How to Cook Like a Man

by Daniel Duane

  That’s how the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook caught my eye. I’d long assumed it to be the authoritative manual for the white-tablecloth cuisine of the formal dining room, and therefore a natural someday destination in my journey, a peak I’d have to climb. But I’d noticed that, in homage to Olney’s The French Menu Cookbook, Alice had arranged her recipes entirely in complete menus, meaning I’d have to prepare them in complete menus if I wanted to master the book’s core teachings. I’d also recognized early that I would have to spend a week and several hundred dollars to prepare any single one of the menus by myself—a bridge too far, even for me. But now, I saw an opportunity—taking on these ridiculously elaborate meals under the guise of bending, for the first time, to the will of my wife. Plus, I saw a solution to the problem of time and expense: perhaps our friends would consider tackling a menu with me, in potluck fashion.

  When they agreed, I gave out assignments. My buddy Rich, a handsome competitive cyclist and pharmaceuticals salesman, boned out an entire five-pound duck, lined a loaf pan with its skin, and then filled that pan with a mixture of the duck’s fat, ground leg meat, and sliced breast meat, along with ground salt pork, two eggs, Cognac, and copious herbs and spices, for Duck Pâté with Pistachio Nuts. Liz’s dear, close friend Kate, a pickup-basketball enthusiast and sustainable-energy expert, agreed to host the evening. She and her boyfriend, Jamie, a polymath software designer, yanked out all the guts from many pounds of Monterey Bay squid, snipped off the tentacles and cut the bodies into rings, and then sauteed all that squid with Cognac flaming in the pan. They used red wine to deglaze the pan, and then they added herbs and aromatic vegetables and set the whole thing to simmer for an hour. For my part, I spent a small fortune on several large racks of lamb. Then I marinated them in wine, herbs, and olive oil while I went through the intense drama of making my first proper lamb stock and then reducing it to a demi-glace for the sauce. Finally, for dessert, a hard-living liquor executive named Jon provided all the Sauternes for an Olive Oil and Sauternes Cake prepared by Kate, who happens to be a sensational baker.

  I don’t remember much about the actual evening, except that Hannah fell asleep on Kate’s bed and everybody had fun, especially Liz. I felt a warm, happy glow that night, as if a grand new chapter were opening in my life. About a month later, I proposed that we all try a second menu based on an expensive ingredient I was about to acquire in quantity. I’d been offered a freelance assignment to write about foraging wild truffles in the Oregon forest. I knew that European truffles cost almost two thousand dollars a pound, so I considered this to be the only opportunity I would ever get for tackling the “Truffle Menu” of Eggs Cooked with Truffles, Crayfish Salad, Filet of Beef Lucien Tendret completely stuffed with truffles, Pommes Anna, and Raw Milk Camembert. And while our friends had mostly seen that first menu as an exhausting one-off, a crazy lark of a thing to do at Dan’s behest, they were unable to resist my new setup, the promise of such a rare culinary experience.

  Liz was about a week short of eight months pregnant, in early April, when we all set a date and I flew alone to Portland to procure the goods. I drove south to a restored-Victorian inn amidst the vineyards of the Willamette Valley. There, I met a gloriously plump country chef named Jack Czarnecki, author of Joe’s Book of Mushroom Cookery, A Cook’s Book of Mushrooms, and the Portobello Cookbook. Building a reputation and a culinary style around his unlimited access to wild Oregon mushrooms, Czarnecki had become the world’s chief booster of the wild Oregon truffle. Brimming with pride, he told me that truffles were, in essence, mushrooms that had abandoned the standard evolutionary adaptation of the aboveground mushroom stem, as a means to reproduction. Growing parasitically on the root-tips of trees, truffles mature well underground. Then, when the time is right, and when most mushrooms would shoot up a stem to spread their spores on the wind, truffles release only a volatile oil that rises up through dirt and carries onto the wind a molecule precisely replicating a mammalian sex hormone found, among other places, in the urine of pregnant women. Strange miracles, but miracles nonetheless: that fungally synthesized copy of our own pheromones slips into the noses of passing squirrels, deer, and people, hijacking our brains to make us dig up the truffles, eat them with a sense of ecstasy, and then defecate truffle spores all over the woods, spawning still more truffles and still more ecstasy. It really is nice to have our brains hijacked in this way; it’s a genuine marvel that an organism evolved to be sensationally delicious through that curious pathway of our sexuality, instead of the typical pathways of sugar, salt, or fat. It is precisely this that makes truffles so magical, as a food: they smell and taste like a mysterious and vaguely unclean sexual musk we cannot help craving and loving, unless we happen to be very pregnant women, in which case they seem to make us want to vomit, at least if we happen also to be Liz. But it is precisely this solvent-like off-gassing quality in truffles that requires, on the part of the cook and the eater, a quality I’ve never had in much quantity: self-restraint.

