to be my wife, and I were trying out our first house in New Haven. She’d recently been admitted to medical school and had hit the books on a cold afternoon for a six-hour study jag. I had built a fire and snapped open the paper to stumble upon one of those overwrought New York Times food columns: “Curried Red Snapper Chowder.” Every one of those words suddenly read delicious.

  The writer extolled the virtues of this midwinter dish with the romantic-etymology move: “Chaudière refers to the heavy pots Breton fishermen traditionally used to simmer their soup.” Doesn’t that sound all big wool sweatery and crackling fire-y and maybe even tasty? I thought so, too.

  Chowder, the writer elaborated, was “a state of heart and mind more than a specific culinary technique.” There was an existential howl in every bowl, something only Herman Melville and a few lobstermen might understand: “It’s a brace against the whistling winds and quiet nights of the soul …” Maybe I should wear a scarf while I cook?

  The writer really knew how to sell it. Chowder was also “a balm to the free-floating desire for cuddle and comfort.” This was not just a savory dinner; it was a full-blooded narrative, a French movie of a meal that would begin in a kitchen made aromatic by artisanal broths and spiced carrots and end upstairs in a pile of quilts.

  Lisa stepped down momentarily to find me clambering into the house with bags of supplies—fresh snapper bought at the best seafood market and colorful veggies from the local grocer. She glanced down at the newspaper recipe.

  “Hmmm,” she said cautiously, “this violates my old home-ec teacher’s rule: never cook anything with more than one column of ingredients.” Please, I indicated, speaking in the language of my right eyebrow.

  I stood at the counter of that kitchen, a long, roomy work space that ran the length of one wall and opened entirely onto the dining room. It was essentially my stage, and I had set out my props. There were lots of pots and pans and bowls and blenders. I had the ingredients set up in a conga line, my spices preselected. I had bought a plain apron (no dopey slogans, please) of a dark testosterone shade. I was a man in the kitchen, looking for love, confident of a meal.

  In the medieval period of the current culinary renascence—that
is, pre–Food Network—you often heard people say, “I love to cook.” The phrase was merely part of the mating prattle of those long-ago and dark ages. It was a signifier of a grand future ahead, but also of a lived life—a life already so packed with experience that other similar convictions could easily be flicked off: “I hate disco” or “I love Casablanca” or “I never watch television, except The Larry Sanders Show.” These were things that one said but didn’t necessarily have to believe or ever act upon.

  But suddenly, there I was one night, no longer in the pretend world of scrambled eggs and toast. I was in the very muck of a recipe, dealing with the world of hurt and confusion that can come from only three or four words such as “Puree until liquefied. Strain.”

  How is it that straining a quart of my pureed goop only produces four red drops in my five gallon chaudière? Can that be right?

  Then there was this other simple instruction. I read it over and over again:

  Heat the remaining olive oil in a skillet. Fry the celery leaves until crisp.

  Crisp? It’s moments like these when you realize that what you are reading is not really English but rather half a lifetime of kitchen experience compressed into a pearl of culinary haiku. You try it anyway—because you have always considered yourself someone who “loves to cook,” i.e, how hard can it be? As you lay the leaves in the oil, they instantly wilt, curl, and tighten into inch-long chlorophyll threads like the kind you might pop out of a buttonhole in a green cotton shirt. You look back at the words in the newspaper and then stare into your frying pan swimming with thread. What the—?

  You refuse to be defeated, and jump in the car. A few minutes later, you return with two new bunches of celery boasting audacious nosegays of fresh green leaves. Maybe the trick is that you have to lay them carefully into the oil, nice and flat. That makes sense. Of course that’s what it is. You’re a little annoyed that the recipe didn’t just say so. You lay them in nice and flat, and voilà!

  More threads.

  Damn. And you think, How does that single line of instruction even make sense? “Fry celery leaves in oil until crisp.” That scans about as sensically as “Soak until medium rare.” But somehow your soul is on the line here, your manhood in the kitchen. Maybe the oil should be hotter?

  Back in the car. Grin feebly at the same register woman. Four bunches. Cups upon cups of leaves. Into a really hot frying pan—for the love of Christ!—again, swimming with new threads. You read the instruction one more time, then stare into the greening pool of oil. A breakthrough idea: Did Breton fishermen eat crisp celery leaves? I hardly think so. It’s a big waste of time. What was the recipe writer thinking? Moving on. Crisp celery leaves are for silly people.

