My life as a cook began on the back panel of a Bisquick box, with Velvet Crumb Cake. This was shortly before my tenth birthday. By that time I’d been helping my mother in the kitchen for several years, as she had helped her own mother, Nettie Cohen. Through helping her—and I know just how patience-taxing and supremely unhelpful a young sous chef can be—I had learned the basic techniques and tools to use: how to level a cup of flour, chop an onion, work the Mixmaster, separate an egg. But I don’t remember preparing any particular dish until I undertook the recipe on the back of that bright yellow box.

Bisquick mix was an anonymous staple of my mother’s kitchen. Pancakes and biscuits were never made with anything else, and nothing else was ever made with it. I think that was the initial appeal of the idea of Velvet Crumb Cake. I was shocked to discover that Bisquick had other uses, other roles that it had been waiting to play, like a shy yet talented understudy. The realization was like finding out that I could make a working model of an X-15 rocket plane out of a rubber-band glider. The only Bisquick recipes I’d ever seen were the two printed on a floury and tattered square of cardboard that my mother had cut from the back of an old box years before and then abandoned to her special Bisquick canister—ordered by mail from Betty Crocker—to be buried and reburied in an endless drift of biscuit mix. For years I never saw a Bisquick box at all. The chance revelation of the possibility of Velvet Crumb Cake, with its extravagant name, seemed to hint at the existence of a world hidden within the world of our kitchen, and to hold out promise of a more fabulous one beyond.

It was coffee cake; I hope that statement implies no sense of disappointment. Eaten warm from the oven, moist and crumbly, a nice coffee cake is pretty hard to fault. Coffee cake! I had made a coffee cake! Mysteriously, I thought, it contained no coffee. The velvet crumb business turned out to revolve around an impasto of butter, brown sugar, chopped nuts, flaked coconut, and a little milk that you spread over the cake after it came out of the oven. Then you stuck it back in the oven for a minute or two. Something wonderful happened to those five ingredients when you blended them and briefly subjected them to intense heat. The result was both smooth and grainy, crisp and chewy. Cooking, it turned out, was a magical act, a feat of transformation, a way of turning the homely and the familiar into something finer, like carving a pumpkin into a lantern.

That year for my birthday my mother gave me a cookbook. It was called Betty Crocker’s New Boys and Girls Cook Book. Like the Bisquick box, its cover was bright yellow. It featured intensely colored photographs of the things you could make from it: huge, lustrous cakes, casseroles, and molds awesome as monuments in a depopulated landscape. The recipe for spaghetti called (in retrospect, somewhat nauseatingly) for you to boil the noodles in the tomato sauce. A lot of the other recipes given in Betty Crocker’s New Boys and Girls Cook Book, perhaps not surprisingly, suggested that they be prepared with Betty Crocker-brand ingredients, especially Bisquick. Many turned for their effects on bits of kitchen legerdemain, exploiting quirks of food chemistry. I was fascinated by and still recall affectionately a recipe for Fudge Upside-Down Cake (or something like that—my copy disappeared years ago) that went into the oven with the batter on the bottom of the cake pan, under a layer of boiling water, and emerged with a layer of cake on top, floating like the earth’s mantle on a glutinous brown magma.

My mother was into cookbooks, and as soon as she saw my interest, she gave me the run of her library and let me try to make pretty much whatever sounded good. It was a solid and typical American-cookbook shelf of the day: keystones like the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book and Joy of Cooking; Julia Child and Craig Claiborne; an intimidating bunch of classical French compendia; and period novelties like 365 Ways to Cook Hamburger and a fondue cookbook. The Library of Babel that is ethnic cuisine was summarized in a footnote, Claiborne’s New York Times International Cookbook. My all-time favorite, from the moment of its publication in 1972, was James Beard’s American Cookery. It had a recipe for nearly everything an American kid could ever imagine eating, including squirrel. Almost in passing—rather, in the style of my mother—it taught the fundamentals of the kitchen: how to boil shrimp, poach an egg, prepare an artichoke. (It also offered excellent recipes for pancakes and for biscuits, including those of Beard’s own mother.) And in retelling the history of the United States from Indian pudding to cheeseburgers, through the history of our great cookbooks and cooks (most of them women), it also turned out to be a kind of autobiography in the form of recipes, written in prose that was magisterial and laconic. I used to lie around reading it for hours.

