The Hand that Rocks the Ladle

When I was growing up I was always jealous of my mom’s prowess in the kitchen: the way she’d be able to whack me with a slipper as she answered the phone, all the while pouring a steady stream of salt into the pasta water, just feeling the perfect amount. It was witchcraft! She never had a measuring cup; I never saw her meticulously quantify ⅛ of a teaspoon of anything. Ever. Around the house there were no written recipes, nor at my *N onna’s, or at her N onna’s¹. If you were to ask my mother how much salt goes into a quart of water, she’d tell you, annoyed: “*Ma, what do I know?! You look, you feel, you taste.” And that was that. You look, you feel, you taste.

I was so aggravated by this as a teen that I rebelled against the *Casalinga style of Italian cooking, snatching up any recipe that had irrefutable amounts, bullet points, friggin’ diagrams! And with this arsenal of tangible instructions in hand, I set out to vengefully make the biggest, best meal anyone had ever tasted…. Oh, and if someone were to ask me how much salt I used, I’d cordially reply: “Why, 1.78 teaspoons, Madame…” But no one ever asked, because all those meals sucked. They sucked hard, and sucked for years. They never came together. Maybe I was following the wrong recipes, or maybe it takes more than a set of measuring spoons to make a good meal. Maybe it is witchcraft.

 

Is the Hand that Rules the World

…Or knowing your ingredients. And how do you get to know your ingredients? Well, you look, you feel, you taste. By trial and error, you realize that a whole head of garlic for 1 cup of tomato puree is a bit much. You make a mental note. And as you sit there, defiantly shkoffing a plate of nasty pasta, hoping that the next forkful will miraculously reveal itself as delicious, getting progressively more full, and progressively more aware of how much fucking garlic is in this godforsaken sauce, you learn. It haunts you, from the mess in the kitchen to the hole in your wallet to the indigestion. Some of us give up at this point, figure we’ll never learn to cook and order out for the rest of our days.

But some of us don’t. Some of us rise up to the challenge because food is too important. It was the first thing that ever gave you comfort, before sex, drugs, or rock and roll. Because the pleasure you get from eating or watching someone succumb to your culinary genius is too primal, too satisfying, too powerful to ever not hold in the crook of your wooden spoon.

It’s witchcraft baby.

1We did own “The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook,” which was used once for a fashionably bland curry in the mid-80s. It then got buried in the Wedding/Communion/Confirmation video drawer and was never seen again.