Jack Hitt is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the public radio program This American Life. His work also appears in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and Wired. He is the author of Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain, which has been made into The Way, a motion picture starring Martin Sheen.
You’re working hard to put food on your family.
—Presidential candidate George W. Bush,
Nashua, New Hampshire, January 27, 2000
I became a man, one might argue, the night I was completely unmanned by a cup of celery leaves. On a frigid night, Lisa, the woman who had just agreed to be my wife, and I were trying out our first house in New Haven. She’d recently been admitted to medical school and had hit the books on a cold afternoon for a six-hour study jag. I had built a fire and snapped open the paper to stumble upon one of those overwrought New York Times food columns: “Curried Red Snapper Chowder.” Every one of those words suddenly read delicious.
The writer extolled the virtues of this midwinter dish with the romantic-etymology move: “Chaudière refers to the heavy pots Breton fishermen traditionally used to simmer their soup.” Doesn’t that sound all big wool sweatery and crackling fire-y and maybe even tasty? I thought so, too.
Chowder, the writer elaborated, was “a state of heart and mind more than a specific culinary technique.” There was an existential howl in every bowl, something only Herman Melville and a few lobstermen might understand: “It’s a brace against the whistling winds and quiet nights of the soul …” Maybe I should wear a scarf while I cook?
The writer really knew how to sell it. Chowder was also “a balm to the free-floating desire for cuddle and comfort.” This was not just a savory dinner; it was a full-blooded narrative, a French movie of a meal that would begin in a kitchen made aromatic by artisanal broths and spiced carrots and end upstairs in a pile of quilts.
Lisa stepped down momentarily to find me clambering into the house with bags of supplies—fresh snapper bought at the best seafood market and colorful veggies from the local grocer. She glanced down at the newspaper recipe.
“Hmmm,” she said cautiously, “this violates my old home-ec teacher’s rule: never cook anything with more than one column of ingredients.” Please, I indicated, speaking in the language of my right eyebrow.
I stood at the counter of that kitchen, a long, roomy work space that ran the length of one wall and opened entirely onto the dining room. It was essentially my stage, and I had set out my props. There were lots of pots and pans and bowls and blenders. I had the ingredients set up in a conga line, my spices preselected. I had bought a plain apron (no dopey slogans, please) of a dark testosterone shade. I was a man in the kitchen, looking for love, confident of a meal.
In the medieval period of the current culinary renascence—that is, pre–Food Network—you often heard people say, “I love to cook.” The phrase was merely part of the mating prattle of those long-ago and dark ages. It was a signifier of a grand future ahead, but also of a lived life—a life already so packed with experience that other similar convictions could easily be flicked off: “I hate disco” or “I love Casablanca” or “I never watch television, except The Larry Sanders Show.” These were things that one said but didn’t necessarily have to believe or ever act upon.
But suddenly, there I was one night, no longer in the pretend world of scrambled eggs and toast. I was in the very muck of a recipe, dealing with the world of hurt and confusion that can come from only three or four words such as “Puree until liquefied. Strain.”
How is it that straining a quart of my pureed goop only produces four red drops in my five gallon chaudière? Can that be right?
Then there was this other simple instruction. I read it over and over again:
Crisp? It’s moments like these when you realize that what you are reading is not really English but rather half a lifetime of kitchen experience compressed into a pearl of culinary haiku. You try it anyway—because you have always considered yourself someone who “loves to cook,” i.e, how hard can it be? As you lay the leaves in the oil, they instantly wilt, curl, and tighten into inch-long chlorophyll threads like the kind you might pop out of a buttonhole in a green cotton shirt. You look back at the words in the newspaper and then stare into your frying pan swimming with thread. What the—?
You refuse to be defeated, and jump in the car. A few minutes later, you return with two new bunches of celery boasting audacious nosegays of fresh green leaves. Maybe the trick is that you have to lay them carefully into the oil, nice and flat. That makes sense. Of course that’s what it is. You’re a little annoyed that the recipe didn’t just say so. You lay them in nice and flat, and voilà!
More threads.
