Mouth Wide Open: A Cook and His Appetite

For David

best of friends

Contents

List of Recipes

Then and Now—By Way of a Preface

MOUTH WIDE OPEN

The Marrow of the Matter

Bagna Caôda

The Reviewer and the Recipe

Maximum Marmalade

Cod & Potatoes

Two with the Flu

Pepper Pot Hot

The Laughing Nut

Signor Minestrone

Conflicted About Casseroles

Real Italians

Wok Fragrant

THE COOK PREPARES HIS BREAKFAST

Beef Kidney

Bread-Cup Eggs

Scrambled Eggs with Chunks of Avocado

The Sensation

Eggs Baked in Cream

Rice Browns

Canned Beef Tamales: Q&A

Eggs Florentine

Fried-Corn-and-Onion Omelet

Return to Halloumi

Five-Month-Old Croissant

THE RUMINATIVE COOK

Falafel

Pasta with Anchovies

Sussing Out Satay

Mashed Potatoes

Go Fry an Egg

The Grist on Grits

Horiátiki Saláta

Fiore di Finocchio

Cooked Midnight

Fasolia Gigantes

Random Receipts

THE COOK CONCOCTS HIS MIDNIGHT SNACK

Baked Fat

Sautéed Spinach Stems

Bagel mit Wiener Salswasser

Sweet Corn and Milk

Mystery Meat

Khai Pen

Headcheese

Cilantro Sandwich

Hot Dog with Norwegian Potato Flatbread

Swedish Meatballs

Bok Choy

Smoked Kielbasa–Casing Po’ Boy

COOKING THE BOOKS

Have It Your Way

A Difficult Man

American Eats

Loose Canon

The Cook and the Gardener

Work Adventures Childhood Dreams

Bibliography

Author’s Note

Index

List of Recipes

Introductory Note

Anyone familiar with my writing will already know that, for the most part, creating recipes is not something that greatly interests me, and I am even less interested in curating any but the most historical. What I do is look for recipes with the potential for a lively conversation—a friendly argument, if you like, between two cooks. As I explain further on in The Reviewer and the Recipe, I don’t follow recipes; I interact with them. Because of that, when a source is provided (as it often is) for a recipe that particularly attracts you, consider seeking out the original version. That way you can clearly see what the argument was all about…and have two cooks to converse with instead of one.

As to the recipes themselves, one day last year I found myself balking when typing freshly ground black pepper into a recipe ingredient list. True, when I keyed in black pepper instead, the naked plainness insinuated that I might be so boorish myself as to actually use an ordinary, vulgar pepper shaker.

Well, to tell the truth, I do use them all the time: very few of the greasy spoons I frequent have gotten around to putting pepper mills on the table—and the food doesn’t seem any the worse for it. True, I usually grind my pepper at home, cook (even fry) with extra-virgin olive oil, and almost always prefer fresh minced garlic to the powdered stuff. Still, look on my spice shelf and you’ll find dried onion, leek, and bell pepper flakes, curry powder, and celery salt. Elsewhere, there are cans of soup and corned beef hash, bags of frozen vegetables.

Chances are, your kitchen is like that, too. Learning to talk isn’t simply about mastering vocabulary and grammar, it also requires that we master one way of talking to our parents and another to our friends, and, later, to our teachers and our bosses. Even home cooking has its several dialects. So you don’t need me nagging you to buy artisanal bread or to use unsalted butter when you cook. Cooking changes best by epiphany; advice is best when it merely prods these into happening.

In any case, so much of what we do in the kitchen is very different from appreciating the best ingredients. In her autobiography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, the poet Audre Lorde rhapsodizes about the smell of onions frying in margarine. I knew just how sweet such a memory could be. Cooking is about doing the best with what you have…and succeeding. The rest is nothing but frosting. So I’ve done my best to winnow out those little peremptory qualifiers in the ingredient list.

However, I do want to note that Matt and I cook with pure, coarse kosher salt (which means if you substitute fine-grained salt—kosher or not—reduce the amount called for in our recipes by half, and adjust from there). We use an inexpensive but fruity extra-virgin olive oil from Spain, Greece, or Italy, depending on the market, and prefer peanut oil by far when olive oil isn’t appropriate.

We use a lot of chiles in our kitchen, sometimes fresh, sometimes dried and flaked or powdered, ranging from mildly hot to mouth-searing. But we don’t own any chili powder, the commercial blend of powdered chile, toasted cumin, Mexican oregano, and other things. So, when we call for any kind of powdered chile, we mean just that—the result of grinding up dried chile pods.

Other, specialized ingredients are detailed in the recipes that call for them, including (where possible) ordering information. This was all updated when this book was about to go to press, but, sadly, small merchants—especially—do come and go, online and in situ. If you find this to be the case, get in touch with us at [email protected]—we may have been able to find another merchant.