I had a lot of disasters in the kitchen, even during the long period when I was cooking under my mother’s supervision and with the benefit of her experience. I still fail all the time, in particular when I turn to baking. After hundreds of attempts, following dozens of different formulas, I don’t think I have ever made what I would consider to be a completely successful pie crust. Disaster is somehow part of the appeal of cooking for me. If that first Velvet Crumb Cake had turned out a flop, I don’t know if I would have pursued my interest in cooking. But cooking entails stubbornness and a tolerance—maybe even a taste—for last-minute collapse. You have to be able to enjoy the repeated and deliberate following of a more or less lengthy, more or less complicated series of steps whose product is very likely—after all that work, with no warning, right at the end—to curdle, sink, scorch, dry up, congeal, burn, or simply taste bad.

This may form part of the male aspect of cookery, a pursuit that combines three classic male modes of gratification: the mastering of an arcane lore bound up in accumulable tomes; mindless repetition (the thing that leads boys to take up card tricks, free-throw shooting, video games); and the staking of everything on a last throw of the dice. Cooking satisfies the part of me that enjoys struggling for days to transfer an out-of-print vinyl record by Klaatu to digital format, screwing with scratch filters and noise reducers, only to have the burn fail every time at the very same track. I’m not at all saying a woman cook doesn’t feel the identical mad urge to keep ruining the same dish over and over until she gets it right. I’m just saying that every woman I’ve ever known has mocked me for being that way.

A few years after Velvet Crumb Cake entered my life, I was obliged to consider an aspect of cooking that has traditionally been thought of as female: that of feeding my family. When I was fourteen, my mother, holding a brand-new law degree from the University of Baltimore, went to work at a federal agency in Washington, D.C., a job that obliged her to rise early and commute almost an hour each way. By the time she arrived home at night, she had neither the energy nor the imagination to make dinner for my brother and me. “If you want to eat a nice hot dinner every night,” she told me, proposing to raise my allowance to a then-hefty fifteen dollars a week, “you’re going to have to cook it yourself.”

So that was what I did—every night for the next four years, until I left for college. I learned to cook all of the homely dishes that my mother had made for us all my life: Swiss steak, spaghetti and meatballs, baked chicken, lasagna, stir-fry, matzo-ball soup, brisket and kasha, beef and macaroni, breaded flounder, beef stew, chicken-fried steak. A number of these recipes were my grandmother’s, and they reflected the nature and history of my mother’s family—Jewish, southern (she was born and raised in Virginia and Maryland), and midcentury assimilationist in the best sense of the word: absorbing other cultural traditions as much as it was itself absorbed. I cooked when I felt like it and when I did not, when there was no risk of ruining anything and very little of interest in the recipe once I had mastered it. I cooked for people who were not always hungry, not always appreciative or amazed, not always in the mood for the lamb chop on their plate.

When I married my wife, had children, and began to cook for them, after many footloose years of recondite kitchen experimentation with the gods of chic vegetarianism, of ethnic-cuisine purism, and of the pasta machine, with non-cow cheeses and sun-dried vegetables and edible flowers, I inevitably sought help, even a kind of instruction, in those recipes from the American Cookery of my mother’s kitchen. I incorporated more modern dishes and ingredients into my regular repertoire, and I acquired many, many new cookbooks, but when it was time to get serious about feeding my family, there was not much doubt about where to turn. A fair portion of the three-by-five cards in my recipe box are written in my mother’s hand, and the thing is bulging with folded-up sheets of her typed instructions for Sour Cream Nut Cake or Chicken Rose.

This turns out to be the enduring source of the pleasure I find in the kitchen. It’s the one that was there from the start, even before my chance encounter with the glories of a velvety crumble of caramelized bliss on the top of a biscuit-mix cake: the connection to my mother, who not only fed her children well but taught me how to feed my own just the way her mother had taught her. In his great work, James Beard somewhat radically positioned himself as the heir and celebrant of a long line of American woman cooks, from Miss Leslie to Fannie Farmer to his own mother, and there must have been something in this unexpected male affirmation of female inheritance that registered with me.

I grew up during a time of dissolving boundaries, shifting economies, loosened definitions of male and female, of parent and child. Without shame or stigma, a marriage could be allowed to come undone, a woman could become a lawyer and go out and earn a good living. And a boy could take to the kitchen, the center of every home, and find there a sense of history and connectedness to anchor him, something that would not disappear or blow away or change beyond recognition. The processes of the kitchen, the secret chemistry that underlies the magical Velvet Crumb transformation of sugar by heat, are unchanging. Even if we can’t always master them, they are constant and true. Incidentally, these are qualities shared by my mother. That tumultuous era, and the new conditions of family life it imposed, obliged me to try to be like her in some measure. I’m lucky that it also permitted me to feel it was all right to want to be, even though I was a boy.