I've been absent and errant, for many reasons, but global tumult has sifted through everything I am. The other day, I admitted to a friend who masters a special bookshop -- which, if forever ambered, could be an Ashurbanipal or Alexandria for our rickety future -- that my daily reliance on cooking as thinking, hand-ballet, and even small achievement was waning, and I wanted to end my relationship. He stopped, struck. As we spoke, he had been sorting books and ephemera in his store's exploded back room. I already knew that New York City … [Read more...]
Not Celery
"Did you see my cardoons?” Mike pointed to a pile of leafless, longer celery. I have eaten cardoons, I remember, at an optimistic Sicilian-only restaurant in Manhattan, long- and quickly gone, and in one other place, forgotten. Never saw them in a market before, and the produce guy, who pretends to know me, was proud. I looked, touched, and didn't buy, a cooking coward. Then I drove back. The plant seemed bruised and tired, with browning ends, but I read what I had to do: it's a thistle, an artichoke cousin, so I sheared the white, … [Read more...]
Cold, Dead White
Forget the red, erase it. Before bloodied by berries, its surface was white. But unlike that of cottage cheese, coconut flesh, or the armor around my eyeballs, this white is negative, an abrogation. When finally chilled, my dish frightened me, at the same time I saw that the recipe worked and cookie should have been pleased. Here's where Lady Macbeth usually appears, her "posset" mention: The doors are open, and the surfeited groomsDo mock their charge with snores.I have drugg'd their possetsThat death and nature do contend about … [Read more...]
The Good Knife
One of the few short stories I've written, a lifetime ago, begins with a declaration that I stole cookbooks. Yes, I did lift some classics as well as a set of what I thought were "good" kitchen knives from a foofy store in San Diego. I learned later that the knives were French, not big-deal German, and in spite of their ridiculous price, considered just OK. When I took the biggest in my hand and pushed it through something, it cut just as well as the $1.99 drug-store serrated knife I already had and still use almost 50 years later, a … [Read more...]
Your Last Supper?
Each time I get a post from the site Memorie di Angelina (Easy. Authentic. Italian.) I assume it includes a recipe I want to cook. Author Frank Fariello's nonna Angelina left Campania in the 1920s and settled in The Bronx on Arthur Avenue. Through her Sunday dinners, Angelina took the boy on an eating and cooking path that his later years working in Rome and around the home country made inevitable. Yet Fariello's kitchen voice whispers in welcome modesty, which is a paradoxical result of direct engagement and … [Read more...]
Iceberg, Melting
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Hungry beyond myself, I come to a cartoon field of wet, glossy globes. Leaping into mud, I get on my knees and lean over, biting and choking to swallow one down. The way nightmares work, I see the lettuces, run, bend and chew -- again and again. Then I wake up, blinking and faint. Iceberg. Caesar. Mesclun. Hedda. These make my two-syllable lettuce poem, and they're welcome, though my next thought is about the recently denigrated M.F.K. Fisher for her youthful lettuce memories. She wrote what she remembered and … [Read more...]
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Boeuf
[contextly_auto_sidebar] We have so many ways nowadays to discover how boeuf en daube is pronounced without having to tap a French shoulder, human or beef. Raise your hands, readers, if you know what novel lists this dish as an ingredient. I read that book, probably unwillingly, more than 50,000 meals ago -- I counted -- and fastened on the scene at the end of the first part that gathers characters to look at and smell their spotlit dinner without any obvious hunger or lust of appetite. That was in the early '70s, when … [Read more...]
A Shroom With a View
"Sex" in a headline could once skew a reader's attention, but I risk vanilla using it here. Grade-schoolers of all nations do porn homework online. That coy teen you meet at your niece's bat mitzvah has fastened on techniques you once only imagined. "Once only imagined" is a familiar phrase, no? What happens to imagination when we walk past the bloody slash on the ground and the other eyes walking with me call to stop. A short time before, my companion and lover said quietly but in amazement, "Look at that big fella!" as an elegant plum … [Read more...]
Fireflies Are Out …
They bring me back to my stoop days, decades ago, when I smudged their bellies on my forehead as makeup, also called war paint. Will they make the same impression decades from now, on those I love beyond measure, in flooded or scorched backyards I'll never see? You can tell the temperature by the firefly rate of thorax blinking, which can be hypnotic, like the gleam of this cucumber seed in fluorescent kitchen light. Those seeds, covered in slime, scoot like baby roaches onto counter or floor when you run a spoon down the center of your … [Read more...]
Finding My Chowder — Part 2
Corn season on the East Coast is ending, sweetness flying off cobs to hole up for the winter and be retrieved -- if we are lucky -- for our next warm time. Still, there's an autumn corn-ucopia to be had. The few farm stands that remain open are stocking swollen cauliflowers and glossy leeks, hard parsnips, more and still more carrots. But the late corn in their coolers, tassels limp, allow us a final chowder. Brooklyn kids from the '50s rarely saw corn on a cob. Canned corn, even dairy-free "creamed style," was considered lazy roughage, so … [Read more...]