Home cooking

by Laurie Colwin

  olive oil

  ajp

  1. Sfired the yam.

  2. Beat up eggs, add to the potatoes and mix.

  3. Add flour to make the mixture cohere (or more to make more coherent).

  4. Add scallion, red pepper flakes and fermented black beans.

  5. Form into cakes with a spoon (these fall to pieces rather easily. I use a bouillon spoon and press the mixture in] and fry in olive oil.

  Fermented black beans are available in Chinese grocery stores. They are pungent and salty and come mixed with salted ginger. They are v^onderful with sauteed eggplant for a pasta sauce, and excellent sprinkled on top of a homemade pizza. Since they are very, very salty a few go a long way.

  While you are concocting these things, remember that vegetables really are good for you and that every step, no matter how devious, should be undertaken to encourage people to eat them happily. You should not tell your hapless victims how you have

  How to Disguise Vegetables

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  duped them. This will only make them belligerent, which is not the idea at all.

  You must not make speeches about health or hector people who insist on being pig-headed. Nor should you make lofty declarations, after the zucchini fritters have disappeared, about the good you are doing. As we know, the only thing that butters a parsnip is butter.

  FISH

  I do not come from a family of adventurous fish eaters. When I was a little girl, we ate broiled fillets of flounder, or my father brought smoked butterfish home from Barney

  Greengrass in New York, or, in the summer, we would go crabbing at Blue Point, on Long Island.

  Crabbing is perfect child sport. You sit still for a very short time holding a string on the end of which is a piece of herring. In your other hand you hold a net. Very soon crabs begin to cruise the herring and you scoop them up. We came home from these excursions sunburnt and happy, with peach baskets packed with seaweed and blue crabs. Fixed in my memory of childhood is the wonderful time when the catch was so enormous we ran out of peach baskets and had to put the last crabs in a cardboard box. Halfway home, claws began to emerge through the cardboard. The boxes and baskets were brought into the kitchen while my mother put an enormous pot of water and crab spice on the stove. Just as it began to boil, the crabs in the cardboard ate their way through and escaped under the stove.

  The best way to eat crabs, as everyone knows, is off newspaper

  at a large table with a large number of people. Adults drink beer. Children quaff iced tea. The crabs are boiled, drained and dumped in the center of the table (protected first by oilcloth and many layers of newspaper). Two people share a nutcracker and there are picks for everyone.

  On birthdays we went to The Riverside Inn in Smithtown and ate lobster and Baked Alaska. On cold nights my mother baked salmon loaf, that wholesome staple of the late forties. In season we had what we called chicken of the sea, which others call sea squab, but are really blowfish.

  The blowfish is a little critter with a poisonous liver and ovaries. What you eat is the back—a firm, plump morsel of meat with one central bone that looks like a minuscule edition of one of those old-fashioned combs with teeth on both sides. When I was little, we ate blowfish breaded with crumbs and fried. Last year at my local farmers' market, blowfish made an appearance in my life for the first time in years: there on ice was the food of my childhood. I bought some thinking they would be a nice treat for a small child.

  These blowfish were an enormous hit with my little daughter, so I decided to saute the rest in butter and garlic and serve them to adults. They were sweet, nutlike and delicate, and I served them continually through the spring, summer and early fall and was met with cries for more. We were very sad when the season ended, and very happy when it began again.

  The only other fish 1 remember eating as a child was sea bass, cooked for me by a friend of my parents. I did not have sea bass again for close to thirty years—this is the result of not being drawn into fish stores—but it was as I remembered it. Now that striped bass are taboo, sea bass abound to keep us all happy.

  As an adult I edged my way toward fish because my best friend's husband liked to get up at four in the morning, drive to Montauk and surf cast. One day he decided it would be a swell idea if we all piled into the car, took a series of motel rooms and went jigging for bass.

  On the way we stopped for dinner at a roadside diner where I

  was given an entire small flounder. I had never eaten anything but a fillet before and this flounder seemed to me quite another thing altogether.

