Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  By the time I was seventeen, I had a steady girlfriend who would eventually break my heart by going off to college and promptly fucking the guy who ran her orientation group. I’d also found a nice group of juvenile delinquents to call friends who’d take me in during my repeated attempts at leaving home. At one point, a whole bunch of us pooled our scant resources and procured for ourselves a stately old four-bedroom Victorian in downtown Rochester, just off Monroe Avenue, the city’s high-water mark for punk rock, body piercing and freak culture.

  Had we been even slightly more shrewd, it might’ve occurred to us that the place was curiously undervalued even for being just a couple doors down from a notorious mods-and-rockers neighborhood bar and facing a street better known for its tattoo parlors, drug deals and casual violence than any residential charm. But we were far too busy arguing over who was going to get what room, where the Nintendo was going to go, whether the bathtub was big enough to hold a full keg (plus ice) or were we going to have to start buying ponies, and where all our various Indian tapestries, incense holders, futons, blown guitar amps and thrift-store lamps would fit. On our first night, we were chased shrieking into the street by a veritable flood of fat, glossy brown cockroaches.

  We jumped the lease, restrained ourselves (though only barely) from lighting the place on fire and split. Anything already moved into the house was called a loss and I ended up living in my car down by Lake Ontario for a while, sleeping out sometimes on the first green of a nearby golf course. It was summer so I called it camping, and a few years later, when my not-yet-wife, Laura, would come looking for me in Rochester in hopes of digging me out of whatever weird hole I’d crawled into, the beach and the first green were two of the places I took her. To me, it was like bringing her home—something that, at the time, I was unable to articulate, which was just one of the many reasons why she quickly left again, leaving me where she’d found me to ripen yet for a few more seasons.

  I was trying to find myself. Anthony Bourdain once said that no one is born a chef; that the white jacket and solid black exec pants must be earned—preferably the hard way—and that people who tell you different are either fooling themselves or trying to sell you something. But, he continued, while no one is born with cooking “in their blood,” there are those born and raised knowing how to eat well.

  Personally, I disagree simply because I’ve never met anyone born to the table. Sure, I know people raised with money: people who grew up with family trips to Paris, fine meals in cloistered dining rooms and “educational” summers in Madrid or Baden-Baden. I know chefs who were the sons of chefs, who suckled on truffles and could use a knife before they could write their own names, others who grew up taking their meals from their home gardens and understood “slow food” not as a political movement, but simply as a way of life. But ask them, and every one with taste (rare enough) will talk of their coming to the table the way some people talk about losing their virginity—a combination of nervous anticipation, flat-out terror and a what-am-I-supposed-to-do-with-this-now? sense of utter, mortifying confusion.

  Learning to eat well is the same as learning to fuck well or cook well. It’s all about experimentation, error, humility before beauty, and training the senses to know good from bad. A real chef has to earn his stripes, no doubt. But so, too, I think, must the young gourmand. It’s not enough to be bought a hooker on your eighteenth birthday. You’ve got to know what to do with her. It’s not enough to be handed the lobster roll, plate of dripping, garlic-laden snails or Carolina barbecue. You’ve got to know where it came from and why. More important, perhaps, you’ve got to know where you came from and how you ended up where you are.

  So there I was—a blue-collar, rust-belt diner kid; a beans-and-weenies, steak-and-potatoes simpleton. I knew nothing of food or restaurants or cooking or cuisine. At the time, I didn’t even much care. I never went to France, never saw my grandmothers cook, never took much notice of what my own mother did in the kitchen every night. I didn’t collect cookbooks, I collected comics. Unlike so many of my contemporaries who can go all Proust-and-his-madeleines over virtually anything from mom’s scratch puttanesca to veal Orloff aboard the QEII, I have no ripe memory of any one particular dish or sauce or recipe that can, just by its bare mention, transport me home again. Whatever food epiphanies would eventually come to me were either years off yet or had come softly, to lie silently ticking close to my heart like little bombs with decades left on their timers.

