Down below caviar, even farther down than cheesecake, there is a place where the joy of cooking gives way to the joy of not bothering to cook at all. Yet even here, on the ocean floor of cuisine en bas, among such primitive life forms as the Fried Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwich, there is food for thought. To discover this sandwich in Brenda Arlene Butler’s Are You Hungry Tonight?: Elvis’ Favorite Recipes is to be transported, without warning, to an age of innocence. The book’s final chapter offers readers the chance to re-create the giant six-tier wedding cake that Elvis and Priscilla cut together on that happy day in 1967: the words “Eleven pounds hydrogenated vegetable shortening (such as Sweetex or Crisco)” speak to me as directly, and as movingly, as the partridges that Renaudet called for in the early morning.
There are times when this need to look elsewhere—to reach into the ovens of another age, or another culture, and pull out whatever you can—grows from a well-fed fancy into a moral necessity. Hence the invaluable contribution of Elizabeth David, whose name remains as revered in England as that of M.F.K. Fisher in America. (Why do women make such great cookery writers? Partly, I suspect, because they realize that it is enough to be a great cook, whereas men, larded with pride in their own accomplishment, invariably go one step too far and try to be great chefs—a grander calling, though somehow less respectable, and certainly less responsive to human need.) Both David and Fisher were spurred to action by the Second World War: Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf was published in 1942, when food shortages were beginning to bite, and David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, when England was still rationed, undernourished, and keen on suet.
Elizabeth David’s mission was to find the modern equivalent of Renaudet’s partridges, to resuscitate flagging and amnesiac palates with the prospect of unthinkable dishes. Such food had no need to be rich; it simply had to taste of something, to bear recognizable links to natural produce, and, most important, to be non-gray. Whether it ever saw the light of day, or the candlelight of evening, was beside the point; the mere promise of it, David herself confessed, was a form of nourishment. “Even if people could not very often make the dishes here described,” she pointed out, “it was stimulating to think about them.” And so on the first page of A Book of Mediterranean Food she kicked off with soupe au pistou and its accompanying dollop of aïllade. The garlicky stink of Nice hit England full in the face, and the nation—or, at any rate, the middle classes—came back to life.
Nowadays, the situation is reversed. We know too much about food. Your principal obligation when you sit down at a restaurant in New York is to play it cool. Black spaghettini with cuttlefish and fennel tops? Been there. Soupe au pistou? Wake me up when it’s over. In the past year, I have eaten both reindeer (a fun Christmas dish) and ostrich (better baked in sand, I guess), but they hardly count as exotic anymore. Cookbooks have followed the lead of restaurants and delicatessens: specialist works abound, the narrower the better. I gave up reading Sara Slavin and Karl Petzke’s Champagne: The Spirit of Celebration, a book devoted to cooking with and for champagne, at the point where it instructed me to “roll each cheese-coated grape in the garlic-almond mixture.” Isn’t there some kind of Grape Protection Society that should be fighting this stuff? As for 365 Ways to Cook Hamburger and Other Ground Meats, by Rick Rodgers, what can I say? Welcome to the most disgusting book on earth. It’s not the dishes themselves that I object to—not even Ed Debevic’s Burnt Meatloaf, or the Transylvanian Pork and Sauerkraut Bake—but the grueling way in which one recipe after another resounds with the same mournful litany: “One pound ground round.” Remember the wise words of M.F.K. Fisher: “The first thing to know about ground round steak is that it should not be that at all.”
Far more cheering and plausible is Nick Malgieri’s How to Bake, which runs for 276 pages before it even gets to “Plain Cakes.” Should you find the book a little too broad in scope, you could always play the sacred card and go for The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking, by Brother Rick Curry, S.J. This alternates clear spiritual homilies with yeasty advice about cooling racks. Sometimes, with a brilliant flourish, Brother Curry kneads his twin passions into one phrase: “As we begin the most austere week in Christianity, tasty rich biscuits remind us that Jesus is coming.” I suspect that such highly sophisticated reasoning may have been the downfall of Gerard Manley Hopkins, poet and Jesuit, who suffered what was reputed to be one of the worst cases of constipation in the nineteenth century.
