by Daniel Duane
In any case, I began to wonder if Vegetables might play such a role in my own life—not social catapult so much as the job performed by Ephron’s Holy Trinity and Alice’s Jackson Five, that of the personal culinary scripture. Objectively speaking, there’s something a little heartless about Vegetables. The recipes work beautifully, they embody a remarkably complete and timeless approach to plant foods, and yet they seem studiously to avoid any evidence of having emerged from a particular mind at a particular time. If you were in a cynical frame of mind, the natural conclusion might be that somebody simply canvassed recipes from all the Chez Panisse cooks and wrote up an introduction. If you weren’t, you might deduce that this was an intentional way of positioning the book as a classic. And I was definitely not in a cynical frame of mind; I was in the same state of spiritual yearning that got Lindh flying to Pakistan and learning to fieldstrip an AK-47, in hopes of slaughtering the Infidel. The very impersonality of Vegetables, in other words, allowed me to read it as supra-personal, as if it were not just a marquee title by America’s most influential cook but rather my own hometown’s time-tested manual for domestic excellence. Viewed in that light, the book’s A–Z quality—inviting me to cook every recipe therein—felt like a gift, presenting a crystal-clear path to a body of knowledge that appeared just as complete and compelling as Mein Kampf has to other vulnerable souls, at other vulnerable moments.
PART TWO
The Alice Years
3
Recipes Are for Idiots Like Me
Anybody who’s ever loved a cookbook—truly loved a cookbook, every page a wonderland—has met one of those depressing Recipes Give Me a Headache people, like a particular friend of my father’s. A Berkeley lawyer I’ll call Lisa, she happened to count Alice among her sometimes clients. So I mentioned to Lisa this plan of mine, with Vegetables. I told her that Liz had been slipping ever deeper into sleepless confusion, and no longer cared much what I made for dinner, as long as I cooked a lot of it quickly and kept ample ice cream around. As a result, I’d begun to find my legs in the kitchen, savoring especially my newfound authority to make a mess while I ripped through such oddities as Brussels Sprouts Pasta, Chanterelle Pasta, or something called Chard, Spinach, and Escarole Pasta.
“And when you cook,” asked Lisa, “how closely do you follow Alice’s recipes?”
“Spot-on religiously,” I replied.
Take Wild Mushroom Pasta Gratin, a kitchen-destroying combination of mushrooms, cream, and noodles, which I’d slammed out right after Whole-Wheat Pasta with Cauliflower, Walnuts, and Ricotta Salata, and right before the ultimately tragic Wild Mushroom and Greens Ravioli (more soiled pots and cluttered counters than you’d believe; amateurs shouldn’t fuck around with ravioli). I’d started by pushing aside some dirty lunch dishes to make room for a bowl filled with hot water and precisely one ounce of dried porcinis, which turned out to be three expensive bags’ worth, because each bag hardly weighed anything. Liz was bathing little Hannah in a tiny plastic tub while I opened the fridge and rummaged around for butter. Then I portioned out precisely one tablespoon of butter and located our smallest saucepan—likewise in the sink—and scrubbed it clean. While the butter melted, I dug around in the sink yet again, fishing out measuring spoons still dirty from buttermilk pancakes. I found the flour where I’d left it during the very same project, and I measured one tablespoon of that flour into the butter. Liz was nursing Hannah while I measured out a shocking cup of heavy cream—cardiovascular suicide, as far as I could tell. Then there was this unusual move of spooning in two to three tablespoons of that porcini rehydration water—mushroomy flavor, I guessed—and clearing still more crap off the stove to free up yet another burner for simmering the cream, porcini water, flour, and butter, together with a little store-bought chicken stock. While it was all bubbling and spattering—Liz done nursing, singing lullabies to Hannah—I moved a particularly annoying pile of dirty baby bottles and beer cans from one counter to another. I rinsed my old dull knife so that I could chop eight ounces of chanterelle mushrooms—amazingly expensive—and then sauté them in butter and …
“No, no, no, no,” said Lisa, Alice’s sometimes-lawyer. “I can’t hear any more about this.”
“What?”
“Ugh. It makes me sick just hearing about all those little amounts. I’m a very good cook, actually. I’m really quite good. But I do my own thing. I mean, I look at cookbooks for ideas, but that’s it.”
Jane Kramer, writing in the New Yorker, describes a similar friend getting a headache “just by looking at the teaspoon measurements for thyme and garlic in a coq au vin.” I believe that my mother fell into this same camp. Not that Mom ever let on: “What a fabulous idea!” Mom exclaimed, regarding my Vegetables project, but I caught a telltale blankness in her loving eyes, some part of Mom’s mind recognizing the personality gulf between us. Cooking wasn’t something she’d ever had to discover, or fret about, or explore. She simply cooked, with pleasure but without pretension. Meatloaf, cinnamon toast, spoon bread, lasagna and cheesecake for my every birthday: I recall all of this with a tingling warmth. And yet I do not recall a single cookbook ever present in our home, except an old copy of Joy of Cooking. Nor do I recall a single food magazine. When I think of Mom cooking even her Classy Dinner Party Beef Stew, I picture her peacefully puttering away in our puny kitchen, adding a dash of this and a drop of that, finding her way toward a great meal. None of these people, however—neither Mom, Kramer’s friend, nor Alice’s lawyer—had ever looked toward cookbooks for immutable laws of action during a period of intense personal disorientation. None of them had ever needed cookbook recipes to dictate the very movement of their limbs through space, minute by minute, hour upon hour, during the tense passage of a young family’s no-sex, no-restaurant evenings, the future ever more daunting.