Damn. And you think, How does that single line of instruction even make sense? “Fry celery leaves in oil until crisp.” That scans about as sensically as “Soak until medium rare.” But somehow your soul is on the line here, your manhood in the kitchen. Maybe the oil should be hotter?
Back in the car. Grin feebly at the same register woman. Four bunches. Cups upon cups of leaves. Into a really hot frying pan—for the love of Christ!—again, swimming with new threads. You read the instruction one more time, then stare into the greening pool of oil. A breakthrough idea: Did Breton fishermen eat crisp celery leaves? I hardly think so. It’s a big waste of time. What was the recipe writer thinking? Moving on. Crisp celery leaves are for silly people.
The very next line reads: “Score the carrots lengthwise with a channel knife.” A channel knife? Is that just writerly pretense for a regular old knife or is this some kind of special tool that’s actually needed? This chowder of mine occurred before the Internet, so an encounter with the unknown couldn’t be quickly solved. Often I deal with my own ignorance by trying to outrun it. So I read ahead: “Add the remaining celery root …” But your celery was obviously sliced off right at the root. A vague sense that maybe “celery root” is wildly different from “celery” passes through your head.
But really, does it matter? Who’s even heard of such a thing? Celery root. These chowder people, these chowderheads—they’re such dainty chefs. In an effort to speed things up, you accidentally swipe a bowl—full of forty-five minutes of something painstakingly shredded and soaked—onto the ground in a ceramic explosion. A level of deep frustration sets in.
Now it’s 9:00 p.m. and you look around your kitchen. Every pot is dirty and half-full of something started and abandoned—or it’s shattered and in the trash. Every bit of counter space is somehow damp, evidence of a whole other tragedy that we’ll just call “homemade carrot broth” and never speak of again.
The recessed window above the sink is now home to a near forest of denuded celery stalks. What recipe, you wonder, calls for ten bunches of celery? Bowls and spoons are everywhere, and every surface seems to have become a magnet for carrot and potato peels. You yourself are somehow inexplicably soaked, as if you had just stepped off a whaling ship. Your future bride suddenly pokes her head in the door to coyly ask, “Sugar, can I help with dinner?”
And you find yourself not quite yourself, uttering the following, really, really loudly: “Oh, yeah, well, fuck you! You’re the—I hate everybody. You caused this catastrophe. And if you hadn’t—if only I—you. This shitty kitchen. How come you don’t have a goddamn channel knife? Do you realize—chowder is stupid.”
Or sentiments to that effect. I have shortened it by four thousand words by editing out the repetitive obscenities. Funny thing is, the chowder tasted fine when we both sat down at the table to eat it. Of course, dining at 1:00 a.m. with a full day of hunger behind you would make old gum taste like pâté.
When I was a little kid, kitchens weren’t anything like what they are today. No one had a stage for a kitchen. Quite the opposite. The kitchen was a place of shame, always located in the back of the house. It was usually beat looking from overuse, with sagging cabinet doors, sunken floors, and scuffed linoleum. The kitchen was the last room in the house anyone spent remodeling money on.
In Charleston, South Carolina, where the houses are mostly antebellum, many kitchens had once been entirely separate outbuildings (as a fire precaution) and were connected only by narrow hallways. It’s where servants worked, maybe a wife. The door to the kitchen signaled as much. It was a heavy wooden thing, painted white thirty years ago, that swung in both directions, functional like a restaurant’s door or one to the furnace room—not ornamental and oaken like every other door in the house. The kitchen door had a chunk of plastic instead of a handle (framed by a fan of indelible grime) so you could push it open either way with a tray full of fresh food or dirty dishes, depending. This door and the area it opened onto was so dreadful that many families obscured the entrance with a folding screen, preferably one with a soothing Chinese landscape done on rice paper, so that the very entrance to the inferno was hidden from view.