  The next day we went trawling around in the tidal rip, armed with long poles with which we drove ourselves crazy jigging for bass—pushing those poles back and forth in a sideways motion hoping that something would bite one of our lures. Several of our party, after a few hours of gas fumes and circling, turned a faint olive color and decided to lie down. 1 drank a cup of awful coffee and then began to jig again. I was placidly jigging, thinking my own thoughts, when 1 suddenly felt that my arm was being pulled out of its socket. 1 yelped loudly to this effect. My friend's husband ran to my side.

  "Hold on tight!" he said. "YouVe got one."

  "You hold on tight," 1 said. "You're three times my size."

  He gave me a look and I could see I had let him down in the real-man department.

  1 hung on for a while and he hung on too.

  "Why is this fish trying to pull my arm off?" I said.

  "They're fighting fish," he said. "That's the fun."

  I did not find this lots of fun, and I found it less fun when the poor fish was hauled up on deck and flopped around desperately.

  By the end of the day we had caught three eight-pound stripers and one of them was mine. My friend and her husband had a room with a kitchen, so we all repaired to our own rooms to shower and agreed to meet in their room to cook.

  As I stepped out of my room, clean and dressed, I saw my friend's husband—an enormous, handsome fellow—sitting on a grassy bank, gutting the fish with a Japanese knife. He was as happy and absorbed as a child, and he smiled like a child as he flung the fish guts up to the circling gulls. He seemed a man entirely at peace, leaving me to wonder why I had given up vegetarianism at the age of seventeen.

  But there, on the counter of the kitchen, was that beautiful big striper, cleaned, scaled and ready to bake. It was stuffed with scallion greens, garlic and some shreds of lean bacon, doused

  with a little white wine, dotted with butter and then swaddled in tin foil and baked in the oven. While it baked, we ate several buckets of steamers. In a small pan, we made a reduction of chopped bacon, butter, white wine and garlic, strained it and dribbled it over the fish when it was cooked.

  Seven people polished off an enormous amount of that eight-pound fish. The next morning, I finished the cold remains and realized how delicious cold striped bass was. But those days are over and gone until our waters are clean and the striped bass population is no longer in danger.

  I now find myself a fish lover, but I am still not a very adventurous fish cooker. Fish in my opinion should be grilled, broiled, sauteed in butter or turned into fish cakes. For large numbers of people I like to bake salmon fillets, and for less ceremonial occasions I like baked codfish served with green almond sauce. This is easily made by putting scallion greens, chopped blanched almonds, garlic, lemon juice, watercress bottoms and a hot green pepper into the blender with enough olive oil to make a sauce—it is delicious on a bland fish like cod or scrod.

  I have cooked tilefish, red snapper, halibut, gray and lemon sole but I have never learned to like trout and I find bluefish quite inedible. 1 will confess I fear smaller fish that have to be cooked in one piece, like porgy, because I fear bones and because I can never get the skin crispy. But fresh sardines are worth the effort and the bones. Fried in butter they are incomparable. Mostly 1 stick happily to that which can be either filleted or cut into steaks.

  Eating habits change, often for the bette
r, with the acquisition of a child. We became a fish-eating family when our daughter began to eat solid food and developed a craving for such expensive things as salmon and sole. It is amazing how much salmon a child three or under can pack away.

  As an entertainment after a morning at play group, the local mothers would wheel their babies into the fish store and amuse them by picking up the smaller fish and displaying them. Then

  we bought our fillets and went off to cook our lunches. The fish men were extremely cheerful and forbearing about this.

  One morning one of my friends took her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to the fish store. The fish man, an unshaven, unsmiling person, turned to the child.

  "Whaddya want," he barked.

  "Slamber," she said without batting an eye.

  "What color is it?"

  'Tink and green," said the child.

  "Oh, yeah?" he said. "Well, we don't carry it."

  "Then give me something else," said the little girl.

