The Teachings of Don B.

by Donald Barthelme

  It is true that all of these great meals fall roughly under the rubric “Southern Cooking,” but I stress that the ingredients have nationwide distribution, for the most part, and that because something has its origins in the South doesn’t automatically mean that it can be dismissed as “low-rent” or beneath contempt. An open mind toward the cuisines of various regions is the first hallmark of the educable palate.

  A GREAT BREAKFAST

  For the Great Breakfast we assume that, the night before, you have gone out and bought 8–10 pieces of Popeye’s Fried Chicken at the drive-in window of your local Popeye’s, together with 6–8 Popeye’s Biscuits. Now I am not sure that Popeye’s is entirely national, but it is widely found throughout the South which makes it national enough for our purposes. Colonel Sanders’ may be substituted if you wish. The average family will have eaten about seven of the chicken pieces and maybe four of the biscuits during the original meal leaving you with a wealth of residue for the Great Breakfast.

  Upon awakening, take one package McCormick Chicken Gravy Mix and place it in a saucepan, adding one-half can of Swanson’s Clear Chicken Broth. This is the first subtlety. The directions for the gravy mix suggest cold water; by adding Swanson’s Chicken Broth you get a gravy that is far richer. (You also double your expense, but as the Gravy Mix is typically about 63 cents a package and the Broth about 49 cents a can, it’s not that much.)

  Next, chop a fresh onion very fine—very very fine, about two tablespoons’ worth. Throw this in the gravy. You may then add a splash of Soave Bolla white wine and raise heat to boil off the alcohol. If your religious convictions do not permit the use of alcohol in your breakfast it may be omitted, but what do you do when you get to turtle soup, leave out the sherry? While the gravy is simmering, take the leftover Popeye’s Biscuits and split them, placing them in a small container in a 425-degree oven for approximately eight minutes.

  Now, strip chicken from leftover Popeye’s pieces and add to gravy, being careful to not include the heavy crispy skin that was your motivation for getting the Popeye’s Chicken in the first place. Then remove biscuits from oven, ladle gravy over them, and sprinkle with Spice Islands thyme, taking care to crush thyme between thumb and forefinger to release flavor. The result is a chicken-with-dumplings that cannot be equaled this side of that tin-roofed place on a dirt road outside of Talladega, Alabama, that we’ve all heard about but no one has ever found. The masterstroke here is of course the onion.

  AN UNUSUAL LUNCH

  This kind of lunch is possible when the green-skinned tomatillo is in season. Luckily the green-skinned tomatillo is always in season in the canned version put out by Herdez, which also includes chilies. Take a can of Gebhardt Tamales and place in a small ovengoing vessel. Layer with chopped onion. Add one can Herdez Salsa Verde Tomatillos. Cover with Kraft Shredded Sharp Cheddar, which is available in a resealable plastic bag for about $2.09 for 10 oz. Use about one third of the bag to top the dish, spreading the cheese smoothly around with your hand. Bake in 425-degree oven for fifteen minutes. In the more developed parts of the country there will be locally produced tamales (usually differentiated as to “Hot” or “Mild”) made by gifted indigenous personnel and these can be substituted for the Gebhardt variety. Renown and Ro*Tel brands of tomatoes and chilies can also be used; both are excellent, although not green. This lunch has a strong Mexican flavor due to the use of ingredients associated with Mexico; although it is not in any sense authentic, it is unusual.

  SUPERB DINNER FOR SIXTY

  You probably did not know that a superb dinner for sixty could be made out of canned goods, but that is true. Begin with five Smok-A-Roma Fully Cooked Boneless Hams. Remove hams from wrappers and cut in chunks, each chunk roughly the size of a Bic cigarette lighter. Set aside. Next take thirty 15-oz. cans of Trappey’s Black Eye Peas Flavored with Slab Bacon, open, and set aside. Next brown thirty pounds of Oscar Mayer Little Smokies, which are very good bite-sized smoked sausages. Tearing open the packages is tiresome but you can usually get children to do this for you. In the same fat, make a roux by stirring in ten pounds of Gold Medal All-Purpose Flour. This gives you approximately twelve pounds of roux (flour plus oil). Set aside.

