Man with a Pan

by John Donohue

  But in the late 1970s, something strange began to happen to my wife (perhaps because she was raised in a mill town in central Maine back in the days when environmental protection meant little more than pouring used engine oil at least five hundred yards from the nearest well): she began to lose her senses of taste and smell. By the turn of the twenty-first century, both were almost gone. Over those years, her interest in both cooking and eating have declined. There was a time when my major contributions in the kitchen were making break-fast for the kids and washing dishes. I do more of the cooking now because, left to her own devices, my wife is apt to eat little but cold cereal or sliced tomatoes with mozzarella and a little olive oil.

  Other than baking bread, which used to fulfill me (a thing I rarely do since a Cuisinart bread machine came into our lives), I have never cared much for cooking, and like my mother before me—a good provider and a wonderful person, but not much of a chef—my weapon of choice is the frying pan. Susan Straub, wife of my sometime collaborator Peter Straub, once said, “Give Steve a frypan and a hunk of butter, and he can cook anything.” It’s an exaggeration, but not a huge one. I like to broil whitefish in the oven, and I’ve discovered a wonderful gadget called the George Foreman grill (cleaning it, however, is a pain in the ass), but for the most part I enjoy frying. You can call it sautéing if it makes you feel better—but it’s really just educated frying.

  Turning down the heat is always a wonderful idea, I think. Whether I’m frying hamburgers, making breakfast omelets, or doing pancakes for a pickup supper, the best rule is to be gentle. Frying gets a bad name because people get enthusiastic and fry the shit out of stuff. The grease splatters; the smoke billows; the smoke detectors go off. No, no, no. Show a little patience. Engage in culinary foreplay.

  If you feel the urge to turn a stove-top burner any higher than a little past med, suppress it. You are better served by getting your stuff out of the fridge—your pork chops, your lamb chops, even your chicken, if you’re frying that—and letting it warm up to something approximating room temperature. I’m not talking leaving it out until it rots and draws flies, but if a steak sits on the counter for twenty minutes or so before cooking, it’s not going to give you the belly gripes unless it was spunky to begin with. If you start frying something fresh out of the fridge, it’s maybe thirty-seven degrees. It’s going to cool off your pan before you even start to cook. Why would you do that?

  Be gentle is the rule I try to follow. I can respect the food even if I’m not especially crazy about cooking it (mostly because I can never find the right goddamn pan or pot, and even if I can find the pot, I can’t find the goddamn cover, and where the hell did those olives go—they were right on the bottom shelf in a Tupperware, goddamn it).

  Want to make a really good omelet? Heat a tablespoon of butter in your frypan (on a burner that’s turned a little past med). Wait until the butter melts and starts to bubble just a little. Then go on and sauté your mushrooms, onions, green peppers, or whatever. All this time, you’ve got let’s say five eggs all cracked and floating in a bowl. Put in three tablespoons of milk (if your mother told you one tablespoon for every egg, she was wrong, especially when it comes to omelets) and then beat it like crazy. Get some air in that honey. Let it sit for a while, then beat it some more. When that’s done, you can go on and pour it in with your sautéed stuff. Stir it all around a little bit, then let it sit. When the eggs start to get a little bit solid around the edges, lift an edge with your spatch and tip the frypan so the liquid egg runs underneath. Wait until the eggs start to show a few blisterlike bubbles. Add some grated cheese if you want. Then use your spatula to fold over the most solid part of the omelet. If you want to flip it, you’re either an acrobat or an idiot.

  All on MED heat, plus a little more. The omelet is happy, not even brown on the bottom, let alone charred. A five-egg omelet will serve two hungry people, three “I just want to nibble” people, or ten super-models. And the principle of gentle cooking holds for everything you do on the stove top. If your definition of sautéing is “gentle cooking,” I’m fine with that. You say tomato, I say to-mah-to.

  I also love the microwave … and if you’re sneering, it’s because you think the only things you can do with the microwave are make popcorn and nuke the living shit out of Stouffer’s frozen dinners. Not true. I don’t do recipes, but before I go cook some lamb chops, let me pass on a great fish dish that’s beautiful in the microwave. Simple to make, and a dream to clean up.

