How to Cook Like a Man by Daniel Duane Read Free Book Online

measuring spoons still dirty from buttermilk pancakes. I found the flour where I’d left it during the very same project, and I measured one tablespoon of that flour into the butter. Liz was nursing Hannah while I measured out a shocking
cup
of heavy cream—cardiovascular suicide, as far as I could tell. Then there was this unusual move of spooning in two to three tablespoons of that porcini rehydration water—mushroomy flavor, I guessed—and clearing still more crap off the stove to free up yet another burner for simmering the cream, porcini water, flour, and butter, together with a little store-bought chicken stock. While it was all bubbling and spattering—Liz done nursing, singing lullabies to Hannah—I moved a particularly annoying pile of dirty baby bottles and beer cans from one counter to another. I rinsed my old dull knife so that I could chop eight ounces of chanterelle mushrooms—amazingly expensive—and then sauté them in butter and …
    â€œNo, no, no, no,” said Lisa, Alice’s sometimes-lawyer. “I can’t hear any more about this.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œUgh. It makes me sick just hearing about all those little amounts. I’m a very good cook, actually. I’m really
quite
good. But I do my own thing. I mean, I look at cookbooks for ideas, but that’s it.”
    Jane Kramer, writing in the
New Yorker
, describes a similar friend getting a headache “just by looking at the teaspoon measurements for thyme and garlic in a coq au vin.” I believe that my mother fell into this same camp. Not that Mom ever let on: “What a fabulous idea!” Mom exclaimed, regarding my
Vegetables
project, but I caught a telltale blankness in her loving eyes, some part of Mom’s mind recognizing the personality gulf between us. Cooking wasn’t something she’d ever had to discover, or fret about, or explore. She simply cooked, with pleasure but without pretension. Meatloaf, cinnamon toast, spoon bread, lasagna and cheesecake for my every birthday: I recall all of this with a tingling warmth. And yet I do not recall a single cookbook ever present in our home, except an old copy of
Joy of Cooking
. Nor do I recall a single food magazine. When I think of Mom cooking even her Classy Dinner Party Beef Stew, I picture her peacefully puttering away in our puny kitchen, adding a dash of this and a drop of that, finding her way toward a great meal. None of these people, however—neither Mom, Kramer’s friend, nor Alice’s lawyer—had ever looked toward cookbooks for immutable laws of action during a period of intense personal disorientation. None of them had ever needed cookbook recipes to dictate the very movement of their limbs through space, minute by minute, hour upon hour, during the tense passage of a young family’s no-sex, no-restaurant evenings, the future ever more daunting.
    Alice herself commanded, in the
Vegetables
introduction, that I should “never cook slavishly, rigidly following a recipe and thoughtlessly adhering to the measurements it gives… . Trust your intuition and your own taste.” But if Alice had been standing before me, wagging a finger, I would have protested to my teacher that, for a man lacking both intuition
and
taste, recipes qualify as oxygen: they make life possible,
if and only if one livesand breathes by them
. Only in following every instruction to the letter, see, could I hope to learn what the hell food was supposed to taste like in the first place. Improv is just fine if you’ve made tens of thousands of meals and long since learned that, say, lemon juice in a salad dressing plays the part of the acid, balancing the oil. If you’ve never made a salad dressing in your life, you might think that the lemon juice was all about a vaguely citrus-like flavor, and that orange juice might work, too. What would you learn then, except that you’re a shitty cook who ought to