  Czarnecki led me to an outdoor table set for a truffle lunch with a few other foragers, opening bottles of Willamette Valley Chardonnay and serving big plates of fettuccine Alfredo not with a few truffle specks, nor even with a judicious shaving on top, but with a sizable midplate mound of multiple whole Oregon white truffles piled up like potatoes. Thinking this a gift from the gods, I dug in, eating an entire white truffle in a single bite. I ate perhaps eight ounces by the time we climbed into cars to go foraging, and I did notice the odd truffle burp—less like garlic burps than, say, gasoline burps. But this is what I mean about monomania running me off course: determined to enjoy myself, or at least to believe that I was enjoying myself, I kept my nausea quiet as we followed a crack forager, his blind wife, and their dog into a forest everybody called the Left Nut Patch because some guy named Carl had once threatened to cut off some other guy’s left nut if he ever caught the guy foraging truffles there. A filthy pair of forest dwellers appeared, and I felt a momentary fear that we’d found Carl himself. But it turned out to be two hippie meth-heads, pale and sallow, dressed in dark, damp cotton and truffle hunting for the spare change. The man wore work boots, but the woman walked barefoot.

  A friend of Czarnecki’s, a man named Charlie, called this woman the Girl of the Forest. He considered her mystically gifted at the finding of buried truffles.

  “What’s your secret?” I asked her.

  “She won’t tell you her secret,” Charlie said.

  “It’s feel,” said the Girl of the Forest.

  Her man, admiring, said, “Sifting her duff is a waste of time.”

  They walked off.

  I soon gathered a general conviction that our own forager’s blind wife had the same mystical gift, so I followed her meandering path among the trees. Suddenly she stopped and said, “Hey, do you smell that?”

  “Oh, I do! I do!”

  “They must be right here!”

  I smelled it, too, among the dominant cedar-and-pine aromas: an unmistakably fruity musk, a visceral sweetness. Moments later, Czarnecki dug the day’s first, a big Oregon black, looking like a golf-ball-sized turd.

  “Any special treat—fresh tomatoes or suckling pig—whose arrival you welcome can be cause for a special meal or a celebration of the season, any season,” Alice writes, in the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. “The pungency that permeates the kitchen whenever fresh truffles arrive … is incentive enough to build an entire meal around those delectable fungi.” I so loved the sound of this, and I so dearly wanted to live in precisely the way Alice told me to live, that I fairly trembled with excitement as the truffles piled up and the foragers packed them into bags, to send home with me. I kept it in mind that night, too, when a local Oregon restaurant turned out a many-course truffle-intensive tasting menu that, despite being delicious, left me alone in my hotel bathroom, sweating truffle stink naked on the cold floor with my slimy hand rammed down my truffled throat, desperately failing to puke. I even kept it in mind back home, packing five pound
s—that’s right, five pounds—of fresh truffles into my refrigerator. Unwilling to waste even a second, with a few days yet remaining before the planned truffle potluck, I bided my time by ticking off every truffle recipe ever published in any Chez Panisse cookbook, from eggs to pizza to chicken breasts and even salads.

