American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

a place of retreat, sanctuary, unfailing consolation and pleasure. Many of the fixtures are new, or relatively new: the large, finely calibrated stove and microwave oven; the green refrigerator; the butcher-block table with its raw, clean, blond wood; the long horizontal glass window above the sink and counters, over which a dozen hanging plants have been set in ceramic pots. Crammed into shelves in the butcher-block table is a library of much-consulted cookbooks; overhead, hanging from hooks and positioned on the walls, are gleaming copper pans and molds, an assortment of wooden spoons, knives with shining blades, and whisks, and scoops, and carving boards, and bunches of garlic, dried herbs—mysterious dessicated things whose names and precise functions Glynnis McCullough can call up in an instant, should any visitor to her kitchen inquire. (And this is a Hazelton kitchen much visited.) Prominent atop the butcher-block table is a handsome new food processor; hidden away in cupboards are specialty utensils of various kinds—colanders, casserole dishes, gratin dishes, soufflé dishes, cast-iron skillets, a cast-aluminum crepe pan, woks and scone pans and egg poachers. In a corner of the kitchen is a round wooden table, several chairs, a Moroccan rug, a small portable television. Though the family eats breakfast at this table, the table is really Glynnis’s; she answers mail here, does quick handwritten drafts of her writing—food articles and columns, cookbooks.
    Glynnis’s current project is a book tentatively titled American Appetites: Regional American Cooking from Alaska to Hawaii , at which she has been working, with varying degrees of inspiration and frustration, for the past year. Though Glynnis’s first two books were praised by reviewers and have sold well, she prefers to think of herself as an amateur: an amateur writer, an amateur cook, an amateur “food person.” (There is room for only one true professional in the McCullough family, Glynnis has told friends.) The first cookbook had seemed to Glynnis scarcely written at all, merely assembled, at the urging of Hazelton friends; the second was her publisher’s idea; the third, though Glynnis’s own idea, seems to her now overly ambitious, rather more professional in its background, research, notes than she would like. But with the passage of months the book has acquired its own idiosyncratic tone and its own erratic momentum. American Appetites: the title came to her, seemingly, in a dream, or in one of her kitchen reveries. In any case it is the first of Glynnis McCullough’s cookbooks to be more than a mere assemblage of recipes; it is—thus the frustration, and the fear!—the first of her books to be really written .
    Since the meal she plans to serve this evening is fairly demanding and involves an uncommon degree of time coordination, Glynnis has begun it hours, even days, beforehand—the seviche, for instance, to serve fifteen, has been marinating since yesterday morning in the refrigerator; the sourdough bread is even now in the oven, with twelve minutes yet to go; the preliminaries of the ballotine of chicken à la Régence are well under way—the several chickens properly boned, and the stock for the sauce simmering, and the farce à quenelles à la panade prepared, and the fine-chopped truffles, and the tongue (this delicacy gives Glynnis a curious sort of frisson , its mere touch—it took Ian years to acquire a taste for it). And the salad greens, in a large wooden bowl, are in the refrigerator, covered; and the tart, mustardy French dressing to accompany them has been mixed. Late last night, while Ian was in Philadelphia giving a lecture, Glynnis had made one of the desserts, with results that were encouraging: a sour-cream chocolate cake with thick rippled fudge frosting upon which, in crystalline vanilla frosting, she wrote HAPPY 50TH IAN! in childlike block letters. There is a