A

Amato’s Italian Sandwich: see Sandwich, Amato’s Italian

B

Baeckeoffe: see Casserole, Alsatian, with pork, lamb, and beef

Bagel mit wiener Salswasser (bagel dipped in German wiener brine) 319

Bagna caôda (chart of variations) 14

—Bagna caôda del omm borghese (bagna caôda for non-peasants) 20

—Bagna caôda con bistecca e peperoni (with strip steak and roasted peppers) 21

—Bagna caôda con funghi e scalogni (with mushrooms and scallions) 22

—Peperoni alla bagna caôda (on roasted peppers) 23

Beans, dried (gigantes plaki), with dill and green olives 285

Beans, dried (gigantes plaki), with garlic and thyme 289

Beans, green (Romano/Italian) (salad) 302

Beef kidney 169

Bok choy, fried, with sesame oil (snack) 326

Briami: see Casserole, Greek

C

Casserole, Alsatian, with pork, lamb, and beef (baeckeoffe) 136

—Baeckeoffe with Munster cheese 141

Casserole, creamed chicken and macaroni (traditional recipe) 128

Casserole, creamy shrimp (Shrimps de Jonghe) 129

Casserole, Greek, with potatoes, zucchini, and tomatoes (Briami) 311

Casserole, Jean’s Two Meat Two Rice 134

Casserole, Macedonian, with gigantes, pickled peppers, and tomato (Tavche gravche) 287

Cheese, Halloumi, fried for breakfast 176

Cheese, Kasseri, fried (saganaki) 312

Chicken liver spread on seasoned toast (The Sensation) 172

Chile paste, green, Yemenite (zhug, for dressing falafel) 193

Cod and potato bake (Dutch) 67

Cod baked on a bed of thinly sliced potatoes, Mediterranean style (el nazalli bel batata) 68

Cod baked with olive oil, garlic, and potatoes 66

Cod, roast, on oven-fried potatoes 65

Corn, Peruvian toasting (maiz tostado) (descriptive recipe) 295

Corn, sweet, cut from the cob, in milk (snack) 320

Croissant, five months old 177

Cucumber salad, Thai 228

E

Egg, fried, in a tortilla pocket 240

Eggs baked in cream 172

Eggs, bread-cup 170

Eggs Florentine 175

Eggs, fried in coconut oil, with bananas, fresh chiles, and onions 246

Eggs, fried in olive oil, with capers 244

Eggs, fried, Mexican (huevos rancheros) 238

Eggs, fried, Spanish, with migas (croutons) 242

Eggs, fried, with garlic and mint 245

Eggs, fried, with oyster sauce, Chinese style 247

Eggs, omelet, with shredded zucchini and fresh marjoram (Richard Olney) 358

Eggs, scrambled, with chunks of avocado 171

El nazalli bel batata: see Cod

F

Falafel, Slightly Unorthodox 187

Fish and brewis (traditional Newfoundland recipe of salt cod, salt pork, and hardtack) 60

Fried rice: see Rice, fried

G

Gigantes: see Beans, dried

Greek salad: see Salad, Greek

Grits, True (my way) 252

—cakes, made with leftover grits 254

H

Ham fat, baked (snack) 317

Hot dog with Norwegian potato flatbread (snack) 323

I

Israeli salad of chopped vegetables (for dressing falafel) 190

L

Lamb, slow-cooked shoulder of 307

M

Maiz tostado: see Corn, Peruvian toasting (descriptive recipe)

Marmalade, important notes about making 50

—Florida navel orange (variation) 54

—Key lime (variation) 55

—Maximum orange 51

—Meyer lemon (variation) 55

—Pineapple lemon 55

—Temple orange 53

Mayonnaise, handmade xxi

Menudo, Not-So-Pseudo (my version of menudo) 95

—Pozole rojo (menudo made with posole and red chile peppers) 89

Minestrone 113

—Minestrone alla Genovese 117

—Minestrone estivo (summer Tuscan version) 122

Mushroom Pot Roast (Russ Parsons’s recipe, with variation using leg of lamb) 37

N

Noodle beef (noodle-intensive beef soup) 75

Noodle chicken (noodle-intensive chicken soup) 73

O

Omelet, fried-corn-and-onion 175

Onion-sumac relish (for dressing falafel) 192

P

Pasta ammuddicata (traditional recipe for pasta with anchovies) 199

Pasta (fusilli) with tomato and green olive sauce 31

Pasta (gemelli) with cauliflower 205

Pasta (gemelli) with onion, bell pepper, black olives, and tuna 32

Pasta (gemelli) with zucchini and Italian sausage 268

Pasta (thin spaghetti) with anchovies and toasted bread crumbs (spaghettini con acciughe ubriache) 204

Pasta (thin spaghetti) with anchovies, garlic, capers, and black olives (spaghettini aromatici) 202