  Next, into some gallons of water in huge immense pots on four six-burner stoves pour any number of cans of Progresso Peeled Tomatoes Italian Style with Basil (Pomidoro Pelati Tipo Italiano con Basilico). If you use the larger cans you have fewer cans to open. Add forty-eight cloves of chopped Elephant Garlic, which is sold in little net bags from Frieda of California and has a subtle explosiveness that is piquant.

  By now you will be slightly confused as you look around you at the mighty forces you have mustered but everything is easier than it looks. You must understand that we don’t like to get this involved either but maybe it’s your daughter’s wedding or something and you have the choice of giving the whole problem over to some unreliable caterer who’ll just supply some pink froufrou on lettuce leaves at a horrible price per head or doing it yourself with your accustomed élan and goodwill. Place a half pound of the roux into each pot and paddle it around in there until the liquid has achieved a rich dark-brown color, then add the ham, sausages, and Black Eye Peas. Simmer for some time; you are doing just fine.

  Pork is the motif which has up to now dominated the mix, and the pork has to have a contrasting flavor. The only thing to do is to slug in five Maple Leaf Farms Frozen Ducklings. Defrost and cut up ducks, brown quickly in Lou Ana 100% Pure and Natural Peanut Oil, home office, Opelousas, La., place in pots and let simmer for one hour. Salt (Morton), pepper (Lawry’s), and parsley your twenty-four pots all to hell, and you are ready to serve. About twenty pounds of sliced onions would be a good addition, although they probably should have gone in earlier. If you want something to call this superb meal you could probably call it a burgoo. (I would like to acknowledge input for this recipe from the Arkansas Department of Corrections, Food Services Division.)

  For other excellent recipes involving American canned goods, my 64-page leaflet is available upon request. But I am not trying to sell the leaflet, only to stress an appropriate respect and love for the American canned good, which is not, and never will be, Japanese.

  LANGUISHING, HALF-DEEP IN SUMMER . . .

  Languishing, half-deep in summer, soul-sick and under-friended, I decided to find love. So I zipped over to the new-suit store and bought me a Giorgio Armani rig, unbacked, and a little skinny nothing tie to go with it, and some face bronzer by Daunt. Thinking: O mistress mine, where are you hiding? Are you at the Whitney Museum, cheek to cheek with the George Segal retrospective? Are you at Crazy Eddie’s, bent over the Grover Washington, Jr., bin? Are you at Paragon Sporting Goods, in the killer-knife area? Have you got your thumb stuck in a dark-green avocado at Balducci’s fruit and produce? Are you riding a Japanese ten-speed the wrong way down Sixth Avenue, with friends? With a whistle in your mouth? Whistling, whistling, wildly whistling?

  So I answered an ad in the back pages of a literary review—Box 222, to be precise—and got me a pretty, lively, successful, vibrant prof. female, fluent French, German, witty affectionate caring, backgammon, racquetball. She was vibrating visibly when we met, at One Fifth in the bar, but I cooled her out with about half a gallon of kir; she was indeed pretty, lively, witty, and her name was Mindy Sue.

  She asked if it had been raining in my part of the city, and I said no, the suit was supposed to look that way, it was an unbacked Giorgio Armani. We looked at my credit cards for a while and then she showed me hers, shyly—her American Express, her Avis, her Bergdorf’s. We discussed backgammon, racquetball, three hundred films, and the urban crisis. Then I said, “Mindy Sue, you are a pretty, lively, successful female, fluent in French and German. You are a professional woman but also sportif. You care buckets, I can see that. How did you get yourself in this terrible predicament? How did you become a four-line seventy-five-cents-a-word advertisement in the back pages of The New York Review of Books?”

  “Pete,�
�� she said, “there are thousands of us. The true urban crisis, from my angle of vision, is marriage. All the good men are married, and most of the bad. There is nothing much left except lames, kiddies, and poor people. What can I do? You think I like describing myself as ‘cultivated, sensuous’?”

  I said that hadn’t been in the ad.

  “Whoops,” she said. “Must have been the Saturday Review. Or maybe the Chronicle of Higher Education. Sometimes I have trouble keeping track.”

  I said she seemed to have a lot of lines out.

