Man with a Pan

by John Donohue

  For a number of years into my adolescence I was fat. The most vivid sensation I had surrounding food did not involve desserts or dinners but rather the surreptitious imbibing that took place in the afternoons, when I returned to an empty apartment. I would on many occasions pour Nestlé’s Quik chocolate milk mix directly into my mouth. Sometimes I did this with confectioners’ sugar. And once or twice, when there was nothing else, I ate flour. These moments of choking gluttony are embarrassing for me to consider, but I also have to acknowledge that they are an important part of my autobiography of food, and cooking, and eating. They were the moments when fear (of what, I can’t say for sure, though in hindsight the emptiness of the apartment seems a prime candidate) most visibly asserted itself in the pattern of my eating.

  7.

  My wife doesn’t like to cook. I knew this from the beginning. She was forthcoming about it. On one of my first visits to her apartment she pointed to the small stove in her kitchen and said, “I use it to store sweaters.” Apparently Con Ed had called at some point, having noticed that she never used any gas, and suggested that she turn the gas off entirely. She accepted the offer. When I met her she seemed to be living on string cheese and white wine, as far as I could tell. I didn’t mind that she couldn’t cook. The list of what she could do was so much longer and more important. It seemed like a small sacrifice.

  To our marriage I brought a huge enthusiasm for food that encompassed joy in the abundance and life force of the raw materials and it the rituals of eating, the pleasure of white linen. The middle step, between the perusal of the luscious vegetables, the bloody truth of the butcher, the gaping fish laid on ice, on one hand, and the table brimming with candles and plates and huge platters, on the other, was not my forte. The middle step being the actual cooking.

  I never had the presence of mind to prepare for it in advance. There is something in me that values the improvised and feels the best way to achieve it is to back yourself into a corner of necessity, even to the point of panic, at which point there is hardly time for thought, just action, gesture, movement.

  8.

  I started to cook just at the time when the pace of things started to speed up. How is it that a small child both makes every second seem like an eternity and makes the days and weeks vanish in a blink? I started cooking when I couldn’t order out. But the reason for relishing the task surely has to do with a wish to grasp at that Salteresque slowing of time, the wish to hold moments, to feel the stopped time of the family gathered around a table, just before we begin to eat.

  For dinner, we arrange ourselves at a big table, surrounded by book-shelves. I like the ceremony. My wife has mixed feelings. It took her a while to acknowledge some resistance to the idea, perhaps because she has some less-than-joyful memories of family dinners.

  For my part, as the father, I rather like the slight aura of tyranny that comes with demanding that everyone sit down at once. My wife, on the other hand, likes the ceremony of lunch, which she has with our daughter every day. She prepares it and puts it on the low white table in the playroom, two plates of sandwiches covered with two paper towels. I find these covered plates poignant in their furtive anticipation of being discovered.

  We now live for most of each year in New Orleans, a city where food is a religion and all sorts of food is available in restaurants everywhere. We go out, much less frequently take out, but mostly still cook at home, for reasons both spiritual and financial. I have made concessions to planning. And now my wife often cooks. The sheer tidal force of motherhood brought her to the stove. The word feast always seems to lead to the word famine, and with a kid there is no room for these bipolar culinary swings. I like that she is now a cooking partner, and I don’t. I am glad for a break, but I am not crazy about her preference for creamy, buttery French food. I am always striving for a vaguely Asian style, dousing things in teriyaki sauce and sprinkling cilantro everywhere. (When the New York Times ran an article explaining that a vocal minority, to which my wife belongs, hated cilantro, she sent it to me, vindicated, and for a while regularly quoted its remark that some people viscerally associate its smell with that of insects, until I demanded she stop.)

  New Orleans was not a place I ever pined for or even thought much about, but now that I have landed here, I am starting to like it a lot. Even the food, heavy, often fried, is starting to work its way into my desirous palate—the emphasis on seafood, gumbo, blackened fish, cochon de lait, the sweet, vinegary hotness of Crystal sauce, and that most acquired taste, boiled crawfish. A wonderful perk, for me, is the city’s Vietnamese community and the attendant Vietnamese restaurants of the West Bank.

