I have been enraged of late. At first I thought of it as only the slowly rising fetor of the holidays, preceded by a longish book tour of two months that began in France and ended in Mississippi. Book tours promote a ghastly self-absorption, a set of emotions inimical to art. Also an excess of deference, so that you’re startled when you finally return home and your dogs, cats, and wife exhibit a graceful disinterest in you.
And maybe the rage is because I wrote many poems in the summer, and when I boarded the first flight of the tour the muse fled on another flight with her usual suitcase of sexual aids. Since October I’ve only managed a simple tercet:
The old couple coughed and coughed.
The old couple coughed and coughed,
Then hit each other with wrinkled fists.
Catchy, isn’t it? And maybe the rage comes from the fact that our body politic in the United States has been fed by Chef Bush a fresh skunk hacked up with an ax and served with no sauce except the creature’s own verminish exudates. The social services departments in nearly every county in every state in this country offer courses in anger management, often obligatory for certain louts given to public mayhem. It’s been suggested I enroll. I have too few teeth left to gamble on any more fistfights. I recall that my grandfather Arthur had his last major fistfight at my current age, sixty-five, and then avoided further fights by dying. Memory can be a warning. He was also a good cook.
Actually, a few days before Christmas I received my first clue on how to deal with my current brain disease. The clue came in the form of three fresh truffles brought along by a friend, David Sanfield, who is a chef and caterer in Los Angeles. He also packed along the usual banal beluga, some French cheeses, and two capons that had admirably fulfilled their destiny by having been de-nutted.
David arrived in the evening and we ate the caviar before a simple green chile stew, a good restorative for a traveler. The combination of pork, hot chilis, and a head of garlic illustrates once again that peasant food can return errant fops to earth.
Before bedtime and after several bottles of Domaine Tempier Bandol, we shaved a goodly portion of truffle into a bowl with nine beaten eggs for breakfast. This makes for good scrambled eggs, after which a walk is in order, and then suddenly lunch looms and perhaps a thimble of wine.
Courage is needed to prepare the coming dinner, poularde demi-deuil, wherein dozens of paper-thin slices of black truffle are slid under the skins of the fowl (thus the bird is in half-mourning). This is my favorite peasant food. The more truffle, the better the dish, right up until the fowl has an ebony hue.
My late mother, a Swede of iron temperament, liked to tell me to count my blessings when none were apparent. Do little things really mean a lot, as the song insists? I had obviously been living too high in my mind, which Jung suggested was a source of anger and depression. I needed to lower my sights to the nose level of the refrigerator. Gifts had arrived, including guanciale, pancetta, and salami sent by my friend Mario Batali in New York City; also a cooler of triggerfish, grouper, and shrimp from Charles Morgan in Destin, Florida; and cases of wine from Kermit Lynch in Berkeley, California.
Guanciale, which is made from the inner, meatier part of pork jowls, will bring you back to earth. My son-in-law, with a little help from me, made some last fall, but ours wasn’t of the sublimity of Mario’s. You cover these cheeks in salt and herbs for two weeks, then hang them in a cool place to cure. As with pancetta, you chop or julienne a goodly portion to begin certain hearty pasta sauces. The earthen flavor lifts the heart and mind well above the bad taste left by current politics and publishing, the sheer noise of pundit logorrhea, the deluge of rhinestones presented as crown jewels. Pork products are not hothouse flowers. Years ago in France, Gérard Oberlé, the famed Burgundian gourmand, made me a fifteenth-century recipe that required fifty pig noses, which, of course, had to be special-ordered. How else would I have been short-listed for the Prix de Gros Ventres in France?
Most artists understand the weeks just before the winter solstice are a dangerous time, rife with alcohol, suicide, and brooding until the elbows virtually grow into the worktable. Wise artists learn that the darkness that surrounds us can be dispelled by body pleasures. I eat well to avoid suicide, and now in mid-January my anger is largely dispelled, though Bush is still bushy and I’ll never get a solstice parade in New York. Anger can still make momentary visits. Last night, after a fine dinner of oxtail cannelloni at the Cafe Sonoita, I discovered we had locked ourselves out of the house and our hidden key had slipped down the crack between two timbers. My wife went out front and sat in the moonlight and listened to the creek while I picked up an ax and freed the key, though not with the ax Bush used to kill the skunk he’s feeding us.
Now I’m serene as Gandhi after he had one of his magnums of Lynch-Bages. It occurred to me I might help others with emotional problems in my new position as food editor of Brick. Serious suggestions are welcome—and I don’t mean curing lust by soaking your parts in ice-cold pineapple juice, an old Hawaiian nostrum. When the Chinese have fatigued tendons, they eat stewed tendons. ls it really that simple? In Wawa, Ontario, I once had a fried pork liver and onion sandwich that did nothing in particular, which illustrates that there are dead ends in this matter.