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

follow recipes?
    Clearly, I had more in common with certain other friends described by Kramer, like the Los Angeles couple who “read cookbooks aloud to each other in bed, as part of what could be called their amatory ritual” or the couple in Berlin who “nearly divorced over an argument about which cookbooks to pack for a year in Cambridge.” Okay, I’m overstating it: Liz would never have seen anything amatory about reading a cookbook together, unless it happened to be Bayless, and I was diving in just to please her. But I had yet to consider a move like that. My point is just that I was closer to Kramer herself, seeing cookbooks as “like the lipsticks I used to buy as a tenth grader in a Quaker school where not even hair ribbons or colored shoelaces were permitted. They promise to transform me.” And sure, while the young Kramer hungered for a ticket into the more illicit aspects of adulthood, I needed a recipe for middle age, a way to maintain a sense of self. The spirit was the same, though, and I’ve been consistently surprised by how few people share it.
    Take my only cooking-obsessed friend, Ignazio, a midforties Italian always laughing happily at the out-of-control absurdity of his own messy but wonderful life. I didn’t actually know Ignazio back when I started cooking. We met more recently, throughmutual friends. But my wife likes his wife, Heather, a pretty American redhead, and their kids are close in age to our daughters. I love stepping out of the elevator in Ignazio’s building into his sun-flooded third-floor apartment in North Beach, a few blocks off Fisherman’s Wharf in the old Italian neighborhood. My daughters run immediately to Giovanni’s room, the wives retire to the couch with a cocktail, and Ignazio and I make like modern men, heading into the room we both like most, the kitchen. Opening Ignazio’s oven, I typically inhale the deep aromas of a big roast, a leg of lamb maybe, fragrant with hot thyme and rosemary, and that’s when it begins, the conversation we always have.
    â€œGod, you’re such a good cook,” I say. “That smells
so
good.”
    â€œOh, no, no. It’s stupid, the way I cook!” Ignazio replies, in his thick Italian accent. “It’s really stupid. I wish I could learn to use cookbooks the way you do, but I just don’t. I don’t know why I don’t, but I don’t. But I find it so incredibly interesting that you can use cookbooks, Dan. You’re so disciplined, and you have so much patience. I don’t have that patience. And your food is always so good! It’s so interesting!”
    To some degree, we’re just acting out the new male Kabuki, dinner-party version: “Oh my God, bro, I cannot believe you’ve gone to
so much fucking trouble
! You are
such
an awesome cook! And you make it look so easy! My wife is just absolutely going to
fucking leave me
and move in with you!”
    â€œNo, no, no. Dude. I’m not a good cook at all. I’m a fucking shitty cook! But
you’re
the best fucking cook in the world. I’ve told absolutely everybody at the gym about those double-thick porter houses you grilled last time!”
    And yet, there’s something real at work, some genuine gulf between Ignazio and myself. Cookbook obsession, Kramer hasargued, is a distinctly British and American phenomenon. Italians, by contrast, have long viewed the very owning of a cookbook—or at least any cookbook beyond a couple of culturally approved Italian culinary encyclopedias, such as
The Silver Spoon
—might carry the implication that Mama, and therefore Italy herself, had failed to pass along the heart of Italian culture. Fiorenzo Andreoli, an Italian chef quoted by Kramer, voices precisely this anti-recipe chauvinism when he says, derisively, of his time in San Francisco restaurants, that everybody he met out there “cooked with his nose in a cookbook.”
    I