  We eat quite a lot of slamber these days, which turned out to be salmon, and I remember my daughter's first taste of it. She smiled a smile of almost giddy delight, which made me realize how as we acquire experience things stop being so amazing.

  About a million years ago I was taken out to dinner by a professor of Chinese studies. He took me to a real Chinese restaurant (as opposed to one of those places full of plastic dragons and chow mein) in Chinatown and proceeded to order one of the most fabulous dinners I had ever eaten. This food was news to me, rather like my daughter's first taste of salmon.

  First we had hot and sour soup. My companion informed me that in China ox blood is dripped on the top of the hot soup in lines to make a design. Then we had a small order of fried dumplings and a small scallion pancake. I had not known that such things existed. Our next dish was sauteed lamb with seal-lions, but the centerpiece of the meal was a striped bass, steamed with black mushrooms, strips of ginger, scallion and Smithfield ham. At the first taste of that fish, I began to laugh. My companion gave me a worried look. After all, 1 was in my early twenties and perhaps he thought 1 was more than a little cracked.

  But it was the food that made me laugh. It was so wonderful and unexpected, so totally new I hardly knew how else to respond.

  Part of the experience of being a parent is the reexperiencing

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  of your own childhood, and as I watch my daughter taste her first this and that—^which, in New York City, means her first shiitake mushroom, falafel, plate of hummus, tree ear, bamboo shoot or chocolate mousse—I remember back to that time when my palate was clear and unsophisticated, everything was an adventure and the world was as fresh as a fish.

  FEEDING THE MULTITUDES

  Somehow or other I always end up in a kitchen feeding a crowd. At parties, I gravitate toward a platter or stack of dishes or can be found hanging around the kitchen

  being helpful. For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start.

  The idea of feeding a crowd is far from alien to me. Each year my assimilated parents gave a Christmas Eve buffet, with turkey, ham, three hot dishes, salad, petits fours, fruitcake, champagne punch with peaches, eggnog and chocolate-covered orange peel, with black caviar for an hors d'oeuvre.

  At college, in an extremely crummy kitchen (a drainboard-sized space in an off-campus men's dorm where two enterprising fellows had formed a sandwich concern), my friend Michelle Reis and 1 were paid cigarette money to make dozens of tuna fish and cheese sandwiches to feed young ladies after curfew—this was many hundreds of years ago when girls still had curfews at college, although the curfew at our progressive school was considered to be extremely liberal. After twelve thirty these boys showed up at the girls' dorms and sold our sandwiches at a hefty markup.

  Reis and I—^we were called by our last names exclusively^ mixed enormous cans of tuna fish with large scoops of mayonnaise from an industrial-sized jar. We laid out the bread like a deck of cards, and spread the slices with iceberg lettuce leaves. The way to get the core out of a head of iceberg lettuce, we were instructed, was to bonk it forcefully on a counter. The core would then pull right out, and that, in my opinion, is all anyone needs to know about iceberg lettuce, except that when a head of it falls to the floor, it bounces, ever so slightly.

  I was an early college dropout. When I dropped back in, it was to the School of General Studies at Columbia, where, in 1968, Students for a Democratic Society called a strike and occupied a number of buildings. 1 was a part-time student, part-time office girl, and when the strike was called I found myself in my Miss Bergdorf dress and raincoat in the kitchen of an occupied building trying to figure out how to feed a large number of ravenous postadolescents. The next day I slipped out, went home to change my clothes and slipped back in. Someone put a piece of adhesive on the sleeve of my sweatshirt that read: kitchen/colwin. This, 1 feel, marked me for life.

  As I began to make what felt like hundreds of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, my comrades streamed in—Columbia College boys younger than I, and starving.

  "Hey! Can 1 have something to eat?"

  "No. We have to save food for mealtimes."

  "Hey, I'm starving. Puh-lease?"

  "Okay. You can have tuna fish or peanut butter and jelly."

  "Tuna fish! Peanut butter and jelly! We had peanut butter and jelly for breakfast and I'm allergic to tuna fish."