Pasta with anchovies (Giuliano Bugialli’s spartan version) 200

Pepper pot, Philadelphia (traditional recipe) 80

—Pepper Pot Not (my version of pepper pot) 86

Peppers, roasted, with tomatoes, in a casserole topped with bagna caôda 23

Pork tenderloin casa nostra 270

Potatoes, mashed, as made at the Auberge de l’Ill 234

Potatoes, mashed (my version) 231

Potatoes, mashed, Della Lutes’s 232

Potatoes, mashed, Richard Olney’s 231

Potato soup: see Soup, potato

R

Rice bowl, Shanghai vegetable 280

Rice bowl with bamboo shoots in chile sauce 281

Rice bowl with Chinese sausage 278

Rice bowl with hacked meat 277

Rice bowl with stirred eggs 279

Rice browns (breakfast patties of fried rice filled with melted cheese) 173

Rice, cooked (snack) 277

Rice, fried, wok-fragrant 159

—with fried eggs 163

Rice, plain boiled 161

S

Saganaki: see Cheese, Kasseri, fried

Salad, Greek, early summer 262

Salad, Greek, Easter 261

Salad, Greek, full summer 262

Salad, green bean (Romano/Italian) 302

Sandwich, Amato’s Italian (descriptive recipe) 144

Sandwich, smoked kielbasa–casing po’ boy 326

Sandwich, marinated zucchini and red pepper 147

Sandwich, Lebanese fried potato 151

Sandwich, roasted pepper and eggplant 148

Sandwich, Tunisian mixed vegetable in French bread (salade blankit) 150

Sandwich, Turkish marinated bean salad (sandviç fasulye piyazi) 149

Satay dipping sauces 224

—Peanut sauce 225

—Peanut sauce, curry-flavored 226

—Peanut sauce with chiles and garlic 225

—Peanut sauce with shallots and tamarind 226

—Sambal kecap 227

—Tangy lime sauce 227

Satay-making, general discussion 208

—Glossary 212

—General recipe instructions 218

—Beef satay 219

—Chicken satay 221

—Chicken satay, minced (satay pentul) 222

—Lamb satay (Ratami’s) 220

—Pork satay 220

—Potato satay 223

Shrimp ceviche, Ecuadorianesque 294

Shrimp, Finger-Sucking 269

Shrimps de Jonghe (creamy shrimp casserole) 129

Soup, potato and bok choy 304

Soup, potato and escarole 303

Spinach stems, sautéed (snack) 318

T

Tahini sauce (for dressing falafel) 190

Tamales, canned beef, as breakfast fare 173

Tavche gravche: see Casserole, Macedonian

Torta fredda gianduia (Italian hazelnut-chocolate confection) 313

Thai cucumber salad: see Cucumber salad, Thai

Z

Zhug (Yemenite green chile paste): see Chile paste, green, Yemenite (zhug)

Zucchini stuffed with rice 299

Then and Now—By Way of a Preface

It was a hot day, summer, the late sixties. I was sitting at a kitchen table across from a friend and fellow faculty member at the small independent school where I was then teaching English. He was about to show me how to make mayonnaise…on a plate…with a fork.

I later was to find out that making it this way was considered a tricky business. But in his hands it was astonishingly simple. He used the fork first to mix a little splash of vinegar into an egg yolk, seasoning this with salt and pepper. Next, stirring briskly all the while with the tines of the fork, he began to whisk in olive oil.

He covered the bottle’s mouth with his thumb and lifted it high enough so that he could keep his eyes focused on the egg yolk. He shifted his thumb slightly, releasing the oil, at first drop by drop, then in a steady golden stream, as slender as a thread.

For the first few minutes, the egg yolk simply absorbed the oil, which gave it a bright yellow, greasy sheen, neither appetizing nor very promising. But the fork went on squeaking across the plate, the oil kept dripping down, and the collation began to thicken, lighten, mount up.

The result was initially flabby-looking, like a scoop of vanilla pudding. But in another minute or two, the tines began leaving a distinct trail. It didn’t last for long, but it was there. By now the golden thread of falling oil had become a thin stream.

How much will it absorb? I asked.

A lot more than I’m going to pour in, he answered. A cup, at least. I’m still adding it because I want to tone down the taste of the egg yolk.

Here, he said, finally, holding out the fork to me, a clot of the mayonnaise roosting at the end.

I tasted. The experience wasn’t rapturous, but it was, in its way, illuminating. This was mayonnaise with attitude—all the more so after a childhood where, whether one opted for Cains or Hellmann’s (almost as big a decision as deciding between Coke and Pepsi), what one tasted was a certain bland unctuousness, perked up by a sharpness that, depending on the brand, might be vinegar or might be lemon.