  Sure, Mom could fry a nice pork chop. She scalloped a mean potato and would occasionally become inspired to whip up thirty or forty gallons of the richest, most murderous cream of broccoli soup ever made. But through all of my childhood, food in our family had been exactly what it’d become to so many other families cut off from their culinary roots and traditions by feud, diaspora and the American Dream of suburban tract housing, a big TV and dinner from a can. It was just fuel, just sustenance on almost any given day. On holidays and special occasions when food was suddenly expected to be given primacy in the social ritual, we came to it like lapsed Catholics to an Easter service: with a small sense of wonder and awe at the fancy clothes and strangeness of it all.

  When my dad would suddenly get an urge to fire up the backyard barbecue grill for the Fourth of July or Labor Day, there was always the possibility that—having forgotten some vital step in the preparation of the grill—he would blow himself up. On Thanksgiving morning when my mom would pull out the heavy plastic bag containing the disassembled pieces of the antique, hand-cranked food mill she used to make stuffing, we would all crowd around it like a family of chimps trying to assemble a bicycle.

  The most commonly used spice in our kitchen when I was growing up was a gigantic tub of generic onion salt, which my dad put on almost everything, from breakfast eggs and potatoes to dinner steak and potatoes and plates of corned-beef hash out of the can—which is still one of my guiltiest culinary pleasures.

  One of the sweetest, most endearing memories I have of my father as a young man was watching him come down the stairs in a stiff suit and tie, wearing his uncomfortable shoes, looking always as if he were headed to his prom or a funeral but, in any case, smiling and looking like a totally different man on those rare nights when he and my mom would go out for dinner without my brother and me. This hipped me to the idea that going out to eat was something special, something adult and powerful and meaningful. I remember the astringent, manly hospital smell of the cologne he wore. The clean pink of his skin when he was freshly shaved. The way his hands—calloused and battered and scarred, nails blacked out with blood blisters—looked so out of place poking from the cuffs of his fancy jacket.

  Because the only restaurants I’d had any experience with at the time were diners, liminal, half-scary “family restaurants” filled with cheap wood paneling and cigarette smoke or fast-food outlets where you spoke your order into a giant clown head, I was worried for my dad that he’d feel out of place, overdressed; that he’d get made fun of. But I kept it to myself because their leaving always meant that the babysitter was coming, and our babysitter was a total pushover who let me eat ice cream for dinner.

  FUNNY STORY: In the years before Laura and I were married, while we were still living in sin in various spots around the country, we would always try to fly back East for one of the two major holidays, Thanksgiving or Christmas. Obviously, we’d spent time visiting both sets of parents during the nonholiday season, and one of the things that always worried Laura about going and staying with my folks was the way they ate—which is to say, hardly at all. My parents are small people. They got together and made more small people: my brother and me. The house is small, the rooms are small, and at meals the portions are small. Always have been. Growing up, we all ate like tiny, wounded birds. It was just something I’d become accustomed to.

  But holidays were different. At holidays (at least the way I remembered them), we ate from sunup till sundown, gorging ourselves nonstop, barely even pausing to breathe.


  “Just wait,” I told Laura while preparing for our first Christmas with my folks. “If there’s one thing I can guarantee, it’s that there’ll be no shortage of things to eat.”

  Now, I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. It’s not like Laura is a big eater either. And I don’t want anyone to infer from my words that she sits around all day eating bonbons or Crisco right out of the tub. When I say she was worried about there not being enough to eat, it was a very reasonable concern on her part because she’d already experienced Sheehan-style portion controls: two chicken breasts split among five people, a small ice cream bowl full of mashed potatoes for the table, an iceberg salad dressed from a bottle of Thousand Island that’d expired during the Carter administration—that kind of thing.

  And I was nothing but reassuring, explaining to her over and over again how my folks would lay in enough supplies for a week and that it would all be consumed in one massive, gluttonous orgy on Christmas day. There would be baked goods and pastries, baked ham, sliced ham, mountains of mashed potatoes, bacon and eggs, more ham, cream of broccoli soup, potato salad, vegetables, ham. I described it like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, like the Christmas feast at the end of A Christmas Carol, complete with the biggest turkey in the city of London and figgy pudding for all.

