Man with a Pan

by John Donohue

  Spaghetti all’Amatriciana. With tomatoes and onions: Step 1 is the same. Remove the pancetta with a slotted spoon and, in the juices left behind, sauté a medium onion, sliced, over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until well softened, about 10 minutes. Turn off the heat and let the mixture cool a bit. Stir in 2 cups chopped tomatoes (canned are fine; drain them first) and turn the heat back to medium. Cook the sauce, stirring occasionally, while you cook the pasta. When the pasta is done, drain it and toss it with the tomato sauce, the reserved pancetta, and at least ½ cup of freshly grated Pecorino Romano or Parmesan cheese.

  Spaghetti with Bacon and Fennel: Step 1 is the same. Remove the pancetta with a slotted spoon and, in the juices left behind, sauté a medium bulb of fennel, sliced, over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until well softened, about 10 minutes. Turn off the heat if the pasta isn’t ready. When the pasta is done, drain it and toss it with the fennel, the reserved pancetta, and at least ½ cup of freshly grated Pecorino Romano or Parmesan cheese.

  Pasta with Bacon and Dried Tomatoes: Step 1 remains the same. Remove the pancetta with a slotted spoon and turn the heat to medium low. In the juices left behind, gently cook ½ cup sliced or chopped dried tomatoes. Keep the heat on, and when the pasta is done, add a couple of tablespoons of the reserved pasta-cooking water to the tomatoes and stir until they absorb the water and plump a bit. Add the reserved pancetta and the pasta and at least ½ cup of freshly grated Pecorino Romano or Parmesan cheese.

  On the Shelf

  The most important books to me are all old; obviously, many people are doing great work, but nothing has become a part of my daily life the way these old ones have. You can still see the influence of all of these in my work, every year.

  James Beard’s Theory and Practice of Good Cooking, James Beard. This book is not exactly basic; it’s much more personal than that. But it’s a personal work by the greatest American cook of all time.

  Art of Good Cooking, Paula Peck.

  Revolutionary and thoughtful book by a home cook who never got the attention she deserved. Also, her Art of Fine Baking.

  Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, Marcella Hazan.

  This timeless work is simply the book that brought Italian home cooking to the States.

  Classic Indian Cooking, Julie Sahni.

  Sahni did for Indian cooking what Hazan did for Italian. Anyone can learn the basics of Indian cooking here.

  North Atlantic Seafood, Alan Davidson.

  Honestly? This book is no longer relevant—the seas have been so overfished that half of these species are rarely seen—but to me, it was crucial.

  IN THE TRENCHES

  The Georgia native Christopher Little is a thirty-seven-year old guidance counselor and football coach at Southwest DeKalb High School, in Atlanta. He has a catering business on the side called One Man, One Oven. He has three children—a twenty-three-year-old adopted daughter, a ten-year-old daughter, and a six-year-old son. He’s been married for twelve years.

  When my wife and I first got married, we went into it with unspoken expectations that she would do the cooking, I would do the lawn work, and so forth. About two years into the marriage, there was some frustration because she’s not a cook. It’s not her thing. So you’re talking about a couple of years of having a lot of Mylanta and Milk of Magnesia in the house. We had to sit down and have a heart-to-heart talk about the roles in the marriage, and we agreed that I would do the cooking.

  I knew how to cook from spending time with my grandmother. Growing up, I would spend the summers with her, and when the other kids were out playing, I would be in the kitchen with my grandmother. I was one of those kids who always liked to talk to older people for some reason. I even married an older woman. I would sit and talk to my grandmother, and before you know it, I’m cutting butter and flour to make biscuits, she’s showing me how long to cook an egg. I just kind of learned and didn’t know I was learning.

  When I went to high school, we had the home-ec courses and that sort of thing, and I took all of those. For my eleventh-grade prom, I cooked dinner for my date at my house instead of taking her to a restaurant like everyone else. I even remember what I made: stuffed pasta shells with four or five different cheeses and a marinara sauce and a light salad. I’m really big into cheesecake, so I made a cheesecake. The prom went well and we dated for two years after that.

