How to Cook Like a Man

by Daniel Duane

  I’m open to the idea that this is just me—that I’m revealing some Anglo-American Puritanical streak that makes me ill-suited to the very highest of gastronomical heights. But it hardly matters: the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook had been written in a spirit of uncritical surrender to epicurean pleasure, not least because such a spirit animated the Chez Panisse kitchen itself, in those years. Alice had written the book, after all, not as a straightforward manual to the restaurant’s fine-dining cuisine but as a document of its formative, experimental phase, beginning shortly after she came onto my own family’s radar as that cute little teacher down at Berkeley Montessori. She’d been living nearby, with the director of the Pacific Film Archive, already populating her locally famous dinner parties with culture heroes like Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Susan Sontag, Abbie Hoffman, and Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panthers. Then Alice got herself fired from the massive responsibility of making morning snack for me and the other toddlers by wearing see-through blouses too many days in a row. (Alice herself told me this, years later, still tickled by her own audacity.) And so she pursued her other great passion, opening Chez Panisse in 1971 and watching it bloom fast into a success. Jeremiah Tower, the dominant head chef of that period, and the author of California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution, describes sous-chefs sucking nitrous in the kitchen, a prep cook named Willy Bishop painting “watercolors of guys jerking off and cum flying all over the place,” and culinary frivolity like a Salvador Dalí dinner, immortalized in the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, featuring “l’entre-plat drogué et sodomisé,” leg of lamb “drugged and sodomized” with Madeira, brandy, and tangerine juice injected through a syringe. This Bishop character claimed later to have slept with both Tower and Alice, though not at the same time. In The United States of Arugula, David Kamp writes that so many cocaine dealers became Chez Panisse regulars that Greil Marcus, a Chez Panisse investor and, more to the point, rock-and-roll critic, couldn’t stand eating there anymore. Tower and Bishop both got hooked on blow, and Bishop graduated to a novel opium-delivery method: “You stick it up your ass,” he later said to Kamp. “Just a quarter of a gram, a little ball, and you bypass the alimentary canal—you don’t get nauseous, you just absorb it.” Bishop lost his cooking job and his mind and later stabbed a guy in a bar, with his paring knife, on a night when he’d been planning to “go to a triple-X movie theater and stab myself. Not to kill myself, but to get attention.”

  Even the birth pangs of the modern Chez Panisse, acted out in this period, carry the exuberant dissolution of the midseventies: Tower, for example, quite literally seducing the 350-pound James Beard into mentioning Chez Panisse in a syndicated column. (“Getting somebody to write about you is the same as getting them to sleep with you, and I’d had a lot of practice in that,” Tower writes.) When Beard dined there on the day after Christmas of 1975, Jeremiah confessed that he wasn’t yet satisfied, thought of going to France.

  “Jim gave me the smile he reserved for young men he held in favor,” writes Tower. “ ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘keep your mouth shut about all that. You have a good thing going here, you’re on the right track. Just stick with America.’”

  The next morning, in what I consider the single most fabulous anecdote in my town’s food history, Jeremiah claims to have visited Beard in his room at the Stanford Court Hotel, in San Francisco: “I bandaged his feet (devastated by lack of circulation), giving his devoted servant Marion Cunningham a rest from her daily chore. His robe had been left open where it fell, exposing a belly as vast as Yosemite’s El Capitan, which swept down to reveal what he could have been proud to reveal were Jim not the exception to the rule that large fingers are also a measure of the family jewels. Jim did have very big hands. This was a morning ritual, exposure to which I had long since become familiar and with which I’d grown comfortable over the years I’d known him. After a little fondle, we talked about my career, about Alice.” They also talked more about this idea of sticking with America, Jeremiah claims, especially California, and that’s how a passing hotel-room frolic triggered the first great salvo in the creation of California cuisine, a Chez Panisse “Northern California Menu” immortalized in the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook: Tomales Bay Bluepoint Oysters on Ice paired with a Schramsberg bubbly; Cream of Fresh Corn Soup, Mendocino Style, with Crayfish Butter; Big Sur Garrapata Creek Smoked Trout Steamed over California Bay Leaves, with a Mount Eden Chardonnay; Monterey Bay Prawns Sautéed with Garlic, Parsely, and Butter; Preserved California-Grown Geese from Sebastopol with a BV Private Reserve Cabernet; Vela Dry Monterey Jack Cheese from Sonoma, with a Ridge Zinfandel; Fresh Caramelized Figs.

