How to Cook Like a Man

by Daniel Duane

  No fault of Bourdain’s: he was being kind, writing a characteristically brilliant introduction to somebody else’s book, and he doubtless meant only to help when he posed for the book’s photographer stark naked and smoking a cigarette, showing off his lean physique (truly impressive, and not just for a chain-smoking ex-junkie) while holding a cow’s raw femur bone upright in front of his groin, like a twenty-pound erection, a great visual joke about the admittedly massive girth and heft of his own culinary cock deriving in large part from his personal outrageousness. Once again, to be fair: Bourdain cops to a certain discomfort with the photograph, offering that “I do always joke that (as some comedian once suggested) ‘I want to leave this world as I entered it: naked, screaming, and covered with blood,’ but … it’s probably not wise to make career decisions after four shots of tequila.” Also, if there is one predominant theme in these fifty final meals, it’s a theme Bourdain would doubtless include, were he to write that introduction now, after his late-in-the-game marriage and the birth of his own first child: the near-universal desire to spend one’s final moments among family and friends. True, Dan Barber—like the prekid Bourdain himself—pictures dining alone, and several other chefs lean heavily toward the company of dead people and complete strangers, like Charlie Trotter’s yearning to spend that ultimate hour with Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Bukowski, Henry Miller, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thomspon, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, a dinner crew he’d have more luck assembling shortly after that final meal, upon his presumed arrival in heaven, or at least in the outer circles of hell, where Dante himself described meeting many cultural luminaries. (Ditto for Marcus Samuelsson’s guest list of Martin Luther King Jr., the food-hating Gandhi, and nobody else; and also for Martin Picard’s sole invitee, Jesus Christ, whom Picard claims to want not because the opportunity to feed Christ at such a critical juncture might tilt His judgment, but because Jesus “is used to having a last meal,” the Lord’s life, being, apparently, a kind of divine Groundhog Day.) By and large, though, everybody wants precisely what I would want: wife, parents, siblings, dear friends, children, even if some chefs yearn like Gabrielle Hamilton to send the children to bed early, after dinner, letting them “fall deeply asleep so that I could eat quietly, contemplatively, and pretend that I was a single, younger person without intense, bone-crushing responsibilities … sans employees, children, or saggy boobs.”

  Fergus, likely one of the few chefs in My Last Supper to have properly contemplated the end—having stared down the gun barrel of major brain surgery—envisions a particularly beautiful and believable summer Saturday’s luncheon, at home with his family, apartment windows open to the London street noises and “many platters of sea urchins washed down with Muscadet.” Cigarettes play a prominent role—why not?—as do cheese, ice cream, and drunken dancing. “That should help soften the blow,” Fergus says, capturing what I consider the essence of the exercise. The blow to which Fergus refers, I believe, is not so much the death blow itself—the bullet, the guillotine—but the blow of knowledge, the awareness of the end growing nigh. That knowledge is always with us, every day of our adult lives, flickering in and out of consciousness. Fantasizing about a final meal, therefore—menu, companions—amounts to thinking through our views on what softens the whole of the earthly passage, asking ourselves what matters most, and whether or not food even plays a meaningful role.

  So here’s my own dream of that Last Supper—or, rather, here’s a representative supper, in the everyday flow of this family’s changing life. Summer’s cold and foggy in San Francisco, so I’m thinking about mid-September, when it always warms up a little. Audrey’s six, a big first-grader. Hannah’s nine, a third-grader, and I pick them both up at school, drive them home, and watch them run out the back door, down the steps I built. We’ve cut holes in our backyard fence, joining our little postage-stamp property to the neighbors on two sides. We share chickens with one of those neighbors, an ace rose gardener named Katy: the coop on our side of the fence the chicken run on hers, so the birds can move around during the day. But this time the girls slip into the other adjacent yard, climbing onto a big trampoline belonging to a seven-year-old boy named Cuya. I can hear them jumping and laughing and chattering with Cuya while I tie on my apron and whip up a little dinner.