This mayonnaise asked you not to choose but to decide if you were ready to move on, the way you might from cola to wine. The real thing, it turned out, didn’t even pretend to be everybody’s pal. It was what it was, and you were either up to that or you weren’t. So, no, I wasn’t swoony with delight. I was busy recalibrating my palate to make sense of a forthright mouthful of creamy olive oil and egg, with all the flavor notes lingeringly plangent.

This, I discovered, is what mayonnaise is all about—the emulsifying of oil into egg yolk. In her own lesson on preparing it,* Elizabeth David forbids the addition of mustard, frowns on the use of salt and pepper, and allows only a whisper of wine vinegar or lemon juice. Everything else only gets in the way.

That experience—and my subsequent success at replicating it—is what comes to mind whenever I’m asked what simple cooking means, and why I chose it to name the food letter I’ve now been writing for more than a quarter of a century. Making mayonnaise this way may not be effortless—the synonym many people associate with simple—but it is fundamental and straightforward, which is to say the greatest effect conjured out of the fewest possible means—a plate, a fork, an egg yolk, some olive oil, a touch of wine vinegar, and (apologies, Elizabeth) a pinch of salt.

In this sense, the phrase became the motivating force of my adventures in the kitchen. Without really noticing it, I lost interest in complicatedly impressive dishes (the hallmark of my earlier efforts at considered cooking) and turned my attention to the often unremarkable-seeming foods that have, ever since, been the ones to capture my heart.

The reason I’m telling you this, however, isn’t to pat myself on the back. Instead, what impresses me most, looking back from a perspective of twenty-five years, is how much this aesthetic, so important to me and my writing, turns out to be almost entirely the product of its time and place, its particularity shaped by my idiosyncratic personal history.

I grew up as an army brat, and thus was completely sheltered from the economic forces—and resulting stresses—that shape most American lives. No one we knew risked losing their job because of a downturn in the economy or the whim of a new boss, or possessed conspicuous wealth or even an enviably higher standard of living. Medical treatment and (quite decent) housing were free. Those who made the army their career felt they were motivated by duty, a sense of patriotism, even if, like my father, they were drawn to military life because it offered someone without many prospects a way into a respected profession.

To be sure, the ethos of the armed forces is fired by idealism, and although, even as a child, I resisted the rah-rah aspect of this, I was still indelibly affected by its pervasiveness. I also have always had a hard time grasping why people want to make lots of money and, once they have it (or even before), why they buy many of the things they do.

This isn’t a moral position. I don’t care that people do these things; I just don’t get it. And this, by itself, has left me woefully unprepared to grasp the changes that have swept through the food world in recent decades. These, I don’t think anyone would deny, have been determined largely by money—and I mean the desire both to make it and to impetuously spend it.

Spending real money on everyday food was a novel idea when I started cooking. It wasn’t that people weren’t interested in good food, but their perception of its possibilities was still largely determined by the Depression and the world war that followed. A roast chicken or a plateful of flapjacks was plenty enough for most people, whose image of fancy eating was the groaning board laid out each time a holiday rolled around—turkey at Thanksgiving, ham at Easter—or when company came to dinner.

Those who think that we Americans knew nothing of imaginative cooking before the sixties haven’t read their history. It’s just that our appetite was waking up then from a long slumber, and had forgotten much of what it once knew. An extended period of denial may whet the appetite, but it withers imagination, until what is longed for has calcified into an emblem of itself. Dry-aged steaks were mythic, if you had heard of them at all; quality chocolates were known by the liqueur in their centers; butter was butter, salted, please, to keep it from spoiling the long time it sat waiting in the refrigerator, while margarine was passed around the family table.

True, you could find things then that you can’t now, like beef tongue or fresh goose or small crimson strawberries, full of flavor and juice, brought up from the Carolinas in the late spring. But these were happy exceptions. Mushrooms came in cans, garlic existed as a powder, and if you wanted any fresh herb apart from curly-leaf parsley, you had to grow it yourself.

If a recipe called for anything faintly exotic, your best bet (and by no means a sure one) was to search for it at the gourmet store, or, if you happened to live near one, the local Italian market. These, as I remember them, were often nothing special—most likely a repository of Italian-American canned goods, salumi, and pastas, with maybe some whole, string-wrapped, dusty balls of provolone hanging from the ceiling.

If you were lucky, they might also have rounds of crusty bread sprinkled with sesame seeds, and a butcher, who could provide you with a stuffed veal roast or a whole rabbit. My own prize find was the tins of murky, green-gold olive oil. That it was imported from Sicily was imprimatur enough—the term extra-virgin was almost completely unknown in this country until well into the seventies.

In fact, the maps available at the time for anyone setting off on their first voyage into the world of food were covered with empty spaces marked terra incognita—how much so it would take me decades to discover.