At one friend’s house where I spent a lot of time growing up in the early 1970s, the owner had a tiny lump in the carpet beneath his foot at the head of the table. With a tap of his toe, he could summon a servant from the bowels of this unwanted place to serve a tureen of, say, overcooked lima beans. In those days, it was impossible to avoid the general assumption that food was something the lower orders fetched up for the higher orders. If you ventured into the kitchen to have a discussion about how food got made with the black maids and carried on in conversation about Low Country crab dishes and red rice and okra gumbo, well, then you were considered an eccentric.
It wasn’t as if good food wasn’t appreciated, but by and large, food was something that came from the Piggly Wiggly and was cooked. Anything different typically meant that some of the men (and the occasional Annie Oakley–style gal) had gone hunting. Then the men might fry the venison in a mustard sauce, grill the dove breasts wrapped in bacon, or stew the duck meat in a half-day-long concoction called a purloo.
Outside of special occasions, the idea that a man might make a salad or cook a pot of rice insinuated provocative things we did not speak about. I would have to grow up and lose several closeted gay friends to self-imposed exile or AIDS before we’d ever begin to talk about such things.
But it’s not as if, despite our repressed childhoods, we didn’t experience the love of good food. That was always there; the how-to of it all, though, just wasn’t much of a conversation. One of my favorite dishes of all time is red rice, a Gullah dish that pulls off the neat trick of getting long-grain white rice to take up a hefty tomato sauce as it would water or stock. When I was little, this dish was cooked all the time, not merely in my house but throughout the city. I’m not sure there is another dish that qualifies as more comforting comfort food for me—maybe shrimp and grits. My mental landscape of 1970s Charleston was charted in part by the landmarks of other people’s red rice. My friend Lucas Daniels had some of the best red rice ever cooked. Because it’s a dish that is arguably better cold than hot, his family kept a pot of it in the refrigerator, essentially, all the time.
We ate it as a break from playing outside. Sometimes I might ring the doorbell at his South Battery home to find out Lucas wasn’t there. I’d go on in anyway, eat some red rice, and then head off to find him. Getting a bowl of red rice from someone was hardly more of a bother than asking for a glass of water on a hot day.
But it never occurred to me to learn how to cook it. Red rice was … red, and so, something of a mystery. It simply emerged from the heated sweatshop of the kitchen, out from behind the folding screen. Why ask? But eventually, when I was sent away to school, I did ask. I wanted to be able to carry a few things with me, and one of them was how to cook red rice. How did one get it to come out fluffy and not gunky? When I asked Lucas’s cook Delores how she cooked her red rice, I got only the universal smile of a chef: I’m not telling.
When I asked my own family cook back in those days, Annie Oliver, how she cooked her red rice, she just shrugged and said, “You put it all together.” Gullah traditions were still considered state secrets and protected knowledge, stories held and transmitted on a need-to-know basis. Without explaining too much here, every white family I knew growing up employed a black woman as a cook. It was the early 1970s. She was either a young mother, like Delores, or a venerable ancient like Annie (who’d also raised my mother). My generation’s struggle to understand just what really underlay our relationship to those cooks is part of the untold story of the civil rights epic—untold because it’s so cringe inducing. And yet, without too much trouble, I could probably tell the whole racial history of the South through my attempt to learn how to cook really good red rice.
Of course, in those days, all recipes were considered secrets, regardless of race, creed, or color. People just didn’t talk about food casually. That would come later. It was all very intimate and happened in that secret chamber behind the swinging door. Especially the everyday dishes. Teaching someone how to cook red rice implied a profound level of trust and love.
All popular dishes have a couple of little tricks that always get left out in the pointillist prose of recipes. In Charleston, the grand old white ladies of my grandmother’s generation created a locally famous cookbook in 1950 called Charleston Receipts. It’s an archaeological wonder. Each page is decorated, at the turning corner, with a tiny silhouette of a black mammy in an apron, working at the kitchen table or presenting a tray of food. (Like I said, cringe inducing.)
Many of the recipes are accidental time capsules. The recipe for string beans lists its top ingredient as
And then it suggests this handy instruction: “Cook string beans by direction on package.” Others are simply inscrutable and epigrammatic. As a result, the red rice recipe always left me with a pot of burnt red glop.