  We’ve finally stopped having separate meals for kids and grown-ups, and Liz now demands that the girls taste at least a little bit of everything Dad makes. The experiment shows promise. First time out, I made things easy by cooking my current goto version of that old Odd Nights Pasta, based on the Garden Tomato and Garlic Pasta from Chez Panisse Vegetables— the one where you just heat up the olive oil with all that chopped garlic and then toss in the chopped fresh tomatoes and cook them until they relax. Ignazio, my recipe-hating Italian buddy, started cooking from Vegetables recently, and even he thinks Alice is onto something with that approach. I pushed the envelope a little on our second night of insisting the whole family eat the same meal, at the same time: I fried up a little squid, served it with a garlic mayonnaise. I watched with amazed eyes while Hannah actually ate a few rings, stomaching a food that, along with everything else from the sea, she’d always considered a vile form of poison inexplicably inflicted upon her by an otherwise trustworthy father. But Audrey, exploiting her sister’s squeamishness, had gone nuts gobbling all the squid tentacles and telling Daddy that calamari was her new favorite food. So tonight, for Joint Family Dinner Number Three, with the girls on that trampoline and Liz out jogging, I’m trying to build on my success with a meal that falls somewhere in between. My thought is to light charcoal on the back porch, grill up a chicken—store-bought, of course, as I’m not allowed to eat the flesh of our own birds, only their eggs. But I’ve learned this trick of cutting out a chicken’s backbone, spreading the body open flat, and then stuffing a little garlic-herb butter under the skin. Then you make slits in the skin at the base of each breast and tuck the drumstick ends into those slits to create a nice tight little package for the grill.

  Liz gets home about the time the bird goes over the coals. She’s showering while I’m making Caesar dressing and frying bits of bread for croutons. Then Liz opens a beer, sets the table, and calls the girls. What happens next only matters because it’s happening to me: Hannah does her usual deal of demanding breast meat, Audrey takes a leg to have fun gnawing at a bone, they both load up on those croutons at the expense of the lettuce, and they happily eat the whole meal, with at least an outward appearance of gusto. It all tastes good to me, too, and somehow I start telling the girls that I cooked pretty differently before I got married, how I had this burrito system where I’d always keep black beans, brown rice, salsa, and guacamole in the fridge, along with big whole-wheat tortillas, so I could whip up a monster bellyful at a moment’s notice.

  Audrey’s face brightens, and she says one of those amazing things kids often say. She says, “Will you make that for us, Dada?”

  Knowing she’s got me, and that my life has finally come full circle, I say, “Absolutely, kiddo. I’d love to make my old surferdude burritos again, just for you.”

  Like everything blessed in our lives, such moments are gone almost before we’ve noticed them. Hannah, for example, soon begins the nightly negotiation over whether or not she’s eaten enough to get dessert. But just for once, I tell the girls not to sweat it, we’re all going out for ice cream, no matter what.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My agent, Sam Stoloff, played a critical role in shaping the idea for this book. Kathy Belden, my editor at Bloomsbury USA, was consistently kind, patient, and supportive, throughout the writing process. Certain portions of this book depended upon the generous support of magazine editors. At Men’s Journal, these have included Will Dana, Jason Fine, Brad Wieners, Terry Noland, and Will Cockrell; at Bon Appetit, Hugh Garvey and Christine Muhlke; at Food & Wine, Dana Cowin, Pamela Kaufman, Michelle Shih, and Michael Endelman; at the New York Times Magazine, Ilena Silverman. At Sierra, Reed McManus and Steve Hawk. More t
han a few chefs have helped me along the way. These have included Alice Waters, Thomas Keller, Fergus Henderson, Chris Cosentino, Staffan Terje, Anne Walker, Sam Mogannam, and Daniel Patterson. My mother, Katharine Duane, not only cooked me countless loving meals over the years, but encouraged me to play that role for my own family. My wife’s parents, Doug and Judy Weil, introduced me to the pleasures of fine dining, at more great restaurants than I can count. Ignazio Moresco, Joe Hefta, Brad Melekian, Bill Gifford, Michael Romano, and Kiernan Warble were all kind enough to read early versions of this book and promise that I wasn’t making a complete fool of myself. My wife, Liz Weil, read pretty much every version and, together with my daughters, Audrey and Hannah, gave me a reason to cook in the first place.

