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

shared all these thoughts with Ignazio during our most recent meal together, over at his place. Heather, his wife, said that Ignazio’s very own mother, during her semiannual San Francisco visits to hang out with the grandkids, was often viciously critical of Ignazio’s cooking (“You call that pesto!? My own son!?”), as if to reassert the primacy of her own judgment, and to reinforce Ignazio’s faithful understanding that Mama’s cooking, the cooking of the Italian people, and the universal Good Cooking of the human race were all one and the same, inseparable. Ignazio laughed, too; we’d all had a lot to drink, and we’d eaten too much, and Ignazio takes every opportunity to be unsentimental about Italy and the Italians. He even hoped to pitch a reality TV show, he said, in which he and his mother would go around to Italian American restaurants and sample the food and say mean things. A fair-minded soul, however, Ignazio volunteered interesting evidence to support my core point: his grandfather had been a professional chef, as had many of his other male relatives, and every single dish his mother ever made was an established, time-tested part of the Milanese cultural repertoire, long since mastered by members of his own family. Every dish Ignazio had ever eaten while growing up, therefore, had come from a recipe—one handeddown orally, perhaps, but a recipe nonetheless—and he’d have to have been a genuine half-wit not to have absorbed all of those recipes through the very pores of his own skin.
    It’s not just the Italians, either: I’ve also been on the receiving end of anti-recipe prejudice through a friend named Sammy, owner of the Bi-Rite Market, which happens to be my favorite San Francisco grocery store. I dropped by one day, to pick up a few things for Alice’s Radish, Fennel, and Dandelion Salad, and I got distracted buying extra fennel for a few other random fennel recipes from
Chez Panisse Vegetables
—perfect examples of dishes that sounded awful to me but which I meant dutifully to make in the spirit of expanding my culinary mind. Sammy asked what the hell I needed so much fennel for, and I ended up telling him about my newfound love for cookbooks. I’d expected to bond with Sammy over this, but I learned instead that my recipe obsession conflicted so deeply with his sense of how a real man ought to behave that he laughed affectionately and said something like, “Wow, Danny, I cannot deal with recipes. I fucking
never
look at recipes.” But, see, Sammy’s mother—like Ignazio’s—was a great cook from an ancient tradition, in Sammy’s case Palestinian. Plus, Sammy himself had been a professional chef before he took over the Bi-Rite Market from his Palestinian-immigrant father; he’d gone to culinary school, he’d interned at a French restaurant in Switzerland, and he’d opened his own little San Francisco bistro at age twenty-four. Like every cook, chef, and culinary student everywhere, therefore, Sammy had followed fixed recipes many thousands of times, bringing to mind the jazz analogy: sure, it’s all improvisation if you’re already Wynton Marsalis, but it’s improvisation on a fixed set of standards, and doesn’t a guy get to learn the standards? Even if, for example, you’re not really capable of simultaneously watching fennel on the backyard grill and simmeringmore fennel on the stove and tracking the doneness of pasta and figuring out that your Radish, Fennel, and Dandelion Salad tastes disgusting because you’ve bought dandelion greens so old and grown-up they have exactly one flavor: bitter? And while I got the message, yet again—Real Cooks Don’t Follow Recipes—I kept right on measuring every teaspoon of parsley without self-consciousness.
    To some degree, this had to do with questions non-culinary. For the goals that actually mattered—my need to bail on