It took me almost twenty years of talking up red rice with old society ladies, black islanders, and a few drunken sailors to cadge enough of the secret cheats that will yield excellent red rice. The final tip, to do nothing at the end, came from another childhood friend, my godmother’s son, Thomas Barnes. Here, as a public service, is my favorite way to cook South Carolina Low Country red rice (with no haiku and my love to Thomas).
Cook three or four pieces of really good hickory-smoked bacon in a cast-iron skillet. It should be smoked bacon, or what’s the point? What you really want out of the bacon is, OK, bacon, but also: the smoke. So don’t skimp. Buy the good bacon. Fry it at a low temperature for a while so that it slowly loses its fat and gets really crispy.
Pour off the fat until you have about a tablespoon or so of chunky bacon gunk in the pan, and in that, sauté a diced medium onion and half a green bell pepper. When they’re soft, toss in a couple of pinches of salt and add a large can of diced tomatoes. Skinned fresh tomatoes are great, but only in high tomato season, late summer. Otherwise, go with canned. Many add tomato paste here (as in Charleston Receipts), but the problem with tomato paste is that it makes everything taste pasty. Skip that. Go with canned diced tomatoes—not whole, not pureed—because the diced ones break down mostly but not entirely, giving the final result the perfect (I hate this word, but what can you do?) mouthfeel.
Simmer that concoction for ten more minutes; then add a cup and a half of rice—preferably Uncle Ben’s parboiled long-grain rice. I don’t quite understand why. There is something about how the parboiled works at taking up the tomato concoction more easily than any other kind of rice. Anyway, there’s about a decade’s worth of Christmas-party chats with Mom’s friends and creekside beers with acquaintances of friends invested in that little tip. And it works like a charm, so just do it and you’ll be happy.
If the result is stiff to stir, then add a splash or two of chicken broth. Most recipes suggest that you cook thereafter on the stove top. But don’t do that. Instead, cover the skillet with tinfoil and put it in a 375°F oven for thirty minutes. Remove the skillet from the oven and put it on the back of the stove. Do not peek under the foil. No one knows what mystery is taking place under there, but it has something to do with liquid and rice, and like the spontaneous combustion of heavy-metal drummers, it’s best left unsolved. As Thomas told me: “It’s best not even to look at it.” Remove the foil eventually—after ten minutes, say—and sprinkle the rice with bacon bits. All leftovers are better the next day, served either hot or cold, or you can fold them into an omelet like my nephew Jim does for a brilliant breakfast.
One day, not all that long ago, my twelve-year-old daughter, Yancey, announced that she and her friend Emma would cook dinner. I was having some friends over and had already put together my own menu. But no, she insisted, waving photocopies of recipes in my face. She and Emma would do it. They had already scoped out what ingredients were lacking in the kitchen. All I had to do was drive them to the store. Once I got them going, they shooed me from the kitchen, and thus began an afternoon that quickly swelled into family legend.
This production in the kitchen involved putting up a rampart of chairs to keep out unwanted spectators. Whenever any adult’s orbit would wing near the kitchen, a squall of girlish gestures would erupt near the barricades, ordering him away. The entire Saturday afternoon took on that feeling of an earlier time, not that many years ago, when the kids would seal off a room and announce they were practicing to put on a play for the adults. Under no circumstances were we to peek.
Those plays were hilarious because the kids were trying to show off their ability to mimic the world as they knew it—the plot of a bedtime story or some recent event that struck them as crucial in their lives. What made them especially entertaining was the kindly recognition of just how bad they were at acting and writing dialogue and improvising. The pleasure for the parents and the kids was always laughing generously at the boffo display of sheer ineptitude.
Translate this comedy to a room full of fire, sharp knives, whole chickens, and several jumbo canisters of (redundantly purchased) Costco oregano, and you have the makings of a tragedy, if not a fiasco.
But at the beginning of the evening, the two girls brought out a bewilderingly brilliant four-course meal, all made from scratch: gazpacho salad, chicken-barley soup, pork loin, chocolate mousse. When Yancey brought in the gazpacho salad, the room reacted to the bright array of color nestled on the Bibb lettuce. She said proudly, “Look how we plated it!”