  In college, my dorm room or apartment was always the hangout spot. After Friday classes my friends would come over and drink beer, and I would be cooking. I’d make a Low Country boil. Everybody would bring something and I would cook it. A Low Country boil has potatoes, corn, and sausage. You can even put crawfish and shrimp in it. Once you finish boiling it, you drain the water off and just literally throw it on the table. I still make it for my family.

  These days I do all the cooking around the house. During the football season I cook multiple meals on Sunday because that seems to be the easiest day to get it all done. Not only do my wife and I have a busy schedule, but the kids have a busy schedule. They’re going to basketball, baseball, and softball, soccer, chorus, after-school activities, and so forth. I cook everything and kind of box it up, if you will, or put it in containers, so when they get home it’s just a matter of scooping out the food and sticking it in the microwave.

  I do all the shopping, too. We have a twenty-four-hour grocery store nearby, and I usually do it at four or five in the morning. The reason I do it then is twofold. It’s not just because I’m short of time during the day, but when you work in the school system like I do, you see your students and their families when you go out. If you go on a Saturday during the day, and you bump into two or three parents, your shopping trips then turns from one hour into three hours, because people want to stop and talk to you and chat.

  My job is complicated. In the weeks before this interview, a student was in a severe accident, and three other students were arrested for murder. Cooking is my sanctuary. When I come home and cook, it’s an opportunity for me to quiet my mind down and get my thoughts together and just do something that I really enjoy. The satisfaction is seeing my family enjoy the food, seeing the people that I cater for enjoy the food, seeing my co-workers enjoy the food. That keeps some sort of balance in dealing with the drama that I run into during the day.

  Recipe File

  Low Country Boil

  This recipe was handed down from my granny.

  Old Bay seasoning to taste (about 1 cup for 5 gallons of water)

  6 12-ounce cans Coors or other beer

  5 pounds potatoes (3 pounds white and 2 pounds red)

  3 16-ounce packages of turkey sausage (any sausage will work, but use turkey to cut down on salt compared to a pork-based sausage)

  10 ears corn, husks and silks removed, broken in half

  5 to 6 pounds crawfish (if budget allows, use whole crab)

  4 to 5 pounds fresh shrimp, peeled and deveined

  Newspapers

  Heat a large pot of water over an outdoor cooker. A turkey fryer usually works well.

  Add the Old Bay seasoning and beer, then bring to a boil.

  Add the potatoes and sausage and cook for about 10 minutes.

  Keep the heat so the pot is at a medium boil.

  Add the corn and crawfish and cook for another 5 to 6 minutes.

  Add the shrimp when all the other ingredients have been cooked almost to completion.

  Cook all the ingredients for an additional 3 to 4 minutes (at this point there should be enough heat in the pot so that the flame can even be turned off).

  Drain off the water and pour the contents out onto a table covered with newspaper for easy cleanup.

  Plates are optional.

  Enjoy.

  JIM HARRISON

  Chef English Major

  Jim Harrison is the author of over thirty books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including Legends of the Fall, The Road Home, Dalva, and his recent collection of novellas, The Farmer’s Daughter. A member of the Amer
ican Academy of Arts and Letters and the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has had work published in twenty-seven languages. Harrison now divides his time between Montana and Arizona.

  “Nobody can tell you nothing,” my dad used to say. He was actually well educated but regularly used a remnant of rural bad grammar for emphasis. The off-the-wall arrogance that allowed me to become a novelist and poet didn’t pan out in the kitchen, and it has taken me nearly fifty years to become a consistently acceptable cook. I still have grand lacunae. I have never successfully baked a loaf of bread or made a soufflé that rose higher than its liquid batter.

  I do well with fish, wild piglets, chicken, elk, venison, antelope, doves, grouse, woodcock, varieties of wild quail, and sharp-tailed grouse but not so well with Hungarian partridge in our present home in Montana. The key to any failures has always been arrogance and perhaps too much alcohol. Once while having an after-lunch drink with the famed chef André Soltner, of Lutèce, he said that when hiring the young for his kitchen, within a day they want to create a salsa. “As for myself I have invented nothing. I only cook French food,” he said. This seemed not quite true, because in answer to my question he rattled off a half-dozen possibilities for Muscovy duck, a large fowl and difficult to master. My problem here is an errant creativity that befits the page rather than the kitchen.