  I kept this up when Liz’s belly once again measured too small, accompanied by high blood pressure indicating the repeat onset of that potentially fatal preeclampsia. Kate sent around a perfectly sensible e-mail wondering if we ought not postpone, and yet, because I’d now officially lost my way, I responded with a plaintive plea that our show go on, and that we’d never come into such a truffle windfall again, as long as we lived. I said that we must not give up on living and loving just because a baby was about to be born. I swore to Kate, over the telephone, right from Liz’s ob-gyn hospital room, that Liz and I had everything completely under control. Then I got off the phone while the anesthesiologist injected Liz with a so-called epidural—a spinal anesthetic. The doctors and nurse left and Liz’s eyes rolled back and she fell unconscious and limp off the hospital bed like maybe she was dying on the spot. I caught her lifeless body myself, before she impacted the hard floor, and I screamed and two nurses came running and one told the other to grab the oxygen mask but the other replied that the oxygen hose had no mask, and so I screamed at her to get a motherfucking mask.

  Liz had only fainted. Kate soon called to say that Rich would host the meal and tackle the main course, so that I could focus on Liz. Within an hour of this conversation, our second daughter was born: Audrey, hale and healthy despite the circumstances. I felt calm and happy about her existence, like a normal dad, but I felt also a quiet thrill about that impending meal.

  Nurses moved us to a recuperation room, and Liz said of Audrey, “She’s so beautiful I could die.”

  “I know, baby.”

  When I finally brought Hannah to meet her new sister, Liz said to Hannah, “Hey sweetie, are you okay? Do you know that I love you and that I think your sister is so, so lucky to have a big sister like you to help her learn everything and that we all need to be together forever and ever?”

  Hannah said, “Why her name’s Audrey?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why her name’s that?”

  “Ah … well, that’s the weird thing about names, honey. Mommies and daddies just get to choose them, and that’s the one we chose, and …”

  I spoke up: “Quick question, sweetheart. About tonight …”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Well, no, okay. See, what I was actually thinking was that you probably need to sleep a lot and I’m worried it might be hard on Hannah and maybe she and I should sleep at home and …”

  “Honestly, it’s fine.”

  “What’s fine?”

  “Go to the truffle thing. It’s okay.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “Please.”

  “Honestly, it’s not that important, I’m just saying that …”

  Even at the party, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. Kate and Jamie had already “truffled” two dozen high-priced farm eggs by sealing them, whole and unbroken, in a Tupperware with several raw truffles. They’d melted half a pound of butter and then slow-scrambled all those eggs with half a cup of heavy cream and, because I said that the recipe’s recommended two whole truffles appeared unnecessarily stingy, given my haul, with about six of those powerfully scented musk bombs. Friends named Leslie and Clara spent a minor fortune on a hundred live crayfish, poaching them in a vast vat of the first court bouillon they’d ever seen, making a sauce from the crayfish shells and a combination of Armagnac and white wine. Rich, meanwhile, must have mortgaged the house to buy those two whole dry-aged Prime filets of beef. Game as ever, he slit them open and stuffed them with, again, a quadruple portion of the recipe’s recommended truffle allotment, along with Niçoise olives, chanterelle mushrooms, and pistachios. Caitlyn had to handle their son, Aiden, all afternoon while Rich built a suitable backyard grill to handle all that meat. And yet, despite the trouble to which everyone had gone, and despite even my own experience in Oregon—a dark secret I kept to myself—I insisted that we whip up a big batch of black-truffle ice cream, too, just because we could, and that we follow that ice cream with black-truffle whipped-cream topping for our post-meal coffee. And that’s how, instead of just joining a group of friends in having fun, I pushed them all off the same cliff from which I’d tumbled myself, down toward a kind of Toxic Truffle Shock Syndrome in which too much of a good thing makes that gassy, musky truffle stink emanate for weeks from one’s breath, sweat, pores, clothes, and even hair, creating a frantic yearning never again to eat a truffle as long as one lives. (Ten years later, every single one of these good people still tells me they feel a vomit-like lurch in the larynx at even the slightest smell of that distinctive truffle odor.)