We all thought: Way too much Food Network for this kid. But actually that wasn’t it. The girls didn’t really watch the Food Network. If anything, that whole Iron Chef vocabulary has simply permeated the culture, creating a generation with the descriptive powers of a sommelier and an easy ability to use “savory” and “umami” in a sentence. What accounted for the quality of the dinner was the fact that the girls had been watching us, really studying us, the adults, as we prepared meals.
I realized that the story of the generation raised in the postfeminist era—my generation—was one that could be told as a history of a single room, the modern kitchen.
The avoided place of my childhood had been a battleground in the 1970s, the place from which all women had to be emancipated. Now it had been reentered by men and women alike. Its repute as a ghetto for women’s work was as remote to these kids as the reputation of colonial frontiersmen for being smelly. That room had been completely renovated—often literally, definitely metaphorically.
It had been remodeled, not only because we now admitted guests and friends there, but because a lot more was going on in there than the preparation of food. Today’s kitchen is to our time what, say, the front parlor or salon was, at least in our imaginations, to the late nineteenth century. It is more than a place where people gather; it is a place where ideas are hatched, practiced, learned, and acted upon. It is a gathering spot for chance encounters and the millworks of family values.
When I bought the house I currently live in, I found the old kitchen door in the basement. It was the exact same one from my childhood home—same plastic push guard beside the same fossilized handprint of generational grime. The previous owner had remodeled the kitchen and made it into one of the showcase rooms in the place. My kitchen now boasted panoramic views of a large green backyard and participated with the rest of the house via a wide, generous, inviting hallway. There was no door at all; rather, the space was merely another grand architectural staging area on par with the living room.
For us, this reinvention of the kitchen was not a deliberate act. It just sort of happened after we brought our first and then second child home from the hospital. We ended up in the kitchen a lot. Almost all of the first two years of child rearing involves putting food into babies’ mouths. Sometimes that food gets thrown across the room or splattered from beneath a slammed fist or reappears along projectile trajectories. The kitchen is unquestionably the best place in the house to be in when any of these amazing events occur.
As a dad who spent a lot of time with the babies—when they were infants, my wife was in medical school and then a resident—I remember pondering one single conscious kitchen-related question: Was I going to spend the next few years eating Annie’s mac and cheese and hot dogs? That’s when I discovered Mark Bittman’s Minimalist column in the newspaper, and the future became clear. With only a little more effort than it would take to produce crappy toddler crud, I could make meals I myself wanted to eat.
In other words, “I love to cook” would actually become: I love to cook.
So the center of gravity of my little family quickly became the kitchen. This was not a feminist pronouncement or a political decision. It had a lot more to do with easy cleanup than with anything so noble as an idea or an intention.
But soon enough, the simplicity of our location turned into all kinds of things. When the kids were two or three, I sat them down and gave them instructions on how to cut up a carrot with a knife. I showed them the secret of making grits (salt must go in before the grits are added, or all is lost). Naturally, pancakes and waffles were in abundant supply on a weekend morning. And precisely because Lisa, the resident, came home exhausted, she felt compelled to cook her mother’s comfort foods—tuna fish casserole, chicken à la king, homemade chicken pot pie (for a Swanson refugee, the latter is a revelation). Our little family menu grew. Then one summer, there was a trip to Paris. The taste of a sidewalk crepe became a critical moment in the life of my oldest daughter, Tarpley. It is now her own private madeleine.
After we returned, she retrieved a recipe and became the house specialist. Soon thereafter, we purchased a crepe pan, and it was her crepe pan. Later, Yancey received her own block of kitchen knives. Even the equipment—from my ancient cast-iron skillet dating back two generations, to Lisa’s hand-thrown pots, to the kids’ stuff—became a map of a family that lived in the kitchen and visited the other rooms in the house when time permitted.