  We have a grill, of course. When I cook, I try to get a white linen tablecloth on the table and light candles. We always eat dinner with our daughter. We’ve raised her very socially. In those crazed, incredible months in Roanoke after she was born, I continued to make wildly ambitious meals and serve them very late. She ate with us then, too. When she became somewhat sentient, at four or five months, we were back in New York for the summer and often took her to restaurants, stayed out late. Once, I looked at my wife as we sat eating at a café in the East Village—not our usual spot—around ten thirty at night, our daughter’s legs dangling out of the stroller, her eyes open, taking in the scene and the food.

  “What are we doing here?” I said, laughing.

  “I don’t know,” my wife said. “But she seems to like it.”

  Flowers, white linen, candelabra, food on large serving plates—I’m transmitting not just food to my daughter in these moments but something else, something almost feminine, something attached to history, to my own mother, and in turn to her mother, who grew up in Germany, oblivious in the way of all well-off German Jews to what was coming. To this grandmother I trace whatever flair I possess in the realm of presentation. The delicacy and ornateness of things. The feeling of gemütlichkeit. The desire to savor, to hold on to, a moment.

  When I cook, my daughter likes to sit near me on the counter and participate somehow. Often I let her hold the fork or knife and I put my hand over hers and we do things together that way. Or I hold her hand over the spatula and we both flip the piece of chicken. Or I put my hand over hers and we both stir the pot with a wooden spoon.

  I think about what I will pass on to my daughter. The tablecloth, the ceremony, the three of us sitting together for a meal. Or the late-night forays into the kitchen when everyone else in the house is asleep and I am again, as in those teenage afternoons, alone in the house, a kind of narcotic, floating feeling coming over me as I open the refrigerator door yet again to see what is inside.

  Recipe File

  Grilled Redfish

  1 pound redfish

  Hoisin sauce

  Red and yellow cherry tomatoes

  Scallions

  Cilantro, to taste

  Eden Shake sesame and sea vegetable seasoning

  Brush the hoisin sauce on the redfish.

  Put the redfish on the grill.

  Close the grill.

  Walk away for some vague amount of time, maybe 10 minutes.

  Chop the scallions and cilantro and cut the red and yellow cherry tomatoes in half.

  Take the fish off the grill and pile the tomatoes, scallions, and cilantro on top.

  Sprinkle with Eden Shake sesame and sea vegetable seasoning, which is a nice mix of black sesame seeds, seaweed, and salt.

  Sprinkle a little fish sauce on top, if desired.

  Serve with salad, rice, and a bowl of buttered edamame out of the shell.

  On the Shelf

  At some point I read an essay by the famous editor and book guy Jason Epstein in the New Yorker that discussed food and, more specifically, shopping for it in Chinatown. I had always loved wandering around Chinatown and eating there. But I hadn’t thought of its markets as anything other than spectacle. Reading him, I thought, Oh, you can actually buy stuff there and cook it—that sounds fun. For some reason I date my understanding of cooking as bein
g part of a larger process of perusing and shopping to my reading that essay. Epstein’s latest book is Eating, but I have not yet read it. When I went to search for Epstein’s food essays online, I could not find any of them. I wonder if perhaps it was just one essay, and maybe it was ten years ago. I have lost all sense of time. Not finding the essay made me wonder if I had imagined this whole thing, but that is another matter.

  KEITH DIXON

  Alternate-Side Cooking

  Keith Dixon is the author of two novels, Ghostfires and The Art of Losing, and Cooking for Gracie, a memoir-cookbook about cooking with and for a child. He is an editor for the New York Times and lives in Manhattan with his wife, Jessica, and their two daughters, Grace and Margot.