  If I’d read the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook more carefully back then—and if I’d learned a little more about it, instead of just pushing onward with still more menus—I might have stopped the madness. I might have recognized that I was tackling the wrong book at the wrong moment in my life, and that it was high time I started asking how cooking might support the emotional core of my family’s life, instead of just offering me an outlet. Like a sprawling first novel from a grand talent, the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook carried everywhere the marks of ambition and enthusiasm, right down to a vast bibliography thrown in for no better reason than to show off Alice’s influences and to situate her in a tradition alongside, say, Brillat-Savarin, whom she doubtless loved for such finery as “Animals feed themselves; men eat; but only wise men know the art of eating.” Worse still, Alice expressed open approval, in an early chapter, for Marcel Rouff’s classic 1924 gastronomic novel, The Passionate Epicure. It’s a beautifully written book, widely admired for its depiction of a fictional nineteenth-century gourmand named Dodin-Bouffant, “the Napoleon of gourmets, the Beethoven of cooking, the Shakespeare of the table.” But the novel opens with the supposedly tragic death of Dodin-Bouffant’s beloved home cook, a woman who has long lavished upon her lord’s guests “the rarest of sensations, the most thrilling experiences; she had exalted them, blissful souls, to the highest peaks of cloudless joy … wrenched cooking away from the materialistic sphere to raise it, sovereign and absolute, to the most transcendent regions which humanity can envisage.” The book’s early action, therefore, covers Dodin-Bouffant’s intense grief not for a lost friend and human being, but rather for a key tool of his self-expression and self-pleasuring. Next comes the painful process of hiring a suitable replacement and, soon after, a competitive exchange of dinner parties with the “Prince of Eurasia,” from which Dodin-Bouffant emerges triumphant, having proven himself vastly more discriminating and skilled in the pleasures of the palate. The Prince strikes back by trying to hire away the new cook. Dodin-Bouffant counters by marrying her, once again not from love but in pure commitment to gastronomy. But then Dodin-Bouffant receives seduction letters from some mysterious female admirer. Existential agony, French style: reluctant to betray his wedding vows, Dodin-Bouffant loves the sound of an erotic dalliance too much to resist. So he accepts the woman’s invitation to lunch and finds her so beautiful that he tells himself he will sleep with her if her luncheon is even barely adequate. Much to his surprise, her food is in fact so masterful that he must forgo sleeping with her for that reason: sex would only betray his profound admiration for this woman’s culinary genius.

  So here’s the astonishing part: the young Alice Waters, the very author of the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, takes all this seriously. I mean that: “More than any other quality in other cooks, the one I most value is the ability to see precisely what is needed in a particular dish, dinner, or event,” she writes, citing DodinBouffant as the very epitome of this ability to discern and discriminate. “Everything in his life was tied in to gastronomic enjoyment,” she notes, describing his marvelous attention to such finer points as the “l
ush greenness and scent of a freshly mowed lawn” outside the dining room window, the exact number of guests required for optimal enjoyment (eight), even the precise dining-room temperature (16 degrees Centigrade). To be fair, these are perfectly appropriate considerations for a young restauratrice, and she was in fine company, vis-à-vis Rouff. Jeffrey Steingarten, writing an introduction to the edition I bought in paperback, shares Alice’s inclination toward taking Rouff’s book at face value—in Steingarten’s case, by reading it as earnest argument for the redemption of classical gastronomy from accusations of gluttony. Rouff’s covert purpose, as Steingarten sees it, is to build a case that gastronomy is in fact a fine art on par with art, literature, and music. Not that Steingarten is entirely convinced, insisting that three conditions must be met, if we are to accept this redefinition of fine dining: “the sense of taste must be put on a par with our other senses; it must be capable of the same subtle manipulation as all the others; and the entire enterprise of gastronomy must be seen to possess a meaning, an emotional and moral content.” Convinced on points one and two, Steingarten confesses to uncertainty on number three. But in asking myself now where I come down on the same questions, I realize that I cannot personally read The Passionate Epicure as anything but a sly send-up of an utterly debased and decadent set of values—celebrating, as it does, a fat, rich, vain, arrogant, childless, loveless glutton without an earthly interest beyond the satisfactions of his own palate.