In the years that followed, Tarpley also figured out the buttery secrets of popovers. Then Yancey mixed some salad dressing, and somehow she got our favorite mustard-vinegar ratio perfect every time. So most nights, dinner became a big, noisy, jostling event—full of chores dictated by custom and history. Even stories of accidents became part of the epic tale. One afternoon, I grabbed a Cuisinart pot by the handle when it was accidentally parked over a low but hot blue flame. The kids saw Dad hold his hand under running water for an hour, squeezing out tears. Later, though, having the distinctive Cuisinart handle shape branded perfectly into my palm—including the nonblistered hole where one would hang up the pot—was not merely a puritan lesson in life’s dangers but pretty funny to look at.
We stumbled upon little secrets. We figured out that broccoli with a dash of balsamic vinegar is surprisingly great. A visit to an Asian market found us taking home some bok choy. And a lifetime of cooking chicken had resulted in a foolproof method of cooking a basic but really great whole chicken. (Several tricks: Gash a lemon twenty-five times with a knife, stuff the chicken with a small handful of rosemary and tarragon, then shove the lemon in and sew the cavity shut. Cook the chicken at a blazing-hot temperature: twenty minutes at 500°F breast side down, fifteen minutes breast side up. Then turn the oven down to 350°F for thirty minutes. The insanely hot temps will seal the skin but also evaporate the lemon juice, which will force itself out, flavoring the meat with the herbs along the way.)
Slowly but surely, the whole family has emerged as able cooks. Last year, I flew home from some work I was doing the day after my birthday. I walked in to find that the two kids had cooked my favorite childhood dinner. That was their present.
Turns out cooking a meal is pretty good practice for just about any complex project. Planning ahead, anticipating mistakes, figuring out the little tricks that will have vast effects down the road, and getting to a result that can be described as beautiful is the basis of every decent meal but also the recipe for a good science-fair project, end-of-the-year term paper, or school play. Thomas Jefferson once said, “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” He could just as easily have been discussing a beautifully savory stew. Food, it turns out, is a gateway drug to aesthetics.
The meals we cook around here end up becoming some part of the discussion at dinner, but not in some supercilious or precious way. There are no foodies here, but there are people who like to cook and eat, so thoughts about how to make something better are appreciated.
It’s in the kitchen that you realize how collaborative all food is. Even when you’re alone, you’re communing with some other cook via the recipe itself, deconstructing some other person’s haiku written perhaps centuries ago. Some dishes—like an African American rice recipe prepared by a curious white boy—can only be cooked by adding a lot of honest history.
I have always enjoyed real barbecue. Slow-cooking a whole pig on a low-temp fire for twenty-four hours is magical not only because the meat tastes so good but because for a whole day, people can’t help but stop by and pitch in with the best of intentions and often amazing advice. After I read Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Near a Thousand Tables, though, I learned that Nestor slow-cooks some beef barbecue in the Odyssey. That’s the other conversation that’s always happening with older dishes and ancient methods—one with the very roots of our being.
Mostly, though, the food in our kitchen happens in the present tense, in the here and now. Even when someone makes a mediocre dish—Lisa recently tried some fish thing in a tomato sauce and it ended up being merely OK—the criticisms aren’t so hard to hear. They come from a different place than most disapproval, a place where we all know it could have been us there at the stove. Sometimes the alchemy just doesn’t happen and you’re stuck with a lump of lead. But each critique also comes with the sense that food is a common experience that needs group participation. So criticism comes couched in more helpful terms, empathetic terms, because in the kitchen it’s easier to express dissent in the helpful language of cooking. Somehow in the kitchen, “This sucks” more often comes out as “Could have used more oregano in the sauce. What do you think?” So far, translating that more gracious conversational gambit to the other rooms of the house hasn’t always worked out. But if that style of interaction makes the leap, it will be leaping from the kitchen.
The kitchen teaches us that the only way to make something better is to tweak it, talk about it, find some new trick, edit and rewrite, and call upon one’s own ever-expanding experience. So often we’ve found that what’s needed to boost something from merely OK to truly beautiful is just some small touch that really changes the dynamic participation of all the other elements of the dish and elevates the entire sense of the meal. It might be some little thing born of experience long ago, something that happens in the moment of cooking and easily gets lost when translated into the stenography of a recipe. Like crispy celery leaves.