However, two good consequences sprang from this, the first being that—unless you were a member of the small coterie of epicures—a tight budget was not at all incompatible with pursuing an interest in food. In those days, even the top food writers were often pressed for cash, and several wrote books on how to eat well without much money (a genre that has now pretty much disappeared).* Others, like Elizabeth David, wrote about foreign cuisines where cooks knew all manner of ways to make cucina povera good enough for a king, and certainly for a hungry private-school teacher.

Second, because culinary discoveries were then so isolated and unique, they tended to resonate in the imagination for a long time. My first bunch of fresh basil is fixed in memory partly because of its resinous intensity, partly because a whole year passed before I got my hands on another. Other gemlike memories include my first encounter with fresh brown mushrooms, authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano, just-made mozzarella dripping with whey, Kalamata olives, and applewood-smoked duck.

Today, of course, it’s another world. The local supermarket sells fresh basil the year round and offers several sizes of fresh mozzarella floating in little tubs. Its deli offers genuine Italian prosciutto; the cheese department, sublime sheep cheeses from French Basque country; the grocery section, a whole shelf of extra-virgin olive oils, including some bottled under the store’s own label. The list goes on and on—indeed, it may be endless, since items are constantly being added to it. And this in a form of generalized food retailing that may soon become passé.

Now we have large markets that specialize in natural and organic foods, others that feature high-end foodstuffs, and still others that offer carefully selected quality foods at bargain prices. Local farm stands no longer have to promote themselves as tourist traps to stay in business (although it still helps if they make their own ice cream). And, in many places, farmers’ markets have made a strong comeback.

In other words, we (middle-class Americans) inhabit a world where culinary pleasure knows no boundaries. Choosing has become a lost art; you can heap your plate with anything you fancy. This, of course, isn’t the absolute truth, but it’s true enough—certainly to the extent that the culinary aesthetic that shaped me as a cook is of little use at all to anyone launching their little barque today. And whereas aspiring cooks of my generation and the one that followed it turned to food writers for inspiration, today’s cooks seek it among the chefs.

Many years ago, it occurred to me that the popularity of spy thrillers with white-collar readers derived from the fact that spies also worked in offices and dealt with unimaginative, even willfully obstructive superiors. But spies also got to go on missions where they could break the law, bribe and steal, and, best of all, kill people. They got to be the cops and the robbers.

In today’s information-centered corporate world, chefs have it all over spies. Chefs churn out one brilliant idea after another, thrilling their clientele while cranking out big bucks for their backers (and taking a prime cut for themselves). Their names can become household words (at least in the households that count). Chefs also work long hours, but in a testosterone-charged, genuinely dangerous workspace, crowded with guys wielding razor-sharp knives and intentionally bumping into each other. To many, this appears to be the very ideal of a job. And, don’t forget, there’s the food, too.

It’s no accident that the center of today’s culinary ethos is the chef. Being a chef is as much about money as it is about food, if not more so. As Michael Ruhlman noted in The New York Times (June 4, 2006):

Fewer and fewer chefs, it seems, strive to be the single-restaurant artist-monk. I don’t want to just stay in one kitchen, [Geoffrey] Zakarian said on the opening day of Country, dressed in street clothes while tasting dishes brought to him by a sous-chef. I have way more interests than just cooking. He continued, There are so many ways to enjoy this métier—everything from multiple books [money] to opening a boutique cooking school [money] to developing kitchen products [money] to designing kitchens for other chefs and operators [money].

More than anyone else, chefs know that there’s so much good food around these days that only a fool takes any of it seriously for longer than a moment. One’s eyes must always be fixed on the horizon for the appearance of the next best thing. Their recipes are a restless amalgam of many ingredients, looking for a combination potent enough to seize the eater’s fickle attention. In such a milieu, simplicity only commands respect when it exudes its own particular extravagance—impressively costly ingredients, infinite preparation time.

Admittedly, my gut reaction to the nation’s current obsession with chef-oriented cooking has been far from positive. In fact, I out and out hated its intrusion into the home kitchen. From my own perspective, it turned quiet but pleasurable experiences into overly competitive and embarrassingly egocentric ones.

Recently, however, a sobering realization set in. Suppose (I thought) I was in the position of, say, John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful,* looking down the decades at Eminem, Yung Joc, and the Pussycat Dolls, and wondering "What happened?" The thing is, Sebastian, even though he’s been off the charts for eons, is still around, still recording albums, and still into jug-band music—which is, speaking analogously, just what you could say about me.

Pushing this train of thought still further, I had to admit that even if what I believe about chefs is true, that doesn’t mean it is all the truth. On the contrary, as chef culture continues to spread, my attitude toward it has turned me more and more into an outsider, uninterested in and out of touch with important changes in America’s culinary life. In other words, without really noticing it, I’d become an old fossil. Maybe the time had come to stop staring, mouth agape, at the antics of Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse, Anthony Bourdain, and company—and to try to comprehend what my cooking aesthetic would be like if I found them a source of inspiration.

