Kitchen Yarns
Page 14
Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Sprinkle with the parsley.
How to Cook Fish When You Really, Really Do Not Like Fish
I was with a man for over twenty-five years who did not love to eat or to cook. How I could stay so long with someone who didn’t enjoy two of the things I enjoy most is bewildering to me, but it does—in part—explain why he is now my ex-husband. On one of our first dates, we did cook together. We steamed artichokes. We made Bolognese. We ate it all up, the artichokes with a homemade vinaigrette and the Bolognese with fresh pasta from Raffetto’s on West Houston Street, and a loaf from Amy’s Bread warmed in the oven and dipped into grassy olive oil. I lived then in a duplex on Leroy Street in Greenwich Village, with a galley kitchen and a dining room table that had been gouged with a knife during a robbery. As we sat at that table with the deep curving scar cut into it, eating the dinner we’d shopped for and cooked together, I could imagine a lifetime of meals like this with this man, someone I hardly knew but had swept into my life like a tornado, turning everything upside down. Had I known then that this would be the first and last meal we shopped for and cooked together, would I have hidden in the basement instead of opening my arms and letting the tornado carry me away? I cannot say, of course. But I can say that the memory of that meal was enough for a while, until it wasn’t anymore.
This man had grown up in a large family with a mother who was not a very good or interested cook. Food was fuel. It kept you warm in winter, helped you grow, and gave you the things you needed to be healthy. One of his complaints when we had dinner parties was that the food wasn’t simple enough. Simple? I wanted to spend all day Saturday in the kitchen, a recipe propped up before me, dicing and sautéing and grinding spices. A homemade mole with four kinds of peppers and toasted bread and Mexican chocolate. A make-your-own taco party with six different fillings and rice and beans. Wild mushroom lasagna. Jambalaya. A twelve-hour pork butt in Cuban spices. Planning and cooking and serving food to friends made me happy. Not him, though. He didn’t understand that joy, just as I didn’t understand why someone would ride a bike across the state for fun or climb Mount Washington in November.
Mostly I pored over my cookbooks and made a week’s plan for dinners. He ate whatever I made, sometimes getting up to rinse off the sauce, sometimes saying the dinner was good. What is this? he’d ask, and I’d tell him I’d made it dozens of times before. If I asked him what he wanted for dinner, he always said the same thing: How about salmon?
I have had salmon that I liked very much. Copper River salmon, in June, in Oregon, to be exact. The meat is red and the fish is fresh and it is available for only a minute, or so it seems. But mostly, I don’t like salmon. In fact, I kind of hate it. The insipid color. The pin bones. The fatty texture. The taste. Yet if every night of the week you make anything you desire and for just one night your husband wants salmon, it seems a fair thing to do to make that salmon.
Someone gave me a recipe for salmon that I used a lot. Put the salmon in a glass baking dish. Grate lots of ginger over it and cover it with bottled teriyaki sauce. Let it sit for an hour, then grill it. The teriyaki covered up the taste of the salmon, anyway. But except for the ginger, it wasn’t exactly the freshest way to prepare it.
After a while, I stopped making salmon. Then he asked for swordfish, my second-least-favorite fish. Usually swordfish is served cut thick as steaks, the flesh a weird grayish color, and fishy-tasting. My father used to slather swordfish steaks with mayo and stick them on the grill, which did make them moist, at least. I tried that. And kebabs. And a fancy marinade from Whole Foods. Like with the salmon, it all just served to mask the taste of the fish, for which I was happy. But basically it was like drinking teriyaki or fancy marinade, with a kick of fish at the end.
I admit that it’s unusual to have grown up in and to live again as an adult in the state known as the Ocean State and not like fish. Maybe this comes from all of my childhood Christmas Eves, when, like all good Neapolitans, we celebrated La Vigilia, or the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Our seven fishes were eel, snails, baccalà, anchovies, smelts, shrimp, and squid. Imagine being six or eight years old and staring at a plate of eel and snails. I used to cry at the smell and the sight of those seven fishes. I used to cry watching my aunts and uncles drop fried smelts into their mouths whole and slather anchovies on their spaghetti. If I didn’t eat the seven fishes, I got that spaghetti with no butter or oil or cheese, a pile of tepid, gluey pasta.