If you really intend to be the star of your own cookbook, you need to watch out. (The finest cooks, such as Escoffier, are godlike, everywhere in the text yet nowhere to be seen.) Brother Curry, schooled in humility, gets it about right: when he says that his Loyola Academy Buttermilk Bread “goes great with peanut butter,” we instinctively believe that he’s plugging a good idea rather than himself. The trouble starts with celebrity cookbooks and tie-ins; try as I might, I cannot conceive of a time when I will want to concoct a meal from the pages of The Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Cookbook or its literate successor, Forrest Gump: My Favorite Chocolate Recipes. Entertaining with Regis and Kathie Lee is remarkable less for the quality of the cuisine than for the photographs of Kathie Lee, who seems to spend half her time with her mouth wide open, as if to catch any mouthfuls flying by. Then there’s Rosie Daley, whose food looks perfectly nice, but whose In the Kitchen with Rosie might not have reached the bestseller lists were she not employed as a cook by Oprah Winfrey. It’s kind of hard to concentrate on the ingredients, what with Oprah’s cheerleading ringing out at regular intervals. “I have thrived on pasta. I can eat it every day and practically do.” You’d never guess.
Whether such works can be relied upon in the kitchen is of little consequence. Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any passing browsers, that we are practicing cooks; but, in all honesty, a cookbook is something that you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed. The purpose is not to nurture nightmares of suckling pig, or to lull ourselves into a fantasy of trimly bearded oysters, but simply to baste our rested brains with common sense, and with the prospect of common pleasures to come. Take this romantic interlude from ’Tis the Season: A Vegetarian Christmas Cookbook, by Nanette Blanchard: “Turn down the lights, light all the candles you can find, throw a log on the fire, turn up the music, and toast each other with a Sparkling Grape Goblet.” Oh, oh, Nanette. On the other hand, what could be sweeter than to retire with Smoke & Spice, by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison, whose High Plains Jerky would be an ornament to any barbecue? Those in search of distant horizons could always caress their senses with The Art of Polish Cooking, in which Alina Zeranska offers her triumphant recipe for “Nothing” Soup (Zupa “Nic”), adding darkly, “This is an all-time children’s favorite.”
If I could share a Sparkling Grape Goblet with anyone—not just any cook but any person in recorded history—it might well be with Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Magistrate, mayor, violinist, judge, and ravenous slayer of wild turkeys during his visit to America, Brillat-Savarin is now remembered for The Physiology of Taste, which was first published in 1825. There is a good paperback version, translated by Anne Drayton, but devotees may wish to seek out the translation by M.F.K. Fisher herself; it has now been reissued in a luxurious new edition, with illustrations by Wayne Thiebaud. To say that The Physiology of Taste is a cookbook is like saying that Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches is a guide to hunting. “When I came to consider the pleasures of the table in all their aspects, I soon perceived that something better than a mere cookery book might be made of such a subject,” Brillat-Savarin writes. It is a perception that few have shared; the closest modern equivalent, perhaps, is in the work of A. J. Liebling, a man whose delicately gluttonous writings on food keep wandering off (when he can tear himself away) into such equally pressing areas as Paris, boxi
ng, and sex. Brillat-Savarin, like Liebling, gives few recipes, though he muses on innumerable dishes, on the scientific reasons for their effect on the metabolism, and on the glow of sociable well-being that is their ideal result. He sprinkles anecdotes like salt, and he defines and defends gourmandisme (“It shows implicit obedience to the commands of the Creator”), following it through the various stages of delight and surfeit to its logical conclusion. There is a chapter on “The Theory of Frying” and a wonderful disquisition on death, embellished with gloomy good cheer: “I would recall the words of the dying Fontenelle, who on being asked what he could feel, replied: ‘Nothing but a certain difficulty in living.’”
The lasting achievement of Brillat-Savarin is that he endowed living with a certain ease. Intricately versed in the difficulties of existence, he came to the unorthodox conclusion that a cookbook—a bastard form, but a wealthy, happy bastard—could offer the widest and most tender range of remedies. I’m not sure whether he knew how to fold the wings of a chicken akimbo, and if you’d handed him a snow pea and told him to stuff it he would have responded in kind; but it takes someone like Brillat-Savarin to remind us that cooking need not be the fraught, perfectionist, slightly paranoid struggle that it has latterly become. His love of food is bound up with a taste for human error and indulgence, and that is why The Physiology of Taste is still the most civilized cookbook ever written. I suspect that Brillat-Savarin might have been bemused by Martha Stewart, but that he would have gotten on just fine with Ed Debevic and his Burnt Meatloaf.