This was hard to do, and it wasn’t accomplished in a day, or a week, or even a month. I’m an old dog and I was being asked not to learn a new trick but to imagine myself as a puppy again. But the more I thought about chefs and their ways, the more I found to like—and the more I found myself transferring my previous negative feelings about them to the universe of cookbooks and those who mostly write them.

When I started cooking, the food writers I admired were, essentially, literary—in the sense that they kept popular culture at bay, while attempting to hold to a culinary aesthetic that embraced authenticity, respect for ingredients, clarity of flavor, and mastery of craft. Like serious reading, this sort of cooking was something that you did alone, in private, in engrossed communion with the writer who was inspiring you.

Writing like this was never mass-marketable, and the books written by the writers who practiced it—Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, Madeleine Kamman, Richard Olney, Patience Gray—sold accordingly. But then Julia Child came along and showed that the right personality could make serious cooking a form of entertainment, draw an audience, make money.

Consequently, she brought into being an endless number of cookbooks written by virtuoso instructors whose natural stage was not the printed page but the dais of the cooking school. It was only a matter of time before these, in turn, were increasingly supplanted by chefs—whose performances were all the more virtuosic because they knew much more about what they were doing. (Stop the press. According to Bill Buford, writing in the October 2, 2006, issue of The New Yorker, the chefs are now being supplanted by personalities like Rachael Ray, television producers having decided that the former were making cooking look too much like work. As Judy Girard, a television executive Buford quotes, puts it: You need television talents. You can’t run a network with chefs. To make truly serious money, you need Rachael Ray, who makes cooking seem as effortless as eating, and lots of fun.)

All this has meant the kiss of death for a certain kind of food writing—wholeheartedly devoted to cooking but meditative, teaching almost by osmosis, rather than by being determinedly helpful and instructive. What passes for literary food writing (always a dangerous term) has become a subset of autobiography—my life, with recipes. This sea change has been profitable and successful, and has drawn many people into the kitchen. But it has been terrible for anyone who wants to think seriously about cooking. What a lively personality may bring to life in face-to-face instruction almost always translates on the page as a monotonous, cheerily hectoring tone, a belief that no recipe is too familiar to not be enthused about and no culinary platitude too fatigued to not be worth repeating—over and over and over again.

For example, the notion that we ought to eat with the seasons has been with us now for decades. Yet it’s still feverishly preached as if it were something just this moment discovered—despite the fact that, for the most part, the adjuration is meaningless. What, for example, is the season for carrots or bananas or eggplant or celery or parsley or…the list goes on and on. Conversely, are there any benighted souls left who have yet to learn that sweet corn, tomatoes, green peas, and asparagus are best when just picked—ideally from one’s own garden?

Then there’s food writing’s nonstop stream of well-meaning but hysteria-powered health advice. You may be better able than I to winnow out what is truly useful from the partial truisms and patent falsehoods with which we are all bombarded.* But perhaps you’d agree that the never-ending insistency that we eat well has inextricably linked eating with health—thus intensifying rather than toning down our current obsession with food. We have become, rather pathetically, a nation of the overweight convinced that it can somehow gobble its way out of obesity.

Since the cooking that chefs do is considered the exception, not the rule, they have a free pass to heap on the calories as they will. Surely this, too, helps explain the magnetic attraction that food entertainment holds for its audience. Within the magic circle, you get to eat (or at least imagine eating) all the good things, without being called to task for it. Given the pervasiveness of nutritional dogma, this safe harbor seems both necessary and blessed, whether one experiences it while eating in a restaurant or cooking chef-inspired dishes at home.

This isn’t to say that chefs are entirely immune to all the proselytizing. But by keeping it at arm’s length, they have gradually, and perhaps even profitably, internalized it. The classic, knee-jerk addition of butter and heavy cream has (often enough, at least) segued into the drizzle of jus, the fruit-intensive coulis, the cilantro-infused vinaigrette. Hedonism, it turns out, can use nutritional wisdom to its own ends, given time and scope enough.

To my mind, food writing is only worth reading when it has something interesting to say, and instruction, while it can be informative, is rarely interesting after the first time around—who, for example, ever goes back to read the notes taken during even favorite college courses? Chefs, on the other hand, are interesting mainly in what they do. And doing something well over and over doesn’t leach it of interest—sometimes, it is precisely this repetition that makes it interesting.

Or consider this real-world example: the sustainable agriculture movement. I think it is a wonderful thing. It provides continued awareness of local farmers, be they of the traditional sort or the new breed of independent entrepreneurs who forage for wild mushrooms; who cultivate flavor-intensive vegetables and greens (sometimes organic, sometimes not); who put cattle out to graze on grass, rather than stuffing them with corn in the feedlot.