  I learned to say: "Forget it! You're supposed to be eating paving stones like your comrades in Paris." This sent them skulking away. Piles of The New York Times showed up mysteriously every morning and we all followed the student strike in Paris as well as the news about ourselves. When people got desperate enough, they either sent runners to Chock Full o' Nuts or implored someone on the street below to provision for them.

  One afternoon we dropped a bucket on ropes out of the window, and after lifting it up and down a number of times we had seven dozen eggs. When I went to boil them, 1 realized that someone had thoughtfully done it for us and we all had boiled eggs for breakfast.

  Time has passed and it is fashionable to run down the sixties, but I am proud to have been in that kitchen. The issues were real issues of academic freedom and social justice, about which many students of the time had deep and passionate feelings.

  Fourteen years later, I found myself in the kitchen of the Olivieri Center for Homeless Women, on Manhattan's West Side in the heart of the fur district. The Olivieri Center is technically a drop-in center, but women are allowed to sleep there, on the floor. It is two blocks from Pennsylvania Station, seven blocks south of the Port Authority Bus Terminal and across town from Grand Central Station. In all of these places, destitute women live—in the ladies' room, in secret places under the tracks, in the waiting rooms. Many of them find their way to Olivieri, where they can shower, get fresh clothes and eat three meals a day. If they stick around, they can talk to a caseworker who will try to straighten out their entitlements—many women receive supplemental security income, a form of social security for the disabled—or help to get them on public assistance. They can be seen by a doctor and sent to a free clinic.

  When I started to volunteer, one hot June morning, the cook, an unflappable, handsome woman named Jean Delmoor, was serving lunch to 120 ladies.

  Until you get the notion to volunteer, you do not know who your population is. Some people read to the blind or take deaf children to baseball games. Some people make home visits to the elderly or work with children or runaways. I did not know until I started that my population would be chronically homeless, mentally ill women.

  For a couple of months I stayed behind the counter with Jean and performed the services of her sous-chef. I mixed and chopped and fetched and scraped carrots and peeled potatoes. Little by

  little I got the hang of the place. I got to know the ladies and the ladies began to know me.

  None of these women was in very good shape. In addition to schizophrenia, paranoia, psy
chosis and delusions, these women suffered from diabetes, congestive heart failure and leg ulcerations, the scourge of people who never lie down to sleep. They had neglected teeth, respiratory problems, lice, scabies and TB. There were pregnant women who refused or never received prenatal care. One woman, in fact, delivered on the floor without saying a word. When the caseworker on night duty went to attend to her before the ambulance came, the only words she spoke were: ''Do you have a cigarette?"

  Some of these women had been homeless for years. Many were former mental patients although there were battered wives, women terrorized out of their Single Room Occupancy hotel rooms by landlords hot to gentrify, mothers burned out of their apartments, or thrown out by boyfriends, husbands and family.

  Not one of them was like another. They were and are the most surprising group of people I have ever encountered, and not a single assumption can be made about them except that they are all living in a horrible way. They were old, young and middle-aged. Some women had advanced degrees. Some had hardly finished the fifth grade. They were black, white, Hispanic, of every religion and creed. They came from everywhere on the face of the earth, and one of them was a person who was waiting for a transsexual operation and therefore was not allowed in either the men's or the women's shelter. She or he, wearing mules with pompoms, lived for a while at the Olivieri Center.

  But all of them had to be fed and 1 was happy to be the person ladling lunch onto plates or drawing coffee into Styro-foam cups from a huge urn.

  One morning in the fall I turned up and found the kitchen empty.

  "Where's Jean?" I asked Juan, who was half security guard and half maintenance man.

  "It's her day off," he said.

  "Who's cooking?" I asi^ed brightly.

  "I guess you," said Juan.

  A chill went over my heart.

  "How many ladies am I cooking for?"

  Juan consulted a sheet.

  "About ninety-eight," he said.

  I sat down on a milk crate. Suddenly 1, who fussed if more than six people came to a dinner party, was responsible for feeding lunch to ninety-eight women.