“When did our relationship move from the bedroom to the kitchen?”
For years, chicken was a sometime thing for me. Maybe the meat was fully cooked. Maybe the skin was tasty. Maybe the meat was moist. Here’s what you get after half a lifetime of trial and error.
1. Get a kosher chicken or brine a nonkosher chicken. (A lot of folks now mock brining—ignore them. It’s a basic thing, like marinating lamb chops in red wine to get rid of the gamy odor.) Preheat the oven to 500°F. Meanwhile, pat the chicken dry. Then push ½ teaspoon of butter (or garlic butter or rosemary butter) under the skin over each breast. Then mash it around with a spoon.
2. Take a lemon or a lime. Stab a bunch of holes in it with a knife, all around.
3. Stick some rosemary in the holes if you can. If not, stuff the chicken cavity with a generous mix of rosemary, tarragon, and marjoram. And anything else you might like: garlic paste, chopped-up onions. (The idea is that once the high temperature hits the goods in the cavity, the lemon juice will evaporate, taking the flavors around it directly into the flesh of the bird; so whatever you stuff around the lemon or lime will become a slight flavoring in the meat.) Sew the cavity shut with butcher’s string; otherwise the flavors fly out into the oven.
4. Place the chicken on a roasting pan, breast side down, and put in the 500°F oven for 20 minutes.
5. Turn it over, breast side up, and return to 500°F oven for 10 minutes.
6. Lower the temperature to 350°F for 30 minutes (10 minutes longer if the bird is huge) or until that little white thing pops up (an instant-read thermometer inserted in the thigh should read 165°F).
7. Let cool for 10 minutes before attempting to slice.
Near a Thousand Tables, Felipe Fernández-Armesto. A wild man who’s a blast to read.
American Fried; Alice, Let’s Eat; and Third Helpings, Calvin Trillin. No one can write about what we eat and somehow answer why we do better than Trillin.
The Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer. My first cookbook, and I still use it. Her occasional remarks scattered among her endless recipes are genius. (“A pig resembles a saint in that he is more honored after death than during life.”)
Glen Payne lives in Hermosa Beach, California. A forty-one-year-old high-yield debt trader, he’s out of the house by 4:00 a.m. each day to prepare for the opening of the markets in New York City. He’s back at home by 4:30 in the afternoon to cook for his wife and two daughters, ages five and one.
If you segment the two hemispheres of the brain, you might say one is creative and the other is analytic; I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but just suppose it is. The work I do is extremely analytic. It’s an intense environment where you’re constantly negotiating and dealing with large sums of money. But in the kitchen I get to put together whatever my creativity can dream up.
I grew up on a fifteen-thousand-acre cattle ranch in New Mexico, and I inherited a love of eating and cooking from my mother and grandmother, who were constantly preparing food and planning for the appetites of the men (mostly me and my brothers) who worked on the ranch. From eating the unique cuisine of New Mexican chefs (definitely not your run-of-the-mill Mexican food, and worth the trip to New Mexico if you haven’t visited), I also developed a craving for all things spicy, which doesn’t work particularly well for either my wife or my kids, though I still try to incorporate spiciness into my day-to-day cooking.
My oldest daughter is one of the more finicky eaters I’ve ever found. After she was born, I eagerly awaited the day that she would start eating baby food, and I jumped right into making my own baby food. She rejected all of it. And that was just an early sign of what kind of eater she would be. Now that she’s older, she helps me cook, and I find that when she does, she tends to experiment more and tends to eat more. So if I can, I involve her in the meals.
Before kids, my wife worked, and we had schedules where I would shop for the meal as I came home. I’d stop at the local butcher or the local fish market, and I’d put an entire kind of multicourse meal together before my wife got home. Now that we’re parents, it’s more about rushing home to have food ready for the kids, and possibly even for us, if we’re going to eat together by 5:30 or 6:00 and do some other things around the house. One thing that’s changed with kids is that I do tend to do more cooking ahead of time. I definitely prepare something one day and then freeze it or maybe eat it over the course of a couple of days if I don’t freeze it.