  “Well some of these dealies pull and some don’t,” she answered, splashing a little kir behind her ears. “One is looking for a certain type of person, right? One stuffs one’s message into the bottle and hopes for the best. You should see what springs from semiotexte. Or praxis 4. Let me tell you, if a journal runs its logo in lower case, what you get is lower depths. With mauve teeth, usually.”

  Ghastly, I said.

  Mindy Sue looked a bit fierce—matter of lowering the lovely eyebrows. “I have also,” she said, “responded to some of these items. Myself. ‘Dynamic, attractive professor seeks supplemental relationship with superior fox, to 40.’ It was piggy of me. Like that cutoff point? Like it? Like that ‘supplemental’? Well, I was punished. He took me to a joint so tacky that when I ordered Cherries Jubilee the captain said ‘We don’t flame for one.’ Can you hear that? ‘We don’t flame for one’?”

  I said something to the effect that the course of periodical love was seldom smooth, and that some comfort could be derived from the excellent editorial matter—the parsley, as it were, in these particular meat marts.

  “Well, I bring it on my own damn self,” said Mindy Sue. “I could sit home and talk to myself in my fluent French and German, I suppose. I could be witty, affectionate, caring with the cat. I could go to the George Segal retrospective at the Whitney and think about the human condition, or plaster. I have a ten-speed Japanese bicycle and a whistle. Nobody’s forcing me to insert myself in the back pages of the damn New York Review of Books—”

  She seemed distraught; I beamed support at her through my newly bronzed façade.

  “But I will not give up!” she said, pounding on the table with her small fist and making the dead Salems dance in their ashtray. “I will persevere. I will check out handsome, cerebral, overachieving prof. male, young 42, likes music, ballet, stamps & coins. I will investigate earthy, outgoing, tall semiretired humanist idealist, sailing, tennis, good coffee. I will encounter, tentatively, dentist, 28, sincere, intelligent. I will invest an evening in warm, bright, NY mensch, assertive but not hostile booklover, walks, talks, concerts. I have to try.”

  I bought her a wurst and an anisette, and told her she was brave.

  THE PALACE

  I was standing in line at the bank (Chase Manhattan Fourteenth Street) last Friday, and I happened to notice the amount of the check the short Puerto Rican woman in front of me was cashing: $84.06.1 looked away very quickly, but the check was yellow and I noticed that there were a lot of white and black and Puerto Rican women in line holding in their hands the same yellow pay-check. And I thought, $84.06, that’s not much for a week’s work. Then I tried to remember what the federal minimum wage was, and remembered, and tried to multiply $1.60 by forty hours and got it wrong, and more women were coming into the bank now with these yellow checks in their hands (it was lunchtime), and I began running down the purchasing power of $84.06. It’s a single session with a $50-an-hour analyst, with $34.06 left over for coffee, cakes, and the rent. And a lady I know has informed me that her panty hose cost $2.50 the pair, and a kennel owner I know has offered me a purebred Rhodesian Ridgeback for $350, and you can buy a Pontiac Firebird for $4,385. And a house in the country . . .

  But you can get a pretty good tennis racket for $84.06, and all of a sudden I flashed on a scene in which all these ladies, white, black, and Puerto Rican, were zipping into Abercrombie’s or somewhere and lashing out their $84.06s for brand-new tennis racquets. And for a minute, there in the bank line, every yellow check became in my mind a good-quality tennis racquet, all these ladies were waving good-quality tennis racquets, and what else was there to do with these tennis racquets but beat me to death with them? What if the Revolution occurred to all these women simultaneously? What if they put it together, figured it out, got hold of the real numbers, all at once, and then, armed with their death-dealing Bancrofts or Wilsons, and me armed only with a little card that says I’m a member of the ACLU, came after me? Because my check wasn’t yellow and it wasn’t for $84.06, and although I am for the Revolution in principle, I haven’t done much about it lately in a practical way. So in order not to think about this distressing situation I thought about the palace.