  Start with a pound or so of salmon or trout fillets. Squeeze a lemon on them, then add a cap or two of olive oil. Mush it all around with your fingertips. If you like other stuff, like basil, sprinkle some on, by all means, but in both cooking and life my motto is KISS: Keep it simple, stupid. Anyway, wrap your fish up in soaked paper towels—just one thickness, no need to bury the fish alive. You should still be able to see the color through the paper towels. Put the package on a microwave-safe plate and then cook it for six minutes. But—this is the important part— don’t nuke the shit out of it ! Cook it at 70 percent power. If you don’t know how to use the power function on your microwave (don’t laugh, for years I didn’t), cook it on high for three minutes and no more. If you cook a pound of salmon for much more than three minutes, it will explode in there and you’ll have a mess to clean up.

  When you take the fish out of the microwave (use an oven glove, and don’t lean in too close when you open the paper towels or you’re apt to get a steam burn), it’s going to be a perfect flaky pink unless the fillets are very thick. If that’s the case, use a fork to cut off everything that’s done and cook the remainder—very gently—for ninety seconds at 60 percent power. But you probably won’t need to do this. People will rave, and all the mess is in the paper towels. Cleaning up is, as they say, a breeze.

  I’ve learned a few other little things over my years as a cook (always shock the pasta in cold water before removing it from the colander, test steaks for doneness with the ball of your thumb while they’re still on the grill, let the griddle rest if you’re planning on cooking more than a dozen pancakes, don’t ever set the kitchen on fire), but the only real secret I have to impart is be gentle . You can cook stuff people love to eat (always assuming they have a sense of taste) without loving to cook.

  “We must be getting close.”

  Recipe File

  Pretty Good Cake

  I found this recipe, by Scottosman, on the Internet at allrecipes.com and adapted it. It’s simple and it works.

  1 cup sugar

  ½ cup butter

  3 teaspoons vanilla

  ¼ cup milk

  1 cup white flour (or a little more: check your batter)

  2 eggs

  1 stick melted chocolate (don’t expect a chocolate cake, you just get a hint of flavor)

  1½ teaspoons baking powder

  1. Preheat the over to 350°F while you’re getting ready.

  2. Grease a 9 × 9-inch pan with lard or Crisco. I use my fingers.

  3. Mix the sugar, butter, and chocolate into a nice sweet soup.

  4. Beat the eggs, add the vanilla, then add these ingredients to the sweet soup. Start adding the flour and the milk. If you need to add extra flour or milk, do so. Your objective is the kind of batter that made you say “Can I lick the bowl?” when you were a kid.

  5. Put in the baking powder last. Keep mixing, but don’t overdo it.

  6. Bake it for 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

  7. Frosting? You can find lots of recipes for that, both on the Net and in Betty Cooker’s Crockbook, but why not buy a can? It’s just as tasty. Don’t do it until the cake cools.

  IN THE TRENCHES

  Josh Lomask, a forty-one-year-old firefighter, lives in a rambling Victorian house in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. He cooks most nights of the week for his wife, an administrator at a private school, and their twin eleven-year-old boys and ten-year-old boy. Josh’s house has been under renovation since they moved
in more than a decade ago, and all he has at his disposal is a single Broil King burner and an old convection oven.

  Cooking is like building a house. It’s a manual process. But unlike a house, which might take months to build, cooking takes one night, and that gives me a great sense of satisfaction. I’ve read stories that the kitchen staff in restaurants is full of excons. There’s definitely something about cooking that appeals to the masculine side of things.

  I really started cooking when I joined the fire department. Somebody in the station has to do it. You don’t want to be a bully, but I tend to always be involved. I’ll tell a new guy not to stir the rice, or I’ll keep someone from cutting his finger off while chopping an onion. Some guys have no clue. I guess I was that way when I started out.

  I learned by trial and error. Friends who were serious about cooking would have us over for dinner. I’d sit in the kitchen, watching, getting enthused about it, and then go off and try something on my own. I throw myself into things. I have seven carbon-steel knives I bought on eBay over two or three months. It goes in cycles. Lately I’m into air-drying steak for a week in the refrigerator. I guess I just threw myself into the kitchen and never came out of it.