If you’re just starting to cook, the best advice I have is to be patient, recognize that you’ll make mistakes, and know that not every dish will turn out the way you want it to. In fact, many of mine don’t turn out the way I want them to. So I keep experimenting. Most importantly, get involved with cooking if you want an alternative to the everyday meals that you’re going to see, whether they’re in restaurants or from the food counter at a grocery store or from a takeout. Do it because you want to get in touch with what you’re eating. Know what the ingredients are. Know what you’re putting into your body. Know why you’re doing it. Control the portions. Control the different things that go into it so that you yourself are creating the taste. At a very important level that I think we tend to forget in this society, you’re controlling your health through your food.
There’s something else about cooking that my wife and I have talked about between ourselves and with other friends who are of a similar age. The women were raised by moms who were coming out of the fifties and left the home—many for the first time in generations—to start working. These moms didn’t pass along to their daughters, who are my wife’s age, knowledge about cooking. So my wife and many of her friends never learned how to cook, and frankly they don’t have a passion for it.
I’m hoping that by involving my daughters in cooking, they’ll have a passion for preparation, they’ll have a passion for food in general, a passion for pairing foods with other foods, or foods with wines. And I just think food is so much about enjoyment of life. And hopefully, they pick that up. Maybe, if nothing else, they pick up an element of creativity from it.
This recipe is adapted from one by Nobu Matsuhisa.
2 pounds black cod fillets (salmon can work as a substitute, but regular cod cannot)
1 cup sake
½ cup mirin
1½ cups miso paste (white)
2 tablespoons sugar
Wash and dry the cod fillets and cut into ½-pound portions.
In a small saucepan, bring the sake to a quick boil, then add the mirin and the miso paste until dissolved.
Add the sugar, stirring until dissolved.
Remove from the heat and allow to cool to room temperature (the refrigerator works well to speed up the cooling).
In a plastic bag, add the miso mixture to the cod, and allow to marinate for 2 hours minimum, up to 24 hours. If marinating longer than 2 hours, then put it in the refrigerator.
Preheat the oven to 425°F.
Remove the fish from the miso mixture and arrange the fish, skin side down, in a baking pan or dish, then place in the preheated oven for 12 to 15 min, until the top surface of the fish is a caramel brown and the fish begins to visibly flake (do not turn over or flip the fish while cooking).
Serve with coconut rice, garnished with sesame seeds.
This recipe is adapted from the recipes of my mother and grandmother.
2 white onions, diced
5 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups pinto beans (sorted and soaked for at least 2 hours, or overnight, which is better)
1 russet potato, peeled and quartered
2 pounds ground turkey (or ground pork or beef)
2 tablespoons red New Mexico chili, ground or powder (see note)
1 16-oz can stewed tomatoes
½ cup flour
Sauté the onion and two cloves of the chopped garlic in a sauce pot, preferably cast iron, sufficiently large to hold the beans and their liquid.
After the onions become translucent (about 10 minutes), add the beans and the potatoes (which, I’ve been told, help to reduce intestinal gas) and 4 cups of water, or enough to cover the beans.
Bring to a rapid boil and then reduce to a simmer until beans are soft, about 2 hours.
Meanwhile, in another stove-top pot—also ideally cast iron—sauté the remaining onion and garlic until the onion turns translucent.
Add the ground turkey and continue to cook until it browns thoroughly.
Mix in the chili powder to coat the meat mixture thoroughly.
Add the tomatoes and 4 cups of water, bring to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer.
Once the chili mixture has simmered for about 1 hour, place the flour in a small sauté pan and heat it gradually, stirring constantly, until it browns (do not overcook).
Once the flour is a caramel-brown color, remove it from the heat and add it to the chili mixture 1 tablespoon at a time, until mixture is thickened.
To serve, place the beans in a bowl and then cover with the chili.
Note: New Mexico red chili powder can be found at Whole Foods in the spice area or at Web sites such as www.hatch-chile.com and www.nmchili.com. As an alternative, you can grind dried chili pods into a powder.