Or maybe I just don’t like fish. Give me a sautéed soft-shell crab, lobster dipped in butter, moules frites, or stuffed quahogs, and I’m happy. But fish, unless it’s very fresh and deep-fried and served with homemade tartar sauce and a pile of real French fries? No thank you.
Of course, it wasn’t just my then husband who craved salmon or swordfish. There were vegetarians who came for dinner. Pescatarians. People on diets. Sometimes pork butt, even one cooked for twelve hours in sour orange and garlic, was not acceptable. So I made it a personal mission to find ways to cook fish that even I would like. It didn’t save my marriage, but it did save a few dinner parties.
COUSIN CHIPPY’S SWORDFISH OREGANATO
Cousin Chippy makes a great Sunday supper: all kinds of meats (pork ribs, flank steak, sausage, etc.) cooked in red sauce and served with pasta. He grills pizza on his Parthenonshaped pizza oven in Breezy Point, New York, and cooks big country ribs in it all night, in the dying embers. And he made me one of the few fish dishes I actually liked. I asked him for the recipe, and he wrote it in pencil on a ripped piece of cardboard. This preparation is a popular Sicilian dish, sometimes called swordfish with salmoriglio sauce. Salmoriglio derives from a word that means “brine,” and the swordfish does sit in a salty, lemony mixture. That part is easy. The tricky part is making sure the swordfish steaks are cut ¼ to ½ inch thick, the thinner the better. My fishmonger always growls at me when I ask him to cut the fish thin, but it makes all the difference, and even fish haters like me enjoy the results.
Serves 4
INGREDIENTS
Four 8-ounce swordfish steaks cut ¼ to ½ inch thick
1 cup olive oil
Juice of 3 or 4 lemons
¼ cup chopped fresh oregano
A handful of kosher salt
Arugula
Lemon slices
Combine the olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, and salt.
Immerse the swordfish in the marinade and leave in the fridge for 30 to 60 minutes.
Prepare your grill (or indoor grill pan) for high heat.
Let the excess marinade drip off the swordfish and place the steaks on the grill. They will cook up fast—just a minute or less per side—so keep an eye on them.
Serve on top of arugula with lemon slices on top of the swordfish. If you’re feeling fancy, grill the lemon slices, too.
GREEN HERB SAUCE
From The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook, Volume II, edited by Michael Bauer and Fran Irwin
I have my father, Rod McKuen, and my old boyfriend Josh to thank for my love of San Francisco. Let me explain. When my father was first in the navy, in the late 1940s, he was stationed in San Francisco, a city he loved. (One of my greatest pleasures was taking him back there when I was a TWA flight attendant.) He used to describe the Victorian houses in Pacific Heights, Lombard Street—the crookedest street in the world!—and the fog and the food and the allure of that beautiful city, where he was engaged for a time to a Nob Hill heiress. By the time I started reading Rod McKuen’s poetry about Stanyan Street and fog and rain and love, I had determined that someday I would live there, too, and unravel its mysteries. That never came to pass. But for many happy years, I was in love with a guy from San Francisco, and he shared with me all of its pleasures, culinary and cultural. It’s no surprise, then, that when I found The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook, I bought it and made many of its recipes. This green herb sauce, from the second volume, is by Marion Cunningham and works perfectly on salmon—both hiding that salmo
ny taste I dislike and highlighting the fresh herbs. With light greens and this sauce, you can make a salmon salad that even I enjoy.
INGREDIENTS
5 garlic cloves, chopped
Juice and grated zest of 2 lemons
1 cup chopped cilantro
1 cup chopped basil
½ cup chopped Italian parsley
1 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Combine first five ingredients in a bowl.
Stir in the olive oil, salt, and pepper.
Taste and add more salt if needed.
NOTE: I have been known to use more or less of each herb as my pantry dictated, and to throw the herbs unchopped into the food processor with the garlic, then add the olive oil and salt and pepper. You really can’t ruin this sauce.