Alice herself commanded, in the Vegetables introduction, that I should “never cook slavishly, rigidly following a recipe and thoughtlessly adhering to the measurements it gives… . Trust your intuition and your own taste.” But if Alice had been standing before me, wagging a finger, I would have protested to my teacher that, for a man lacking both intuition and taste, recipes qualify as oxygen: they make life possible, if and only if one lives and breathes by them. Only in following every instruction to the letter, see, could I hope to learn what the hell food was supposed to taste like in the first place. Improv is just fine if you’ve made tens of thousands of meals and long since learned that, say, lemon juice in a salad dressing plays the part of the acid, balancing the oil. If you’ve never made a salad dressing in your life, you might think that the lemon juice was all about a vaguely citrus-like flavor, and that orange juice might work, too. What would you learn then, except that you’re a shitty cook who ought to follow recipes?
Clearly, I had more in common with certain other friends described by Kramer, like the Los Angeles couple who “read cookbooks aloud to each other in bed, as part of what could be called their amatory ritual” or the couple in Berlin who “nearly divorced over an argument about which cookbooks to pack for a year in Cambridge.” Okay, I’m overstating it: Liz would never have seen anything amatory about reading a cookbook together, unless it happened to be Bayless, and I was diving in just to please her. But I had yet to consider a move like that. My point is just that I was closer to Kramer herself, seeing cookbooks as “like the lipsticks I used to buy as a tenth grader in a Quaker school where not even hair ribbons or colored shoelaces were permitted. They promise to transform me.” And sure, while the young Kramer hungered for a ticket into the more illicit aspects of adulthood, I needed a recipe for middle age, a way to maintain a sense of self. The spirit was the same, though, and I’ve been consistently surprised by how few people share it.
Take my only cooking-obsessed friend, Ignazio, a midforties Italian always laughing happily at the out-of-control absurdity of his own messy but wonderful life. I didn’t actually know Ignazio back when I started cooking. We met more recently, through mutual f
riends. But my wife likes his wife, Heather, a pretty American redhead, and their kids are close in age to our daughters. I love stepping out of the elevator in Ignazio’s building into his sun-flooded third-floor apartment in North Beach, a few blocks off Fisherman’s Wharf in the old Italian neighborhood. My daughters run immediately to Giovanni’s room, the wives retire to the couch with a cocktail, and Ignazio and I make like modern men, heading into the room we both like most, the kitchen. Opening Ignazio’s oven, I typically inhale the deep aromas of a big roast, a leg of lamb maybe, fragrant with hot thyme and rosemary, and that’s when it begins, the conversation we always have.
“God, you’re such a good cook,” I say. “That smells so good.”
“Oh, no, no. It’s stupid, the way I cook!” Ignazio replies, in his thick Italian accent. “It’s really stupid. I wish I could learn to use cookbooks the way you do, but I just don’t. I don’t know why I don’t, but I don’t. But I find it so incredibly interesting that you can use cookbooks, Dan. You’re so disciplined, and you have so much patience. I don’t have that patience. And your food is always so good! It’s so interesting!”
To some degree, we’re just acting out the new male Kabuki, dinner-party version: “Oh my God, bro, I cannot believe you’ve gone to so much fucking trouble! You are such an awesome cook! And you make it look so easy! My wife is just absolutely going to fucking leave me and move in with you!”
“No, no, no. Dude. I’m not a good cook at all. I’m a fucking shitty cook! But you’re the best fucking cook in the world. I’ve told absolutely everybody at the gym about those double-thick porter houses you grilled last time!”
And yet, there’s something real at work, some genuine gulf between Ignazio and myself. Cookbook obsession, Kramer has argued, is a distinctly British and American phenomenon. Italians, by contrast, have long viewed the very owning of a cookbook—or at least any cookbook beyond a couple of culturally approved Italian culinary encyclopedias, such as The Silver Spoon—might carry the implication that Mama, and therefore Italy herself, had failed to pass along the heart of Italian culture. Fiorenzo Andreoli, an Italian chef quoted by Kramer, voices precisely this anti-recipe chauvinism when he says, derisively, of his time in San Francisco restaurants, that everybody he met out there “cooked with his nose in a cookbook.”