  My parents divorced when I was young, and I was raised by my dad. We lived in a place that didn’t have hot water. This was the seventies, and there were still cold-water flats. The kitchen was barely equipped. It had a toaster oven and at one point a camping stove. I cooked for myself a fair amount, but it wasn’t cooking. It was making egg noodles or opening a Campbell’s soup can. Swanson Hungry-Man dinners were a big part of growing up. I met my wife in high school. We’re basically both type B personalities, though when I’m cooking I can be type A.

  My Farberware convection oven is a pretty serious gizmo. It is not a homeowner’s model. It’s professional. I got it from a friend, the former headmaster of my high school, who is a serious baker. It cooks faster than a normal oven and sometimes drier, which is not always a convenience. My equipment may be primitive, but it goes to show that you don’t need to be too sophisticated to do a fairly good job. We’ve had Thanksgiving for nine here.

  Sometimes my eyes are bigger than my stomach. I’ll go to the butcher, to Fairway, and to some other stores and end up with four different types of meat. And then I get jammed up, with life or with work or with something, and I don’t get the time in the kitchen. I find a chicken I was supposed to cook five days ago, sitting there. I hate to throw out a whole chicken. If I am too busy, my wife will do the whole spaghetti and jar-sauce thing. Or we’ll eat egg noodles. I always have about four bags of egg noodles on hand, ready to go, just in case.

  With both parents working, there’s been a whole generation of neglect in the kitchen. Guys are going to have to learn what fifties housewives must all have known—how to plan a menu and feed a family week by week.

  Recipe File

  Milk-Braised Pork

  I first learned of this dish in Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. It is unbelievably simple and good. Anthony Bourdain also has a nice variation in his cookbook. I prefer to use the Boston butt as Hazan recommends (she likes the vein of fat that runs through it), but I often use a pork loin. This dish always goes over well with roasted potatoes, and if you prefer not to simply reheat leftovers, combining the pork and the potatoes and frying them up in a hash with the gravy on top is terrific.

  1 3- to 4-pound rib roast of pork, Boston butt, or pork loin

  Salt and pepper

  3 cups milk

  ½ cup water

  Season the meat with salt and pepper and brown in a heavy roasting pan over medium heat on the stove top.

  Brown the meat as much as possible without burning it.

  Turn the heat down to medium low, add 1 cup of milk, and braise on the stove top, flipping the meat occasionally, until the milk reduces and starts to break down.

  Add another cup of milk and repeat. This can be repeated once, twice, or even three times. The meat should cook for 2 to 3 hours, depending on the size of the cut. An ideal internal temperature is 145°F to 150°F.

  The milk will reduce and become a rich, brown gravy.

  Remove the meat and let it rest 10 minutes, then slice.

  Skim some fat from the gravy, add ½ cup water, boil for about 3 minutes, then serve with the sliced pork.

  Anthony Bourdain’s recipe adds diced carrot, onion, garlic, leek, a bouquet garni. He also suggests straining the gravy and pureeing it before serving. I’ve tried it and it is great, but nothing beats the simplicity of Hazan’s recipe.

  Double-Crispy Roast Chicken

  I can’t narrow down where I got the idea for flipping the chicken. There are so many different variations. Some recommend starting it on its side and flipping it three times, a quarter turn each time; some say to start breast side up; some say keep it upside down the whole time. I’ve found that, for my oven at least, starting it upside down and flipping it breast side up works best. As for how long to cook it, this is what I’ve found works best in my oven (a small convection one). There is no end to recommendations about how to cook the perfect bird. Just find out what works best for your oven.

  ½ stick butter

  Salt and pepper Herbes de Provence

  1 3- to 4-pound chicken

  2 onions, chopped

  2 stalks celery, chopped

  1 tablespoon flour

  1 cup water

  Milk or half-and-half (optional)

  Preheat the oven to 425°F.

  Melt the butter, pour it into a bowl, and combine it with salt, pepper, and herbs.

  Using your fingers, slather the mixture all over the chicken and under the skin.