Food writers have, of course, busily promoted all this. But no amount of effusive prose and glossy photos are of much help to their subjects, who tend to live in out-of-the-way places or whose products don’t marry well with farmers’ markets. For example, those who have a flock of hens and a few dozen eggs to sell every day would prefer to have customers come to them. People who raise food animals or run small smokehouses usually want to sell in bulk rather than by the lamb chop or pound of bacon.

Here, while food writers talk the talk, chefs walk the walk. Because they can spread the cost among many diners, they are more than willing to buy all the eggs, the side of pork, the basket of mushrooms, in one quick transaction, and not be flattened by the price. For small producers, that makes all the difference.

Chefs are equally adept at handling the touchy matter of quality. Matt and I have been going to farm stands and farmers’ markets for a long time, both here and in Maine, and we’re quite familiar with farmers who have next to no interest in critically tasting what they’ve raised. Some soil is better suited for cabbage than carrots; superior varieties of fruits and vegetables are often more challenging to grow or to harvest. And some farmers insist on trying to sell what ought to have been heaved onto the compost pile.

Chefs, partly because of their buying power and partly because they know what good is, are in a much better position to get what they want, by getting suppliers to want to give it to them. In our part of central Massachusetts, where the number of sophisticated upscale restaurants barely makes it into the double digits, local chefs still make a real effort to track down and nurture small producers. Because of that, there’s not only more locally grown food available, but more of it that’s truly worth seeking out.

The best chefs are simultaneously sensualists and disciplinarians. You can do the job with just one of those qualities, but you won’t rise to the top. Chefs have to force their ingredients—not always the best—to pull off some fantastic tricks. They constantly have to browbeat their underlings, their suppliers, even their bosses, to get things done right. Chefs, in fact, can be threatening people to get close to—which is one good reason why there’s such a thing as a waiter.

I remember looking at the photograph of Daniel Boulud, one of New York City’s most acclaimed chefs, on the cover of his first cookbook,* and thinking that it would take guts to cook with this guy. Partly it was his smile, just this side of a grimace, and the tension in his pose, waiting for this picture-taking nonsense to be over so that he could get back to his kitchen. Mostly what struck me were his hands: solid, muscular, and hard-used, two highly disciplined, unquestioningly obedient slaves.

What those hands bear witness to is that professional cooking is hard work, and mastering it is a toughening experience that ultimately leaves you standing on your own two feet. Most food writing, however, isn’t intended to lead you to that sort of independence—instead, it leaves you with the need to buy another cookbook. Once out of culinary school, chefs learn by hanging out in other chefs’ kitchens, not by poring over cookbooks—and these, when consulted, tend to be either technical and/or written for chefs by other chefs.

That’s why I can watch a good chef going about his or her business all day long, but can’t spend more than a few minutes reading most cookbooks. Usually I just quickly leaf through them, scanning the recipes for anything interesting. The best food writers have always been cooks who are especially gifted in articulating what they do in their own kitchen, and not only make that seem worth doing but also worth thinking about. The rest fall back on instruction—and you can’t learn cooking, any more than carpentry, by following numbered directions from a book. You have to work much harder than that, and you have to choose books that make you do so.

Unfortunately, few chefs write their own cookbooks. Instead, they let a professional food writer reconstruct their dishes into recipe-speak, which strips them of any real interest. (The regal exception to this is Richard Olney’s explication of the cooking of Lulu Peyraud.†) Most readers, if they cook from these books at all, use them to reproduce trophy dishes by carefully connecting all the dots. Sous-chefs, on the other hand, even though they’re required to spend their day making replications, have their boss looking over their shoulder, tasting, adjusting, commentating—which is to say, teaching.

Cooking is a métier that demands that you learn to think with your senses and articulate with your hands. Tasting, smelling, prodding, kneading, even listening—at bottom, kitchen work is just not a verbal activity. Fortunately, as a home cook, I don’t need much in the way of disciplinary chops, but I do have to get down, mano a mano, with the onions and potatoes. Real cooking takes place in real time with the laying of hands on real food—and it is there that its lasting pleasures lie.

This, of course, is cooking as I see it—and, albeit in a more complicated sense, how I see chefs doing it, as well as an ever-shrinking tribe of interested home cooks. As for everybody else—well, I think that the recent craze for culinary entertainments may be signaling the end of home cooking as we know it. For the past hundred years, an enormous amount of commercial effort has been invested in making cooking progressively less of a chore. On the whole, I think, it has failed. No number of conveniences can change the fact that many people just don’t have enough time in the day to accomplish all that they need to do, let alone what they would really like to.

Because of this, the historical and cultural reasons that once compelled us to cook are waning fast. Even the very word cooking has been pared and twisted to the point where it no longer has a clear, straightforward meaning. Is heating something up cooking? Heating up two different things and serving them together? As the prepared-meal counter at markets like Whole Foods gets longer and longer, cooking becomes a matter of selecting something among all this food to bring home for dinner.