I shared all these thoughts with Ignazio during our most recent meal together, over at his place. Heather, his wife, said that Ignazio’s very own mother, during her semiannual San Francisco visits to hang out with the grandkids, was often viciously critical of Ignazio’s cooking (“You call that pesto!? My own son!?”), as if to reassert the primacy of her own judgment, and to reinforce Ignazio’s faithful understanding that Mama’s cooking, the cooking of the Italian people, and the universal Good Cooking of the human race were all one and the same, inseparable. Ignazio laughed, too; we’d all had a lot to drink, and we’d eaten too much, and Ignazio takes every opportunity to be unsentimental about Italy and the Italians. He even hoped to pitch a reality TV show, he said, in which he and his mother would go around to Italian American restaurants and sample the food and say mean things. A fair-minded soul, however, Ignazio volunteered interesting evidence to support my core point: his grandfather had been a professional chef, as had many of his other male relatives, and every single dish his mother ever made was an established, time-tested part of the Milanese cultural repertoire, long since mastered by members of his own family. Every dish Ignazio had ever eaten while growing up, therefore, had come from a recipe—one handed down orally, perhaps, but a recipe nonetheless—and he’d have to have been a genuine half-wit not to have absorbed all of those recipes through the very pores of his own skin.
It’s not just the Italians, either: I’ve also been on the receiving end of anti-recipe prejudice through a friend named Sammy, owner of the Bi-Rite Market, which happens to be my favorite San Francisco grocery store. I dropped by one day, to pick up a few things for Alice’s Radish, Fennel, and Dandelion Salad, and I got distracted buying extra fennel for a few other random fennel recipes from Chez Panisse Vegetables—perfect examples of dishes that sounded awful to me but which I meant dutifully to make in the spirit of expanding my culinary mind. Sammy asked what the hell I needed so much fennel for, and I ended up telling him about my newfound love for cookbooks. I’d expected to bond with Sammy over this, but I learned instead that my recipe obsession conflicted so deeply with his sense of how a real man ought to behave that he laughed affectionately and said something like, “Wow, Danny, I cannot deal with recipes. I fucking never look at recipes.” But, see, Sammy’s mother—like Ignazio’s—was a great cook from an ancient tradition, in Sammy’s case Palestinian. Plus, Sammy himself had been a professional chef before he took over the Bi-Rite Market from his Palestinian-immigrant father; he’d gone to culinary school, he’d interned at a French restaurant in Switzerland, and he’d opened his own little San Francisco bistro at age twenty-four. Like every cook, chef, and culinary student everywhere, therefore, Sammy had followed fixed recipes many thousands of times, bringing to mind the jazz analogy: sure, it’s all improvisation if you’re already Wynton Marsalis, but it’s improvisation on a fixed set of standards, and doesn’t a guy get to learn the standards? Even if, for example, you’re not really capable of simultaneously watching fennel on the backyard grill and simmering more fennel on the stove and tracking the doneness of pasta and figuring out that your Radish, Fennel, and Dandelion Salad tastes disgusting because you’ve bought dandelion greens so old and grown-up they have exactly one flavor: bitter? And while I got the message, yet again—Real Cooks Don’t Follow Recipes—I kept right on measuring every teaspoon of parsley without self-consciousness.
To some degree, this had to do with questions non-culinary. For the goals that actually mattered—my need to bail on the Great American Novel, and to become a responsible father before Hannah discovered that I was not one—precise amounts were unavailable. Clear instructions were unimaginable. Completion, in the two or three hours before Liz freaked out with hunger and rage and poured herself a fucking bowl of cereal right in front of my face, was utterly impossible. But right up to the very last of the pasta and salad recipes in Vegetables, all of the above satisfactions were palpably available, and precisely because, in deciding that my own palate was stupid, I’d cleared out other considerations like, say, whether or not Liz even felt like eating Pasta with Zucchini, Walnuts, and Pesto on a given night. She’d consistently said she didn’t care, during those vulnerable first months with a baby. By the time she did begin to care again, around months four and five, it was too late. I’d already developed a fierce emotional attachment to menu control, narrowing my job down to recipe completion and nothing more—as if I were building model airplanes that happened to be edible. I’d come to love that I could stop thinking and follow Alice’s orders, none of which included cleaning as I cooked. Trim and julienne a little “zucchini or other summer squashes,” boil noodles, kablam: checkmark next to the recipe’s title, in the book’s table of contents. Ditto with the next main-course category I tackled: pizza, even when I got flour all over my clothes and the countertops, and even when the crust came out soggy, puffy, and bready. Yeast in warm water, add flour, let rise, knead again. Then: “Preheat the oven to 375. Dice the onion and toss in a small ovenproof sauté pan with a pinch of salt and enough olive oil to coat lightly,” until, two and a half hours after I’d started, the kitchen ransacked and burned food be damned, I would absolutely have achieved something a reasonable person might describe as Pizza with Broccoli Raab, Roasted Onion, and Olives.
I found yet another stripe of anti-recipe prejudice, which I will call the Lamentation of the Disappointed Cookbook Lover: “Like sex education and nuclear physics they are founded on an illusion,” writes Anthony Lane, the New Yorker’s movie critic, of his own love for cookbooks. “They bespeak order, but they end in tears.” Similar sentiment from Adam Gopnik, in the same magazine: “The anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disapp
ointment of the thing achieved… . You start with a feeling of greed, find a list of rules, assemble a bunch of ingredients, and then you have something to be greedy about. In cooking you begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of the appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.” (Gopnik skipped adolescence—there’s no other way to explain a man’s thinking that eros begins with a specific object of desire, and not with an aimless ache.)