  New York City residents who own cars struggle mightily with something called alternate-side parking, in which you’re forced to move your street-parked car once or twice a week (depending on where it’s parked) for an hour and a half or so (depending on where it’s parked) while the revving street cleaner sweeps by, scouring the gutters. After the street cleaner is gone, you scurry back to your desired spot—in time, you hope, to score a parking space just outside your building, where the car will remain until the next time it has to be moved. As long as you remember to move your car every week at the appointed times, you never get a parking ticket, and parking on the street begins to look like a pretty good deal—especially when compared with the extortionate cost of garaging a car in New York.

  No one does this. No one remembers to move the car every week at the appointed times. What you do instead is this: You forget to move the car, and the next time you walk by it you notice that you have a pretty pumpkin-colored parking ticket stuffed under the wiper. At this point you remember that you were supposed to move the car and will now have to explain to your wife that you’re out a hundred and fifteen bucks. After I did this about twenty times, I realized that my only choice was to garage the car full-time and accept the cost as the price of forgetfulness. With the car safely tucked into the garage below my apartment, I assumed that I was finished with alternate-side perils forever. I was wrong.

  A new alternate-side hazard is making itself known in my house-hold. It appeared quietly and stealthily, but it’s there nevertheless. Vexingly, it’s a hazard related to the room of the house I cherish the most, and whose sanctity I strive to protect: the kitchen. Until recently, my rule over this room was both absolute and undisputed, which is exactly the way I liked it.

  That’s all coming to an end now, thanks to this new hazard.

  Let’s call it alternate-side cooking.

  * * *

  I’m a dad who cooks. My dad is also a dad who cooks. One clear difference between us: I treat cooking as a full-time mania (I’m the glazed-eyed fanatic walking aisle six on Tuesday night just for fun), while my dad regarded cooking as more of a creative weekend diversion and a chance to help out a little around the house. He began cooking years ago, when my mother, quite wisely, pulled a Tom Sawyer and managed to convince him that making meals for a large family all the time was lots of fun. His job limited him to cooking on weekends, though, which meant that the laborious work of preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner at least five days a week for me and my three hungry brothers was left almost entirely to my mother.

  In my experience, it’s the person who shows initiative—the person who shows up on time, makes the decisions, and does the actual work—who takes most of the flak for any project, however large or small, almost always from the people who sat idle on the sidelines and contributed nothing. This is truer in the kitchen than anywhere else. Let’s pause here to consider the scorn we’ve heaped on cooks throughout our lives. Most people can’t so much as order a grilled cheese without silently reproaching the cook for something he could have done better or differently, and never mind the fact that he just saved us the effort of making it for ourselves. My mother, stationed so frequently at the stove, suffered the pernicious effects of this carping worse than anyone in our family. In her case, the criticism arrived in the form of “Oh God, are we having this again?” and “I hated this last time we had it.” Anyone who’s been saddled with the unsexy responsibility of feeding a group of people over and over and over knows what’s at work here: even the most capable cook can keep only so many recipes straight in her mind, which means reliable recipes are bound to be repeated at some interval—and repeats, it turns out, are easy targets for teenage scorn. Old grudges are revived for the reappearance of the chicken pot pie, the baked fish, the spaghetti squash. And even if you did like it last time around, familiarity eventually breeds a faux contempt. A mutinous air often hovered over our dining table, and many recipes that might have been well received were scuttled by a single withering remark.

  Then, seemingly without warning, it would be Saturday night, and my father would arrive on the kitchen scene. These were alternate-side cooking days. We were already in a good mood (it was the weekend, after all), so a quality of carefree delight colored the proceedings, perhaps abating some of our suspicions. What would he make this time? Who knew? Venison stew, perhaps, or maybe steak Diane. What about smoked brisket? He’d had all day or even all week to think it over. My father would chop and sear and stir with no small amount of pleasure. When the dinner bell was rattled (literally: we had a cowbell), the four boys, who’d been playing Wiffle ball or chasing Hail Mary passes or doing laps in a pool all afternoon and were therefore extremely hungry, would bolt to the kitchen table and begin shoveling down whatever was on offer. Without the reliable “Oh God, are we having this again?” ammunition, and with the added enhancement of the exercise-amplified hunger, these weekend meals tended to be better received. Dad would enjoy the moment; but my mother would feel the slight sting of resentment. She’d cooked all week long, after all, but he got the glory. Neither spouse was at fault—marriage and modern life were exerting their normal pressures. My mother was working hard to run the household; my father was trying to contribute on the weekend, when he had more time around the house. Yet the difficulty was unmistakably there, and the situation showed its sinister designs. There were no tickets written up in those days for alternate-side cooking violations, not literally—but the tally was kept. Fines were levied and infractions were noted. In my childhood household, alternate-side cooking led to quite a few recriminations and even some outright arguments.