  Beautiful stuff, in a way: Tower, Beard, Dodin-Bouffant, the meteoric genius of the young Alice, forever changing our national conversation about food. But I was approaching the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook in such an uncritical way, knowing nothing of its past and not yet admitting to myself that I did not have the intestinal fortitude for its implied lifestyle. So eager was I to “bond with the like-minded” that I willed our friends right on through the “Spring” menu of wild mushrooms, spring-vegetable pasta, charcoal-grilled salmon and Buckwheat Crepes with Tangerines. “Summer” came next, and then “Fall,” hosted again by Rich, and including Smoked Trout Mousse with Chervil Butter, Warm Salad of Curly Endive and Artichoke Hearts, and Champagne Sauerkraut, a.k.a. Choucroute Garnie, the great Alsatian heart-stopper for which we filled a big roasting pan with four pounds of sauerkraut, a quart of duck fat, a pound of pig skin, two pounds of bacon, two suckling-pig’s feet, a “prosciutto bone,” a quart of chicken stock, half a bottle of Champagne, two pounds of potatoes, several suckling-pig loin chops, and a pound each of Virginia ham and garlic sausage. Baking that monstrosity whole, we set it upon the table, handed out plates, and tried hard to convince our befuddled wives that it was just a key stage in our collective education about regional French culinary variation, as if such an education mattered to anybody in the room.

  Liz, in particular, found that meal so absurd that even before we got to “Winter,” the writing was on the wall. We’d reentered that long, dark newborn tunnel—that snuggly and love-filled but still tough passage. The older child, about now, suffers the first grand disappointment of her life: the sibling she’s wanted for a playmate turns out only to scream, cry, and dominate Mommy’s love, and this turns the eldest hard toward Daddy, himself in a state of emotional deprivation and need, such that a great new bond forms and the man begins to realize that he loves fatherhood above all else. Night after night, Hannah would cry if left alone in her dark bedroom, so I would lie on her bedroom floor, right next to the crib we still had her in. She’d reach a tiny arm through the bars and wrap a tiny hand around one of my garlicky fingers. We’d doze off together, and then I’d wake up around midnight. The baby, Audrey, still owned my usual spot in the marital bed, but we’d taken over the front half of the downstairs flat by then, converting it into a pair of home offices. So I’d tiptoe out the front door and down the front steps and then back inside through the lower flat’s front door, onto the extra bed next to Liz’s writing desk, Mason jar for a bedpan.

  Even I’d begun to falter, in commitment to all those menus, when I forced “Winter” into being, enlisting our usual crew but somehow doubling the guest list to seventeen, so that I spent more money than even I could bear. All day long, I shucked oysters until my fingers bled and I made Victoria’s Champagne Sausages by hand, stuffing sheep intestines with all that pork and a whole bottle of Champagne. Together, Rich and I roasted nine whole ducks stuffed with corn bread and chanterelle mushrooms. We made duck stock from scratch; we reduced it for the sauce. Leslie made Red Onion Tarts. Clara made a Garden Lettuce Salad with Roquefort Vinaigrette. Kate made masterful Lemon Clove Cookies. And although everybody had fun, I nearly destroyed the duck sauce and I had to spend hours cleaning all the duck fat out of the oven and I began to wonder why I was so determined to make all my friends help me run a free restaurant at
such great emotional and financial expense.

  When I called Rich the following morning, he finally brought us to the point I could not have reached on my own. He said, “Dude, I’m really sorry. But my wife says I can’t do any more dinners with you, ever. Like, not ever ever.”

  Kate, speaking through Liz herself, gently communicated that other members of the crowd felt tired, too: “I guess maybe Kate’s wondering if we could try something different next time, like an Indian-food potluck, where we all bring an Indian dish and a six-pack, and maybe pick up some naan from Aslam’s Rasoi, over on Valencia.”