Three Potato
In 1988, I was invited to teach at the esteemed Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont for the first time. A few years earlier, I had attended as a student, clutching my three connected short stories nervously, unsure of what exactly was supposed to happen at such a place. I didn’t know that Robert Frost had started it in 1926, or that some of my favorite writers—Eudora Welty, Willa Cather, Anne Sexton—had been there. I only knew that my teacher William Decker, in one of the only creative writing classes I ever took, told me that I was “the real thing, a real writer,” and that real writers went to Bread Loaf. So I went. There, workshop leader Nicholas Delbanco urged me to turn those short stories into a novel, and always the good student, I went home and did just that. Somewhere off the Coast of Maine was published in 1987, and I won a fellowship to return to Bread Loaf and work with Hilma Wolitzer. A year later, I found myself back on the mountain as a faculty member, teamed up with Tim O’Brien.
I remember a lot about those long-ago two weeks in Vermont. I remember lying on my back in a field full of writers, watching shooting stars. I remember feeling a strange mixture of shyness and gregariousness in the faculty lounge in Treman, where we drank Bloody Marys before lunch and gin and tonics before dinner. I remember sneaking into Middlebury for dinner with William Matthews and other writers, drinking wine I couldn’t afford.
What I don’t remember is walking arm in arm with two friends out of the inn and a man calling out to me: “Miss Hood?” I don’t remember turning and smiling at that man, who was a twenty-five-year-old writer there as a scholar for an article he’d written about his mentor, Reynolds Price. I’ve been told—by him—that I asked him what it was he wanted to do, but I don’t remember that. Nor do I remember that he told me he wanted to write fiction and I told him, “You will!” and then I walked away.
Twenty years later, I was teaching at a writers’ conference in Cleveland, Ohio, happily sitting with a Cleveland friend, waiting for the afternoon lecture, when a very cute guy walked in. That cute guy was the same guy I’d walked away from that long-ago summer at Bread Loaf, although I didn’t know that until he stood at the podium and said, “Ann Hood doesn’t know this, but I’ve been in love with her for twenty years.” A statement like that gets my attention. Of course he meant the literary-crush kind of love, but for a writer that’s even better than the other kind of love.
Even more years had to pass before it turned into love love, years with intermittent e-mails, exchanging our books, a brief drink at the Miami Book Fair, and ultimately marriages that had gone bad. One night we looked at each other and, as corny as it sounds, we both knew. It was kind of like, Oh! It’s you!
When I was a teenager, I used to cry to my mother, “Will anyone ever love me? I mean really love me? For me?” And she would always say that there was someone who would love me truly for who I was. “How will I know it’s love?” I’d ask her. “You just know,” she always said. After two marriages, I questioned my judgment on this “just knowing” business. But for some of us, like me, finding that person takes a lot longer, and you need to make some mistakes along the way.
What I know for sure is that this man is perfect for me. He loves to read and talk about literature. He loves to play cards. He is a writer, and he works hard as a writer. He loves to travel. He even learned to knit. And he is a cook. For a long time, if I said I liked a particular food—chicken fried steak, for example—he’d say: “I have to cook that for you!” And if I said I didn’t like something—baked potatoes, for example—he’d say, “You’ll like mine.” And he was right.
And so I offer you the recipe for Michael’s Baked Potatoes, because he made me fall in love with baked potatoes, and with him.
MICHAEL’S BAKED POTATOES
When I asked Michael for his baked potato recipe for this book, he thought it was one of the funniest recipe requests he’d ever heard. And he told me the story about a babysitter he’d had when he was around four. He kept telling her there wasn’t enough butter on his potato, so this old woman sat there and rubbed an entire stick of butter on his halved baked potato. She was baffled when he said, “There’s still not enough butter.” To which I asked, “Is there ever enough butter?” Michael says that a good baked potato is all about texture. I have to agree—that’s why I never liked those wrinkled ones of my childhood. Basically, according to Michael, you are basically making mashed potatoes in a shell. Preferably a very hard shell.