  There are obvious and somewhat comic limitations for the self-taught golfer, tennis player, or cook. With the latter it’s not all in the recipe, but that’s a start. About forty years ago when my oldest daughter was ten and my wife was taking late-afternoon tennis lessons, my daughter said, “Dad, don’t you think we should follow the exact recipe at least the first time out?”

  What a preposterous idea! Was my own daughter quelling my creativity? Of course. And of course she was right. I was blundering through one of Julia Child’s epically complicated seafood dishes while she was studying the recipe in detail. Here we were, stuffing sole, when making the mortgage payments of ninety-nine dollars a month on our little farm in northern Michigan was a struggle.

  I was struck in graduate school by Arnold Toynbee’s notion that great cuisines come from an economy of scarcity. By common consent we are dealing with the Chinese and the French, throwing in the Italians as third. By extension this is why it’s hard to get a good meal in Iowa or Kansas, where they have everything. In our own case it was a long period of near poverty, averaging about twelve grand a year for fifteen years during my apprenticeship as a poet and novelist. We ate very well because my wife has always been a far better cook than I. My specialties were shopping for food and studying recipe books. My wife had the specific advantage of not cooking with her ego. As a fisherman and hunter I was always good at “bringing home the bacon.” In the rural areas in which we lived, wild game and fish were in plenitude, and since I learned how to fish and hunt early in life, wild food plus our big garden was a large part of our eating. Luck plays a goodly part in hunting and fishing, assuming you’ve mastered technique. I recall one cold spring evening coming home with five lake trout that had a combined weight of sixty pounds from nearby Lake Michigan, and one day during bird season my French friend Guy de la Valdène and I came home with nine grouse and seven woodcock. The next day he was startled when a friend of mine stopped by and gave me an “extra” deer. A gift deer in France would be a very large gift indeed.

  For the man who cooks perhaps twice a week, the prime motive in cooking is to have something to eat worthy of your heart’s peculiar desires. In my own critical view, 99.9 percent of restaurants in America are in themselves acts of humiliation. When you live rurally and remotely, good restaurants are rare, and there were long periods when if a good restaurant did exist in our area, it was rarely visited because we couldn’t afford the tab. It was the same when I lived in New York City at nineteen and my weekly salary of thirty-five dollars was split evenly between room rent, food, and beer, and the recreation, other than chasing girls, was to walk the streets reading restaurant menus pasted to doors or windows. The restaurants were so far out of the question that I felt no envy. One evening in the White Horse Tavern, I won two bucks in an arm-wrestling contest and immediately turned the money into a large corned beef sandwich. There was a place near Times Square where you would get a big piece of herring and two slices of rye bread for fifteen cents. When you’re nineteen, you’re propelled by the noncalorie fuel of hormones, so much so that when I’d return home to Michigan, my father would regard my skinniness and say that I might eventually return home weighing nothing. At that age you’re always hungry but are too scattered to figure out how to address the problem.

  Cooking is in the details and is not for those who think they must spend all their time thinking large. This morning I burned my Jimmy Dean hot pepper sausage patty because I was on the phone speaking with a friend about another friend’s cancer. Yesterday morning I ruined a quesadilla by adding too much salsa because I was busy revising a poem. How can I creatively and irrelevantly interfere with a proper quesadilla? It’s easier to screw up while cooking than while driving, both of which suffer grossly from inattention.

  You start with hunger and then listen to the chorus, small, of two daughters and a wife. If the weather is fair you look out the window at one of your several grills and smokers and then head for the freezer or grocer’s. When cooking solo at the remote cabin we used to own and sadly lost, everything depended on my captious moods, which in turn depended on how well the work went that day and the nature of the possibly bad news from New York or Los Angeles. Your immediate survival can depend on the morale boost of a good dinner. I recall a day when I got fired (for arrogance) yet again from Hollywood, and the murk of the dismissal was easily leavened by grilling five illegal baby lake trout, about a foot long, over an oak fire, and basting them with dry vermouth, butter, and lemon. Minor disappointments over an inferior writing day could be leavened with a single chicken, half-basted with a private potion called “the sauce of lust and violence.” This recipe was hard to screw up, so you could easily consume a full bottle of Côtes du Rhône during preparation.