  Badly stung—I’m a social person, I care dearly about other people’s opinions of me—I still wasn’t man enough for random Indian potlucks, a return to my old Chicken Tikka days. (“Are you fucking kidding me? I’d rather eat glass.”) So I tried to carry on alone, for a while, cooking the “Cassoulet” menu for my mother’s Christmas party, and then a few other menus here and there. But by the time Audrey turned one I could no longer kid myself: I had lost my Chez Panisse faith, and it wasn’t coming back.

  PART THREE

  What Is Cooking For?

  8

  The Meat Period in Every Man’s Life

  Anthony Lane, writing in the New Yorker, has wondered why so many of the best food writers are women: Alice, M. F. K., Kamman, Reichl, David. The answer, he suspects, lies in their presumed understanding “that it is enough to be a great cook, whereas men, larded with pride in their own accomplishment, invariably try to go one step too far and become great chefs—a grander calling, though somehow less respectable, and certainly less responsive to human need.” Mea culpa, as charged, and not of mere culinary misdemeanors, like wearing a toque around the house, or demanding that my toddler daughters call me “Chef” (although Audrey once did, reading me like a book, at age three, playing for laughs, “ ’scuze me, Chef!”), but of the full domestic felony. Set adrift by the end of my Chez Panisse years, I’d been unable to find a cookbook that compelled me toward completionist fantasies. Without any dreams of cookbook completion, I could no longer bring myself even to tick off recipes. Soon, I’d developed the notion that, instead of torturing my wife with grand meals for peace-loving friends, I should simply commit myself to culinary woodshedding, the private study of discreet skills that a chef might someday need, even if he never planned to earn his living by the knife: bread-making, for example, with sourdough starters eternally on my person, even in the back of the car, so that I would never miss a feeding; and then knife-sharpening, for which I bought several Japanese wet stones and began studying knifegeek videos, learning to prove sharpness by dry-shaving my forearms. A guy at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market told me about a fish distribution warehouse that would sell super-fresh product to walk-ins, if you called ahead. So I bought a book called Rick Stein’s Complete Seafood, befriended the men down at the cavernous Ports Seafood distribution warehouse, and made a stab toward becoming a fish master—although Liz began worrying that shellfish, in particular, bothered her stomach. (Ridiculous, in my view; purely emotional female reaction to my claiming a traditionally female power in the home, the power over diet, dinner.)

  But then I read, along with every other American foodie, the two obvious food-related bestsellers of that moment: Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford; and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan. Buford chronicled a mentorship under Mario Batali, learning to cook inside Batali’s restaurant kitchens, and also the fun he’d had in butchering a whole pig at home. (“One of the chicest things a chef or committed foodie can do today is pick up a whole pig from an organic farm and portion it out, cooking its defrosted chops and trotters for months to come,” writes Sara Dickerman, in a seminal essay from the period, titled “Some Pig: The Development of the Piggy Confessional.”) Pollan, for his part, documented hunting and killing a wild pig, and he explained that so-called commodity meat, along with factory-raised pork and poultry, emerged from such unhealthy and morally revolting circumstances that no self-respecting person could ever eat it again. Pollan also explained that holistically raised animal foods, from truly old-fashioned livestock operations, occupied a polar opposite position, clearly being the most ethically defensible and nutritious food known to mankind. Taken together, these two books laid out everything that men like me suddenly felt they had to do—the restaurant cooking, the butchery, the killing—in order to maintain perfect self-respect. So I sat up in bed one night, set down my hardcover copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and told Liz that our family was forever done eating industrial meat, and that I would like her to hand over the laptop so that I might google “grassfed beef california” and start bringing home the real bacon.

  Within minutes, I’d found a local rancher, and then I ordered half a grassfed cow. That’s when I got the first surprise of what I now consider the Meat Period, a standard developmental phase of the emotionally isolated male cook: Liz was all for it. It felt like nesting, made her feel warm inside. So I filled a chest freezer with a hundred pounds, vacuum-packed and labeled. A quarter of the mass came in delicious, money-shot steaks. (Yours truly: “To me, it tastes more like beef should taste; I can’t even eat supermarket beef anymore. It totally makes me feel bloated.”) Even the girls loved that stuff, and it was fun holding little Audrey in one arm, flipping meat on the grill with the other, drinking a beer and watching Audrey try to say the word steak. (“Want ’teak, Dada. Want ’teak.”) But the next little surprise came from the ground beef comprising half my haul, and largely responsible for bringing down our total per-pound price: that’s a lot of goddamn hamburgers, but Hannah turned out to be a burger fiend, and Liz loved the meat’s leanness. She loved also the casual, no-big-deal feel of all those family burger nights, even if I wouldn’t allow anybody to eat a burger in any manner except the Chez Panisse–approved deal with toasted levain bread, homemade aioli, grilled red onions, and arugula (I’ve since dropped that silliness, embracing ketchup).