  Twenty-five years later, a similar antipathy is making itself known in my own household. My stove is under siege. The assault is being staged by my wife, Jessica, who was all too happy to leave the cooking to me for half a decade but has recently discovered a desire to cook again. Worse still, she’s begun dreaming up meals for our three-year-old daughter, Grace. Worst of all, Grace—who has always loved my cooking and regarded me as a striding knight of santoku and whisk and waffle iron—likes my wife’s cooking as much as, and sometimes more than, mine. Soups, in particular, are a tense battleground. Cooking has always been my favorite way to connect with my daughter—I love knowing that even if I’ve been away from her all day at work, it’s my food she’s eating at every meal. But the tenuous father-daughter mealtime thread is being threatened.

  For most people, this would seem to be a sort of antidilemma. Most people want the other spouse to do more in the kitchen, and welcome the presence of someone trying to muscle in on their territory. I suppose the surprise and hurt and (yes) jealousy I felt was amplified by the fact that the change took place through a keen prism of female cunning, which means it happened without my even realizing it—suddenly the change was just there, like a new window treatment in the bedroom, or a vase of tulips on the hall table. The signs of the takeover were subtle but unmistakable: First, my chicken stock began to go missing. (And any serious cook knows that you don’t filch someone’s homemade chicken stock without asking. You just don’t do that.) Then I noticed that leftovers I’d casually set aside for Gracie had gone uneaten. “Did you have lunch out?” I’d ask, and Jessica, to throw me off the trail, would answer with an enig
matic “No.” One afternoon she casually inquired as to my secret for cooking a quality lentil soup (onions, deeply caramelized). Days later I caught her in blazing crime, as guilty as Lady Macbeth, when I discovered the remains of a batch of lentil soup in the refrigerator that was not of my making!—meager remains, I might add, as if the party it was served to had seriously enjoyed it and was reluctant to leave any behind.

  I stood gaping at the remains of this soup, probably with my mouth open, and then, acting on instinct, I hollered into the next room, “Did someone bring over lentil soup today?”

  Again, that enigmatic “No.”

  Well, I put two and two together and figured out what had happened: My wife had cooked a meal for my daughter. Worse, Gracie had liked it. Mentally I wrote Jessica tickets for a number of alternate-side cooking violations: Failure to Yield Right-of-Way, Failure to Signal a Lane Change, Driving without Proper Identification.

  New York City kitchens aren’t engineered to be occupied by three people. Our kitchen is larger than most, but still, every other minute or so I whirl around, boiling saucepan in hand, and find myself mere kissing distance from my wife. More often than not, she’s carrying a boiling saucepan, too. We do the Excuse Me Tango and the Let Me Sneak By You Waltz. I watch what she has going in her pan out of the corner of my eye and notice that she’s doing the same.

  Gracie pounds her spoon on the chopping block and says, “Eat! Eat! Eat!”

  Jessica and I look at each other.

  I think, Well, who’s going to feed her?

  Eventually we get that worked out, and if the person tapped to cook was Jessica, I watch how Gracie receives her dinner with no small amount of interest. Sometimes I’m sure these women are in cahoots. Symmetrically, Gracie has begun an amusing mealtime habit—she loves to spoon what she has in one cup into the contents of another; she also loves to take whatever we’ve served her to drink (milk, juice, soda water) and mix it into whatever food we’ve served her, making a point of following this with a stir, stir, stir motion. What she would appear to be doing here is a Gracie version of cooking.