  The palace is quite a wonderful place, full of Eames chairs and Barcelona chairs and Pollock paintings and David Smith sculptures and other high-class cultural grid coordinates. The palace was partly designed by Breuer, but then Mies came over one day while the thing was still a-building and said something about how wouldn’t it be nice if the travertine that covers the west wall ran this way instead of that way (waving his hands in the air, which is how architects do their thinking), and Breuer, who is the most modest of men, said, “Mies, just for fun, why don’t you do part of it and I’ll do part of it and we’ll see what happens?” Well, Mies liked to play, too, so he agreed, and then when Corbu visited the site he wanted to get in on it, and, in fact, the entire east wing is Corbu’s. And then Nervi and Aalto and Neutra and Saarinen and Louis Kahn and all sorts of other people, all geniuses, got interested, contributed bits, ideas, little pieces, because none of them had ever done a palace before—I mean a real, honest-to-God palace, as opposed to a corporate headquarters. The king came out to the site every day wearing a blue hard hat and was just beside himself. I have never seen a king, even a limited constitutional monarch, take so much pleasure in anything. The wonderful part was that the whole place worked, it came together beautifully, none of the architects tried to upstage each other—the palace appears to be the product of a single hand. Kahn’s dark-red brick towers look amazing and lovely against Mies’s exposed steel (in this case, Cor-Ten, which rusts to a handsome reddish brown, rather than his usual black-painted steel—just one instance of the courtesy and tact and sweetness that prevailed). Aalto used dark woods instead of light, Le Corbusier did not insist on pilotis, and everyone wondered what Wright would have done if he had been around to participate, and Venturi jumped up and down and clapped his hands in glee and sent a telegram to Paolo Soleri, out there in the desert, and ordered forty dozen wind bells and wondered if Soleri would be interested in doing the grand ballroom. Soleri was enchanted with the idea of doing a grand ballroom, and the next day the model arrived by air express, together with a blueprint forty feet long and so splendid in conception that everybody agreed it gave new meaning to the words grand and ballroom. And the throne room, done by Simon Rodia, who did the Watts Towers, is as gaudy as Gaudí, and the royal kitchens, by Edward Durell Stone, make you want to get in there and cook your heart out.

  The royal tennis courts extend for miles in every direction—grass courts set in glades and dells (each glade and dell the work of a great-grandson of Frederick Law Olmsted himself), and I suddenly shouted, right out loud, right there in line at Chase Manhattan Fourteenth Street, “Tennis, everyone?” And everyone shouted back, “Yes, yes, tennis!” And we all set out, the white and black and Puerto Rican women with their tennis racquets, and the clerks and tellers, too, with their racquets, and even the bank officers, in their dark suits, with their racquets, in a long straggle, or friendly mob, in the direction of the palace. The palace exists; we have only to get there—that is, walk hard enough. That is a beautiful idea of which I have always been very fond. The truth is that the palace does not exist but the serfs do.

  MR. FOOLFARM’S JOURNAL

  Mr. Foolfarm, the well-known Generalist, was not in again today. He had hauled Himself to Washington on the Shuttle, to see his
Ambassadorship. The post, as Plenipotentiary to North Minerva (the handsome and vivacious South Pacific atoll), was awarded him not in Consequence of his campaign contribution of $1.95, as malicious Tongues have whispered, but rather for his lifetime of service to the Nation, as well as his great talents at Stroking and Mental Reservation. He is also known to excel at Face-Slapping, holding the world Title for same at 34 hours 20 minutes (Kiev, USSR, 1961).

  Mr. Foolfarm was not in again today. He is in Washington, the Capital of the Country, advising an Important Person about Hangout. It had been suggested to the Important Person that he Let It All Hang Out, but Mr. Foolfarm is not entirely Sanguine as to the Consequences of this Policy. The noted Generalist has, it is said, offered a Bouquet of Options, including Partial Hangout, Semipartial Hangout, Semipartial Reversible Hangout, More or Less Total Hangout, and Absolutely Final Weighted Plus-or-Minus Hangout. The Important Person is giving these Choices the consideration they Deserve.

  Mr. Foolfarm, the Omnidirectional Thinker, was not in again today. He is in Washington, the Capital of the Country, learning to play Tennis. By fierce perusal of the Newspapers, he has learned that if he is ever put away in one of the better government Nicks, he will have to be Able to at least get the Ball back over the net, or else suffer social Obloquy. Golf he has already mastered.