  Fully one quarter of my beef, however, came in oddities like crossrib roasts, top round roasts, and even tongue and other organ meats. This, in turn, led to the next scripture in the Education of the Peaceful Carnivore: The River Cottage Meat Book, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The book opened with graphic slaughterhouse photography and text arguing that shrink-wrapped supermarket steaks, while cheap, easy, and comforting, allowed us to ignore the hard truths. Opening our eyes, by contrast, and watching that which we feared to watch, could force a man to care exactly how his meat lived and died, offering a pathway not toward shame but toward virtuous pride, when you made the right meat-buying decisions. The River Cottage Meat Book included a list of moral exhortation titled “My Meat Manifesto,” and I had the first few in the bag. Topping the list was an order to “think about the meat that you eat,” and to ask, “Is it good enough? Good enough to bring you pleasure every time you eat it?” Check. Same for encomium number two: “Think about the animals from which the meat that you eat comes.” And so on, and so forth, and because The River Cottage Meat Book carried an epic dissertation on proper roasting technique, I’d even paid all due respect and justice to the butcher beef itself, as per instructions. But this meant discovering that all those big grassfed roasts were so lean and tough they were borderline inedible if you cooked them beyond rare, a situation that made a man look wistfully upon his dwindling steak reserves.

  At this point in the Meat Period, our man wants to feel that he has climbed to significant heights. So he congratulates himself on the view back down toward those unenlightened souls still blindly devouring lethal, immoral, world-destroying garbage meat. Blocking the meaty summit, however, stands another admonition in that Meat Manifesto: “Are you adventurous with meat? Do you explore the different tastes and textures of the various cuts, particularly the cheaper cuts, and of offal?”

  Thus begins the predictable Odd Bits Sub-Phase, kicked off in my
own case by a visit to a neighborhood restaurant called Incanto. Chef Chris Cosentino was specializing in cooking supergross stuff in delicious ways, so I ordered up a clear broth garnished by goose testicles and soft-shell goose eggs harvested from inside the bird’s reproductive tract, a kind of Goose Fuck Soup, if you will. Then I asked to speak to the chef. I told him I was dazzled by what he was doing, and he told me that his food was not about shock value at all, nor about gross-out challenges, and that anybody who thought such foolishness was some kind of squeamish rube who didn’t get it. I loved the sound of this. I loved also Cosentino’s insistence that there was simply something immoral about eating only the choicest cuts from a given animal—killing all those living creatures, only to discard most of their remains.

  Spooning a goose ball into my mouth, I bit until it burst and thought of a Mary Douglas book I’d read in graduate school, Purity and Danger. Taboo, she explains, can best be understood as a “device for protecting the distinctive categories of the universe,” protecting “local consensus on how the world is organized. It shores up wavering certainty. It reduces intellectual and social disorder.” By that reasoning, the contemporary American revulsion toward the consumption of animal organs and extremities reflected nothing but a fear of the ill defined, parts of the animal not clearly identified as food: “Ambiguous things can seem very threatening,” Douglas writes. “Taboo confronts the ambiguous and shunts it into the category of the sacred.” Offal, therefore, could be seen as a category of the profane, the filthy, but also of the sacred: we don’t avoid those parts of the animal because we think they’ll hurt us, or because they hold toxins, we avoid them because they have associations that scare us. Eating the heart reminds us of killing, slaughterhouses, animal sacrifice; it tells us that we are bloody in a way that we don’t want to feel bloody. It also indicates that we’re poor, in a way, that we don’t get the good parts of the animal, that we’re so desperate for protein we’re stuck with the off-fall. As a fearless cook, however, I had a duty to explore all flavors and to ignore silly taboos. I could not simply rule out entire aspects of the animal: I had to face them like St. Catherine of Siena when, furious at her own revulsion for the wounds she tended in others, she sought to purify herself by drinking a bowl of pus.