I sure wish that he had been on hand for my terrine of sardines and potatoes. There I was—apron on, gin in hand, closely following the recipe of the French chef Raymond Blanc. All went well until I got to the harmless words “a piece of cardboard.” Apparently, I needed cardboard to lay on the terrine mold; the cardboard then had to be covered with “evenly distributed weights” for twelve hours. Weights? Cardboard? Twelve hours? They weren’t listed with the ingredients. I had my sardines; I had my twenty capers and my freshly grated nutmeg; but I had no cardboard. Frankly, it would have been easier to kill a turtle.
That’s the trouble with cookbooks. Like sex education and nuclear physics, they are founded on an illusion. They bespeak order, but they end in tears.
1995
“Cook regrets to state, Ma’am, that she’s trod on the pudding.”
THE REPORTER’S KITCHEN
JANE KRAMER
The kitchen where I’m making dinner is a New York kitchen. Nice light, way too small, nowhere to put anything unless the stove goes. My stove is huge, but it will never go. My stove is where my head clears, my impressions settle, my reporter’s life gets folded into my life, and whatever I’ve just learned, or think I’ve learned—whatever it was, out there in the world, that had seemed so different and surprising—bubbles away in the very small pot of what I think I know and, if I’m lucky, produces something like perspective. A few years ago, I had a chance to interview Brenda Milner, the neuropsychologist who helped trace the process by which the brain turns information into memory, and memory into the particular consciousness called a life, or, you could say, into the signature of the person. Professor Milner was nearly eighty when I met her, in Montreal, at the neurological institute at McGill, where she’d worked for close to fifty years, and one of the things we talked about was how some people, even at her great age, persist in “seeing” memory the way children do—as a cupboard or a drawer or a box of treasures underneath the bed, a box that gets full and has to be cleaned out every now and then to make room for new treasures they collect. Professor Milner wasn’t one of those people, but I am. The memory I “see” is a kind of kitchen, where the thoughts and characters I bring home go straight into a stockpot on my big stove, reducing old flavors, distilling new ones, making a soup that never tastes the same as it did the day before, and feeds the voice that, for better or worse, is me writing, and not some woman from another kitchen.
I knew nothing about stockpots as a child. My mother was an awful cook, or, more accurately, she didn’t cook, since in her day it was fashionable not to go anywhere near a kitchen if you didn’t have to. Her one creation, apart from a fluffy spinach soufflé that for some reason always appeared with the overcooked turkey when she made Thanksgiving dinner (a task she undertook mainly to avoid sitting in the cold with the rest of us at the Brown Thanksgiving Day home football game), would probably count today as haute-fusion family cooking: matzo-meal-and-Rhode-Island-johnnycake-mix pancakes, topped with thick bacon, sour cream, and maple syrup. Not even our housekeeper and occasional cook could cook—beyond a tepid, sherried stew that was always presented at parties, grandly, as lobster thermidor, and a passable apple filling that you could spoon out, undetected, through the large steam holes of an otherwise tasteless pie. I don’t think I ever saw my father cook anything, unless you can call sprinkling sugar on a grapefruit, or boiling syringes in an enamel pan, the way doctors did in those days, cooking. (I use the pan now for roasting chickens.) The only man in my family with a recipe of his own was my brother Bobby, who had mastered a pretty dessert called pumpkin chiffon while courting an Amish girl who liked pumpkins. My own experience in the kitchen was pretty much limited to reheating the Sunday-night Chinese takeout early on Monday mornings, before anyone else was awake to eat it first.