Serves 4
INGREDIENTS
4 medium-sized russet potatoes, well washed
1 stick butter, divided into quarters (plus more for the table), warmed to room temperature
Kosher salt, to taste
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
Put the potatoes in it.
After an hour, squeeze one. If it’s soft, continue to bake for 15 more minutes, or until the shell is distinctly hard and the inner potato is completely soft.
Remove from the oven and immediately cut a slit down the middle lengthwise, to allow the steam out (otherwise, it might soften the shell).
Pinch the slit from each end to open it wider and gently separate the flesh from the shell, chopping it to break it up (without removing it from the shell) with a fork.
Add half of one of the butter quarters and chop it into the potato.
Add the other half and continue to chop until the butter is evenly distributed.
Repeat with the other potatoes and butter quarters.
Serve immediately.
Make sure there’s more room-temperature butter and salt on the table so people can add more to the potato’s flesh or to the shell after the inside has been devoured.
NOTE: If making this dish for a larger group, remove the flesh from all the potatoes and mash it together with butter and salt, then distribute among the shells (which you can crisp in the oven). You can also add minced onion or other fun stuff to the flesh before distributing it, top each potato with grated cheddar cheese, and bake until the cheese melts.
With Thanks to the Chicken
My father used to stick an apple in a chicken’s butt before he roasted it. If he was out of apples, he used a peeled orange. “Keeps it moist,” he said.
I don’t know if he was right, but his roast chicken was indeed moist, and he made a delicious homemade gravy using the pan drippings, flour, and milk. With mashed potatoes, I can’t think of a more satisfying Sunday supper.
When my kids were young, I often roasted a chicken for supper, because it is the easiest thing to make. Sometimes I would sit the chicken in the roasting pan on top of baby carrots and fingerling potatoes, so that our entire meal cooked in that one pan, the veggies browned in chicken fat, the chicken moist not from apples but from the halved lemon I put in its cavity. I put in a halved head of garlic, too, and whatever fresh herb I had handy—rosemary or thyme or tarragon.
What my father didn’t do was use that carcass for stock the way I do with my turkey carcass at Thanksgiving.
I have hosted Thanksgiving since my son, Sam, was born—in other words, for twenty-five years. That first time, seven-month-old Sam and I lived on the top floor of
a restored Colonial, his father having flown the coop, so to speak. We had two bedrooms, maybe three if you counted the odd alcove off my bedroom, and an eat-in kitchen, where my cousin Gloria-Jean and I somehow managed to fit a dozen people. We even made them do crafts: tracing their hands onto construction paper and fashioning turkeys from them with dime-store feathers glued to the fingers. My father famously even drew in his watch, which sat jauntily below the turkey’s neck. That night, after everyone left, I put the turkey carcass into a big pot of water and simmered it all the next day, a practice I continued for every Thanksgiving night afterward. The dinner the evening after Thanksgiving was always turkey pot pie made with leftover turkey, gravy, and whatever vegetables remained—some years green beans and carrots, others peas and potatoes. And the second evening after Thanksgiving I simmered that stock and cooked either rice or egg noodles in it for a final farewell to the holiday, and to the turkey, which in between had been put into cold sandwiches with mayo and cranberry sauce and hot open-faced sandwiches topped with gravy.
My family has enjoyed over two decades of hosting Thanksgiving and the rituals of it—yes, the cooking with cousins and friends, but also the various people (opera singers from the Czech Republic, exchange students from Germany and Japan and Brazil, West Point cadets) around the table with us, trying to remember how to set the timer on the oven (where did I put the instructions for the stove?) so that one turkey would start to roast at six a.m., the party the night before that often led to conga lines and washing kale in the bathtub and someone crying in the bathroom, the arranging of tables across three rooms to accommodate eighteen or twenty-two or thirty-one people, the taking down of the mismatched champagne glasses and wineglasses, the toasts and the going around the tables to say what we are thankful for, watching as the little kids grow out of the kids’ table and become teenagers deserving a room of their own to eat in, right off the dining room, and seeing the teenagers grow up and away.