  I’ve talked to a couple of prison wardens about how food is the central morale item for we caged mammals, which seems to include all of us. At the cabin I’d even walk a couple of hours to ensure a sturdy enough appetite to enjoy a meal. I have regularly observed in both New York City and Paris that intensely effete cooking is designed for those without an actual appetite. You have to be a tad careful about your excesses, because you can’t make a philosophical system out of cooking, hunting, baseball, fridge, fishing, or even your sexuality. Life is brutal in its demand for contents, but the very idea of leaving out cooking mystifies me. Life is so short; why would one not eat well or bring others to the pleasure of your table?

  Men learning to cook often start with the BBQ grill, perhaps because they have been roasting meat over fire for a couple of hundred thousand years. Of course women do it equally well, but then they must think, Let the dickhead go at it, I’m tired of doing all the cooking. There is no better insurance for a long-lasting marriage than for couples to cook together or for men to engineer the meals a few times a week to release their beloved from the monotony.

  It is quite impossible for a man to do anything without a touch of strutting vanity, and as the years pass, a man will trip over his smugness in the kitchen or at the grill. A friend who is normally a grill expert got drunk and literally incinerated (towering flame) a ten-pound prime rib in front of another friend who had laid out the two hundred bucks for the meat, which tasted like a burned-out house smells. And there must be hundreds of thousands of one-dish neophyte cooks. You hear, “Wait until you try Bob’s chili,” or “You won’t believe Marvin’s spaghetti sauce!” as if there were only one. Bob’s chili had a large amount of celery in it, which exceeds in heresy the idea that God is dead, while Marvin’s pasta sauce had more oregano in it than a pizzeria would use in a week.

  Currently the overuse of rosemary among bad cooks in America must be v
iewed as a capital crime. The abuse of spices and herbs is a hallmark of neophyte cooking and enjoyed only by those with brutish palates. I admit my guilt early on in this matter, recalling the upturned faces of my daughters and recalling their glances: “What in God’s name did you put in here, Dad?” Trying to cater to youthful and captious appetites is demanding indeed.

  I admit to obsessions that by definition can’t be defined, as it were. Once on my way north to the cabin, I stopped in an Italian deli in Traverse City, Folgarelli’s, which helped enlighten the eating habits of the area, and told the proprietor, Fox, that I needed seven pounds of garlic. Fox was curious about what restaurant I owned and I said it was just me at my cabin, where the nearest good garlic was a 120-mile drive. To start the season in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where many years there still was remnant snow on the ground in May, I needed to make a rigatoni with thirty-three cloves of garlic, in honor of the number of years Christ lived. Fox, aka Folgarelli, seemed sympathetic to my neurosis as he built my sandwich out of mortadella, imported provolone, salami, and a splash of Italian dressing. Food lovers are sympathetic to each other’s obsessions. Many years later when I sat down in France with eleven others to a thirty-seven-course lunch (only nineteen wines) that took thirteen hours, no one questioned our good sense. Nearly all the dishes were drawn from the eighteenth century, so there was an obvious connection to the history of gastronomy, though in itself that wouldn’t be enough to get me on a plane to Burgundy. When asked dozens of times what it cost, a vulgar American preoccupation, I have a uniform answer: “About the price of a Volvo, but none of us wanted a Volvo. We also saved money by not needing dinner.”

  So I muddle along, learning and relearning. The biggest corrective in my cooking was to become friends and acquaintances with a number of fine chefs. Early on it was Alice Waters and Mario Batali. My friendship with Mario led me on to Tony Bourdain. When my seventieth birthday came up, Mario, April Bloomfield from the Spotted Pig, and Adam Perry Lang came out from New York City, and Chris Bianco from Phoenix. We had a dozen lovely courses, ending with 1937 Château d’Yquem, 1937 Madeira, and 1938 Armagnac to get close to my birth year. On another trip, Mario brought Loretta Keller from San Francisco, and Michael Schlow from Boston, the fastest knife I’ve ever seen.