  She was skeptical, but took me at my word. It was the last time she ever made that mistake.

  We came up from Laura’s folks’ place outside Philadelphia, driving in on Christmas Eve through the sort of hostile winter storm that blows through the area every year around the holidays yet never fails to shock and horrify all Western New Yorkers—most of whom have been born with a kind of weather autism that makes them incapable of remembering bad weather from one season to the next and unable to see the patterns that even dogs can. As a result, we arrived late and went to bed hungry because dinner was already done and everyone was exhausted.

  “No problem,” I told Laura. “Just wait until tomorrow morning.”

  Following me up the stairs, she nodded trustingly, gnawing a cold crust of dinner roll. We went to bed.

  Christmas morning we woke to the smell of pine needles and cinnamon and fresh-brewed coffee (the one thing that my folks always did have plenty of on hand). Heading downstairs, I asked her if she was hungry. She gave me a look not unlike the looks I imagine were on the faces of those Uruguayan rugby players who crashed in the Andes and went cannibal.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Let’s go have breakfast.”

  One small coffee cake split five ways. One egg per person and two strips of bacon. Enough coffee for thirty cups apiece, orange juice served in doll glasses, and white toast thinly veneered in some bitter spread made from whipped olive oil.

  Lunch was last night’s cold ham leftovers made into sandwiches, which we missed because I’d dragged Laura out to try to get bagel dogs (a hot dog with cheese cooked inside a bagel) from a shop I remembered having good ones. It being Christmas Day, the shop was closed. No surprise. We ate candy bars from the gas station and made Chronicles of Narnia jokes about Edmund selling his soul for a handful of Turkish delight.

  For dinner, my parents served the world’s smallest turkey, roughly the size of three starlings stapled together, and roasted, limp green beans from a can, cream of broccoli soup and sides served in dishes better suited for dwarfs. We finished with one pie cut into a dozen tiny slivers.

  “See?” I told her in bed that night. “Didn’t I tell you there’d be enough to eat?” She had to cover her face with a pillow just so her bitter laughter wouldn’t wake the neighbors.

  The next night, Laura and I went out for dinner. And now, whenever we go to visit Rochester for Christmas, we pack as if for an extended polar expedition with no guarantee of resupply, loading down the bottom of one of our backpacks with snack foods, hiding beef jerky and PowerBars and granola and dried fruit in all our pockets.

  I REMEMBER BEING LITTLE, watching cartoons on the living room floor and eating cold SpaghettiOs from the can, and my wonder at the microwave oven (one of the first on our block) Dad brought home from work one day.5 I was amazed at how fast the thing could cook a potato. So was my mom. We ate baked potatoes for dinner for a week straight. Baked potatoes and bacon because she also no longer had to worry about hauling out the skillet, waiting for it to heat, the oil spattering all over the stovetop, and disposing of the drippings when I wasn’t looking because I’d eat the stuff on bread if not watched like a hawk.

  I will swear up and down that this whole cooking thing that I got myself into (and this whole food-writing thing that came later) was all just one big, colossal mistake, the unintended consequence of precocity, poor career planning and my absolute unwillingness to wear a tie or work someplace where my calling someone a goddamn cocksucker and threatening them with a really big knife would be considered grounds for anything more serious than a five-minute time-out on the loading dock.

  I will tell you and anyone else who’ll listen that I should’ve been an assembly-line worker, a machinist, the assistant manager of the corner Gas-n-Sip or an orthodontist. Orthodontists wear white coats just like chefs do. Orthodontists and chefs are both concerned about what’s going into their customers’ mouths. But you know what orthodontists have that (most) chefs don’t? Boats. Big ones.6

  I just didn’t have it in me to look at teeth all day. But then I would’ve also sworn that nothing in particular was driving me toward the so-called culinary arts either; nothing in my makeup or personal history that had me kinked as a sensualist, a gastronaut, a fucking foodie.