Before the phonograph and the radio, people learned to sing or play instruments if they wanted to listen to music. Now, for the most part, the chief motivation to learn the ways of an electric guitar is the hope of playing in a rock band. Entertainments like Iron Chef and the Food Network are similarly transforming kitchen work into spectacle. When we want music, we play a CD; one day soon, perhaps, when we want to eat, we’ll pop a favorite chef’s signature dish into the microwave—David Waltuck’s seafood sausage for you; Gordon Ramsay’s cappuccino of white beans with grated truffles for me.

Granted, these meals won’t be nearly as good as they would be if eaten at the restaurant, let alone as something lovingly made from scratch at home. But that’s not the point. All they have to be is better than (or at least as good as) what most people prepare for themselves, most of the time. The moment cooking became a form of entertainment, its aura of virtue evaporated, and there was no reason left not to let others do the heavy lifting.

Cooking has always been too pleasurable a part of my life for me to consider it a virtuous enterprise (like making the bed)—let alone the sort of boring task that I’d be happy to relegate to someone else (like making the bed). On the other hand, the whole world can dine on microwave dinners, for all I care, as long as I can still scrounge up an onion and a chunk of butter.

Simple cooking. It’s worth remembering that a chef—Escoffier, no less—said it first: Above all, make it simple! He was in revolt against the obtuse over-ornamentation of dishes—which is why the phrase continues to resonate with professional chefs today. Culinary overkill has its moments, to be sure, but, in the long run, creativity does its best work when struggling against restraint.

However, as I’ve grown older and become increasingly set in my ways, the nature of the struggle has changed. Calcification should never be confused with simplicity, and what this meditation has shown me is that it’s time for me to embrace a bit more complexity. I need to

Try to become more comfortable with waste. I find it hard to shake the idea that I ought to eat all the food I buy to make a particular dish, or at least save it for another day. This means that there are many dishes I wouldn’t even think of making, even once, out of mere curiosity.

Shop less at supermarkets. I’ve survived their ever-increasing cacophony and bogusness by mentally stuffing my ears and donning blinders, which can only have a dampening effect on my cooking. Ethnic markets are full of junk as well, but their sheer foreignness keeps me alert to what is wondrous and different and worth a try. And shopping well at a farmers’ market really tests one’s mettle.

Keep narrowing my focus. Three decades ago, I yearned to learn everything I could about a range of foreign cuisines. But now, despite the ever-increasing number of cookbooks, cooking schools in situ, and imported ingredients, authentic connection seems even further away. Times of scarcity produce generalists; times of abundance, specialists—and that means persistently seeking out ingredients and techniques that resonate with one’s cooking and relentlessly weeding out what doesn’t.

Continue to strive to be a single-kitchen artist-monk. Eaters are browsers by definition, but cooks who browse will always be slaves to their cookbooks. By keeping an eye open for connections, by adapting one dish according to what I learn from another, I may grow old but my kitchen will stay young.

Whenever you hold the past up to the present, one or the other always suffers. Looking back at the time I began cooking, it’s hard for me not to feel embarrassed by how ingenuous it all was. Salt was salt, wine vinegar was just another kind of vinegar, an egg was just an egg. Even imported olive oil seemed no more than a hard-to-find, slightly classy kind of vegetable oil. The one used by my friend was light and delicate, yet unmistakably pressed from olives. It gave the mayonnaise its flavor, its presence—even as the egg made it thick. It was the first time I really noticed olive oil, but it didn’t seem at all as rich with signification as it soon would become.

Indeed, it’s only because of the bottle’s unique shape that I know, even after all these years, that it was bottled by James Plagniol, and that it came from Provence. Recently, I went to our local gourmet emporium to see if I could purchase some, wondering whether its taste would summon back anything of the old enchantment. There, I discovered that the sole Provençal oil they carried was a seventeen-ounce bottle of Arnaud extra-virgin, AOC Vallée des Baux de Provence—blended of Salonenque, Grossane, Verdale, Picholine, and Aglandeau olives. It couldn’t be more echt Provençal, but priced at the princely sum of thirty-three dollars, it was neither simple nor affordable.

As for James Plagniol, he was nowhere to be found—not here, not on those burgeoning supermarket shelves. I did an online search, and the only place I found offering it for sale was a market and garden center in New Jersey. They didn’t do mail order, so, back at the supermarket, I chose a pale, grove-pressed extra-virgin olive oil from Argentina. Then I made the mayonnaise—with a fork, by hand, on a plate, with a raw egg yolk. Everything went perfectly—as I’m sure it will for you, if you just make sure the egg is fresh and at room temperature.

No, it didn’t carry me back to 1969. It just stayed what it was, a