I started cooking when I started writing. My first dish was tuna curry (a can of Bumble Bee, a can of Campbell’s cream-of-mushroom soup, a big spoonful of Durkee’s curry powder, and a cup of instant Carolina rice), and the recipe, such as it was, came from my friend Mary Clay, who claimed to have gotten it directly from the cook at her family’s Kentucky farm. It counted for me as triply exotic, being at once the product of a New York supermarket chain, the bluegrass South, and India. And never mind that the stove I cooked on then was tiny, or that “dining” meant a couple of plates and a candle on my old toy chest, transformed into the coffee table of a graduate school rental, near Columbia; the feeling was high sixties, meaning that a nice girl from Providence could look forward to enjoying literature, sex, and cooking in the space of a single day. I don’t remember whom I was making the curry for, though I must have liked him, because I raced home from Frederick Dupee’s famous lecture on symbolism in Light in August to make it. What I do remember is how comforting it was to be standing at that tiny stove, pinched into a Merry Widow and stirring yellow powder into Campbell’s soup, when I might have been pacing the stacks at Butler Library, trying to resolve the very serious question of whether, after Dupee on Faulkner, there was anything left to say about literature, and, more precisely, the question of whether I’d find anything to say in a review—one of my first assignments in the real world—of a book of poems written by Norman Mailer on the occasion of having stabbed his second wife. I remember this because as I stood there, stirring powder and a soupçon of Acapulco Gold into my tuna curry, I began to accept that, while whatever I did say wasn’t going to be the last word on the poetics of domestic violence, it would be my word, a lot of Rhode Island still in it, a little New York, and, to my real surprise, a couple of certainties: I was angry at Norman Mailer; I was twenty-one and didn’t think that you should stab your wife. Mailer, on the other hand, had produced some very good lines of poetry. He must have been happy (or startled) to be taken for a poet at all, because a few weeks after my review ran—in a neighborhood paper you could pick up free in apartment-house lobbies—his friend Dan Wolf, the editor of what was then a twelve-page downtown alternative weekly called The Village Voice, phoned to offer me a job.
I bought a madeleine mold, at a kitchen shop near the old Voice offices, on Sheridan Square. It was my first purchase as a reporter who cooked—a long, narrow pan of shallow, ridged shells, waiting to produce a Proust—but though I liked madeleines, they didn’t collect my world in a mouthful, the way the taste of warm apples, licked from the cool tingle of a silver spoon, still does, or, for that matter, the way the terrible chicken curry at the old brasserie La Coupole, in Par
is, always reminded me of Norman Mailer’s wife. The mold sat in my various kitchens for ten years before I moved to the kitchen I cook in now, and tried madeleines again, and discovered that, for me, they were just another cookie—which is to say, not the kind of cookie that belonged in the ritual that for years has kept me commuting between my study and my stove, stirring or beating or chopping or sifting my way through false starts and strained transitions and sticky sentences.
The cookies I like to make when I’m writing are called “dream cookies.” I made my first batch in my friend John Tillinger’s kitchen, in Roxbury, Connecticut, at one in the morning, in a mood perhaps best described by the fact that I’d just been awakened by the weight of a large cat settling on my head. The cookies were a kind of sand tart. They had a dry, gritty, burned-butter taste, and I must have associated them with the taste of deliverance from sweet, smooth, treacherous things like purring cats. I say this because a few years later I found myself making them again, in North Africa, in the middle of reporting a story about a tribal feud that involved a Berber wedding and was encrypted—at least, for me—in platters of syrupy honeyed pastries, sugared couscous, and sweet mint tea.
At the time, my kitchen was in the Moroccan city of Meknès, where my husband was doing ethnographic research, but my story took me to a village a couple of hours up into the foothills of the Middle Atlas Mountains. It was a wild, unpleasant place. Even today, some thirty years, a couple of wars and revolutions, and an assortment of arguably more unpleasant places later, I would call it scary. The wedding in question, a three-day, her-house-to-his-house traveling celebration, was about to begin in the bride’s village—which had every reason to celebrate, having already provided the groom’s village with a large number of pretty virgins and, in the process, profited considerably from the bride-prices those virgins had commanded: goats, chickens, silver necklaces, brass plates, and simple, practical, hard cash, some of it in negotiable European currencies. The problem was that none of the young men in the bride’s village were at all interested in the virgins available in the groom’s village, whose own supply of goats, chickens, necklaces, plates, and money was consequently quite depleted. All that village had was an abundance of homely daughters—or, you could say, the bad end of the balance of trade in brides. As a result, the men in the groom’s village were getting ready to fight the men in the bride’s village, a situation that left the women in both villages cooking day and night, in a frantic effort to turn their enemies into guests.
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