  And yet, and yet, and yet . . .

  I had a whole second secret life even back then that I kept almost completely to myself; closeted like a small-town queer, hidden like a third nipple or a taste for stiff leather miniskirts and spanking.

  When I was still little, every time Mom would take me shopping I would demand that she buy me cheese. A different cheese each time: aged cheddars, pearl mozzarella, individually wrapped Kraft singles, wedges of hard Parm, chèvre, baby Goudas in foil, Velveeta, expensive Muenster with that cool orange rind and farmer’s cheeses, the stronger the better. It would be years before I would taste my first Brie or Vacherin or artisanal bleu, but it amazed me even then that one thing—“cheese”—could taste so many different ways, and yet the “cheese” traditionally employed in my mom’s kitchen all tasted the same. Ditto “bread” (generic white sandwich) and “chocolate” (Hershey’s) and “butter” (read margarine) and the mayonnaise that wasn’t mayonnaise at all, but some vile, whipped fluff called salad dressing that also wasn’t salad dressing because my mom’s refrigerator was where bottles of actual meant-to-go-on-top-of-lettuce salad dressing went to die.

  In high school I would regularly ditch my last class before lunch so I’d have time to run down to the grocery store a few blocks away for sushi. Yeah, that’s right: grocery-store sushi. Sometimes three or four times a week. And I was lucky. Growing up in Rochester meant growing up in the hometown of Wegmans, probably the best small family supermarket chain in the country.

  Danny Wegman (who would later employ me during one of the darker points in my career) was and is something of a visionary. His stores were monuments, huge palaces of food where someone could find not only anything he wanted, but ten or twenty or thirty other things that he didn’t even know existed but now must immediately taste. Tamales in a can. Plugrá. Irish brandy butter (which, just behind proper whiskey and the Pogues, is the greatest contribution of my people to world culture). Prosciutto. Japanese shrimp puffs. Focaccia. All of these things I had for the first time thanks to Wegmans. Same with all those cheeses. And grocery-store sushi packed in little black plastic clamshell to-go boxes with a smear of pasty wasabi and a strip of fake plastic grass for garnish. Smoked eel and ebi, tamago, tekka maki and California rolls—I would buy the box and eat my fish walking, picking rolls up with my fingers, mauling them in a puddle of soy or (horror) cocktail sauce. Obviously, it was terrible sushi—tasting, when it taste
d of anything at all, like refrigerated air, shelf stabilizers and the rubber they use to make spatula blades.

  But I loved it anyway, which fucked me up for years when it came to eating real sushi, because my best, most powerful memories of what sushi was supposed to taste like came from those afternoons strolling across the Wegmans parking lot, headed back toward school, jamming mushy rice and sticky nori and fake crab greedily into my mouth; rushing to finish it all before anyone saw me because this was still Rochester, after all, and in my neighborhood, fish got eaten only two ways: fried on Fridays with chips and washed down with six or eight Guinnesses so God didn’t smite your heathen ass for accidentally having a cheeseburger, or caught on a fishing trip, gutted, scaled and burned to carbon on a backyard grill.

  So even though Danny Wegman, with his big-city money and highfalutin notions, might offer raw fish for sale, it didn’t mean anyone was supposed to actually eat the stuff. Do that and probably there was something wrong with you. Something shameful, to which the consumption of raw fish and “Oriental food” was just one clue.

  I bought copies of Gourmet magazine on the sly, surreptitiously, like I was buying porno, like that scene from American Graffiti where the geek tries to buy whiskey.

  “Can I help you, young man?”

  “Why, yes, good shopkeep. I believe you can. I just need a few things here, so let me see . . . I’ll take a carton of cigarettes, that home enema kit, a copy of Screw, a tube of Anal Eze, a bottle of Ten High, a pack of those Zig-Zags, some tampons, pocket comb . . . andacopy-ofGourmetmagazineplease.”