  Loosely stuff some of the onion and celery inside the cavity.

  In a roasting pan, place the rest of the celery and onion and enough water to cover the bottom of the pan.

  Put the chicken on a roasting rack, breast side down. Make sure the rack keeps the chicken above the water and allows heat to get all around the chicken.

  Roast the chicken until the skin on top begins to brown and crisp, about 45 minutes.

  Remove the pan and flip the bird (the chicken shouldn’t stick much because of the butter on the skin, but if you like, wipe some oil onto the rack before putting the chicken on it). Return the chicken to the oven and cook until the skin is nicely browned and crisped all around and the internal temperature of the thigh is 165°F, about 1 hour.

  Carefully upend the chicken so that any juice that has collected in the cavity drains into the roasting pan.

  Lift the chicken and place it on a cutting board. Let it rest for 15 minutes, then cut up and serve.

  To make the gravy, remove and set aside as much of the celery and onion as you can.

  Spoon off most of the fat.

  Place the roasting pan on a stove top over low heat.

  Sprinkle in 1 tablespoon of flour and stir to blend the flour and fat.

  Press out any lumps of flour with a spoon, or mix with a whisk.

  Add 1 cup water to deglaze, stirring and scraping up all the remaining browned bits from the bottom of the pan.

  For added richness, you can add a bit of milk or even half-and-half to the gravy.

  Note: Herbes de Provence is a classic mixture of dried herbs from the south of France. It is readily available in the spice aisle of large supermarkets.

  When coating the bird with the herb-butter mixture, for complete coverage there’s no substitute for fingers. This is a bit of a messy process, but it ensures that the butter and seasoning get all over the chicken.

  Also, a bunch of sliced potatoes placed beneath the chicken makes for a greasy yet popular side dish with the chicken. But it makes it impossible to make gravy from the drippings.

  After serving the chicken, there is inevitably a lot of meat left on the carcass. Use your fingers to strip it off and make chicken salad. What’s left of the carcass can be frozen to make stock at a later date.

  PAUL GREEN
BERG

  Heads Up!

  Paul Greenberg is the author most recently of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, National Geographic, Vogue, and many other publications. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow as well as a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow, he lives and works in New York City and Lake Placid, New York.

  My current family food budget is governed by the convergence of two troubling and important phenomena:

  1. The global decline of oceanic fisheries

  2. The rapid and imprudent spending of my book advance

  For the past three years I have been writing a book about the global decline of oceanic fisheries. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars uncovering the truth but have been sent back to the drawing board by my editors no less than four times, rewriting, researching, respending more and more money that I don’t have. It is all my fault. I should have read my contract. Before I can get the second half of my book advance, the editors must vet. The lawyers must vet. The proofreaders must vet. Everyone must vet. But with a family to feed, I can’t offer up “vetting” as an excuse for not putting food on the table.

  Which is why I ended up having to contribute directly to the global decline of oceanic fisheries.

  On a bone-chilling day in February around 3:00 a.m., I stepped aboard the party fishing boat Sea Otter out of Montauk, New York, with the idea of trying to catch some cod. Cod, in case you’re not aware of it, used to be the most astoundingly bountiful source of wild food in the world. Jesus, there were a lot of cod. Those stories of colonists lowering buckets over the rails and pulling up fish? Cod. But like me, humanity blew its advance. If humans had just had a little restraint and caught the majority of the cod every year instead of building the biggest boats ever made and then catching almost all the cod, we and the codfish would be in much better shape. Seriously, if you go to a fishing ground and catch 60 percent of the cod and leave 40 percent of the cod in the water, generally you’ll have enough cod for next year, because your average cod lays millions of eggs and the population can replace itself pretty quickly. But humans didn’t do that. In Atlantic Canada, for example, they caught 95 percent of the cod, and now the cod that are left are runts compared to the behemoths that used to dominate. Humans have artificially selected a whole new race of minicod by catching and eating all the big ones. As a result of all this bad behavior, a pound of cod, which used to cost a few bucks, now retails in New York supermarkets at around fourteen dollars—way out of the ballpark for my food budget.