  SELECTED READING

  Barnes, Julian. The Pedant in the Kitchen. London: Atlantic Books, 2003.

  Bertolli, Paul, and Alice Waters. Chez Panisse Cooking. New York: Random House, 1988.

  Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. Trans. M. F. K. Fisher. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2000.

  Chamberlain, Samuel. Clementine in the Kitchen. New York: Modern Library, 2001.

  Colicchio, Tom. Think Like a Chef. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2000.

  Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. The River Cottage Meat Book. New York: Ten Speed Press, 2007.

  Harrison, Jim. The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roaming Gourmand. New York: Grove Press, 2002.

  Henderson, Fergus. The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating. New York: Ecco, 2004.

  Kamman, Madeleine. When French Women Cook: A Gastronomic Memoir. New York: Ten Speed Press, 2002.

  Kamp, David. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2006.

  Keller, Thomas. Ad Hoc At Home. New York: Artisan, 2006.

  ———. Bouchon. New York: Artisan, 2004.

  _______. The French Laundry Cookbook. New York: Artisan, 1999.

  Liebling, A. J. Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris. New York: Random House, 1995.

  Montanari, Massimo. Food Is Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

  Olney, Richard. The French Menu Cookbook. New York: Ten Speed Press, 2002.

  _______. Simple French Food. New York: Wiley, 1992.

  _______. Lulu’s Provençal Table. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

  Pellegrini, Angelo M. The Unprejudiced Palate. New York: Macmillan, 1948.

  Ripert, Eric, and Maguy Le Coze. Le Bernardin Cookbook: Four-Star Simplicity. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1998.

  Rouff, Marcel. The Passionate Epicure. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

  Ruhlman, Michael. The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1999.

  ________. The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection. New York: Penguin, 2001.

  Shere, Lindsey Remolif. Chez Panisse Desserts. New York: Random House, 1985.

  Tower, Jeremiah. California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution. New York: Free Press, 2003.

  Trillin, Calvin. The Tummy Trilogy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.

  Waters, Alice. Chez Panisse Café Cookbook. New York: William Morrow Cookbooks, 1999.

  ________. Chez Panisse Fruit. New York: William Morrow Cookbooks, 2002.

  _______. Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. New York: Random House, 1982.

  _______. Chez Panisse Vegetables. New York: William Morrow Cookbooks, 1996.

  Wrangham, Richard. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

  Ziegelman, Jane. 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement. New York: HarperCollins, 2010.

  A Note on the Author

  Daniel Duane is the author of the surf memoir Caught Inside and the recipient of a 2011 National Magazine Award for “Five Meals Every Man Should Master,” an article about cooking with chef Thomas Keller. Duane’s food writing has been nominated for a James Beard Award and anthologized in Best Food Writing 2011. He collaborated with Alice Waters on the book Edible Education: A Universal Idea. His journalism has appeared in Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and GQ, and he is a contributing editor for Men’s Journal. Duane lives in San Francisco with his wife, the writer Elizabeth Weil, and their two daughters, Audrey and Hannah.

  By the Same Author

  Nonfiction

  Lighting Out: A Vision of California and the Mountains

  Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast

  El Capitan: Historic Feats and Radical Routes

  Fiction

  Looking for Mo

  A Mouth Like Yours

  Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Duane

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Electronic edition published in May 2012

  Parts of this book appeared first, in substantially different form, in Men’s

  Journal, the New York Times Magazine, Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, and

  Sierra.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.

  ISBN: 978-1-60819-415-5 (e-book)

  www.bloomsburyusa.com