  The very next line reads: “Score the carrots lengthwise with a channel knife.” A channel knife? Is that just writerly pretense for a regular old knife or is this some kind of special tool that’s actually needed? This chowder of mine occurred before the Internet, so an encounter with the unknown couldn’t be quickly solved. Often I deal with my own ignorance by trying to outrun it. So I read ahead: “Add the remaining celery root …” But your celery was obviously sliced off right at the root. A vague sense that maybe “celery root” is wildly different from “celery” passes through your head.

  But really, does it matter? Who’s even heard of such a thing? Celery root. These chowder people, these chowderheads—they’re such dainty chefs. In an effort to speed things up, you accidentally swipe a bowl—full of forty-five minutes of something painstakingly shredded and soaked—onto the ground in a ceramic explosion. A level of deep frustration sets in.

  Now it’s 9:00 p.m. and you look around your kitchen. Every pot is dirty and half-full of something started and abandoned—or it’s shattered and in the trash. Every bit of counter space is somehow damp, evidence of a whole other tragedy that we’ll just call “homemade carrot broth” and never speak of again.

  The recessed window above the sink is now home to a near forest of denuded celery stalks. What recipe, you wonder, calls for ten bunches of celery? Bowls and spoons are everywhere, and every surface seems to have become a magnet for carrot and potato peels. You yourself are somehow inexplicably soaked, as if you had just stepped off a whaling ship. Your future bride suddenly pokes her head in the door to coyly ask, “Sugar, can I help with dinner?”

  And you find yourself not quite yourself, uttering the following, really, really loudly: “Oh, yeah, well, fuck you! You’re the—I hate everybody. You caused this catastrophe. And if you hadn’t—if only I—you. This shitty kitchen. How come you don’t have a goddamn channel knife? Do you realize—chowder is stupid.”

  Or sentiments to that effect. I have shortened it by four thousand words by editing out the repetitive obscenities. Funny thing is, the chowder tasted fine when we both sat down at the table to eat it. Of course, dining at 1:00 a.m. with a full day of hunger behind you would make old gum taste like pâté.

  * * *

  When I was a little kid, kitchens weren’t anything like what they are today. No one had a stage for a kitchen. Quite the opposite. The kitchen was a place of shame, always located in the back of the house. It was usually beat looking from overuse, with sagging cabinet doors, sunken floors, and scuffed linoleum. The kitchen was the last room in the house anyone spent remodeling money on.

  In Charleston, South Carolina, where the houses are mostly antebellum, many kitchens had once been entirely separate outbuildings (as a fire precaution) and were connected only by narrow hallways. It’s where servants worked, maybe a wife. The door to the kitchen signaled as much. It was a heavy wooden thing, painted white thirty years ago, that swung in both directions, functional like a restaurant’s door or one to the furnace room—not ornamental and oaken like every other door in the house. The kitchen door had a chunk of plastic instead of a handle (framed by a fan of indelible grime) so you could push it open either way with a tray full of fresh food or dirty dishes, depending. This door and the area it opened onto was so dreadful that many families obscured the entrance with a folding screen, preferably one with a soothing Chinese landscape done on rice paper, so that the very entrance to the inferno was hidden from view.

  At one friend’s house where I spent a lot of time growing up in the early 1970s, the owner had a tiny lump in the carpet beneath his foot at the head of the table. With a tap of his toe, he could summon a servant from the bowels of this unwanted place to serve a tureen of, say, overcooked lima beans. In those days, it was impossible to avoid the general assumption that food was something the lower orders fetched up for the higher orders. If you ventured into the kitchen to have a discussion about how food got made with the black maids and carried on in conversation about Low Country crab dishes and red rice and okra gumbo, well, then you were considered an eccentric.

  It wasn’t as if good food wasn’t appreciated, but by and large, food was something that came from the Piggly Wiggly and was cooked. Anything different typically meant that some of the men (and the occasional Annie Oakley–style gal) had gone hunting. Then the men might fry the venison in a mustard sauce, grill the dove breasts wrapped in bacon, or stew the duck meat in a half-day-long concoction called a purloo.

  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 s
hrimp 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.