(apologies to Shakespeare)
(P.J. Nelson)
895 words
The first time I realized how much I liked my own cooking was at the end of February in 1976. It was a Tuesday night and for no reason at all (or was some divine spirit abroad in my kitchen?) I decided to do something I’d never done before. I decided to cook dinner.
I had, sitting on the counter, two bottles of wine that someone had given me for Christmas. I had a chicken and some vegetables in the fridge and a dim memory of a black-and-white Julia Child episode which encouraged me to put the chicken in a Corning ware and pour the entire bottle of white wine on top of it. Julia’s spirit also reminded me to chop up celery, carrots, and potatoes and put them in the pot too. Covered, put in the oven at 375 degrees, the chicken began to cook.
The Boz Skaggs album Silk Degrees had just come out, and I put it on despite not liking “Lowdown” because of its disco poisoning. But as I drank the other bottle of wine, the red one, I became much more enthusiastic about the music, and by the time it got to “We’re All Alone” I was willing to argue that Silk Degrees was the equal of such perfect records as Kind of Blue, Time Out, or Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations.
That’s the mood I was in when I sat down to my chicken and vegetables cooked in white wine. It was the greatest meal I had ever eaten.
In retrospect, my enthusiasm for both Boz Skaggs and Coq avec Vin Blanc was at least partially predicated on the bottle of red wine that preceded them both. Still, the experience engendered a subsequent lifelong joy of cooking.
Once in 1983, when I was the writer in residence in Zebulon, Georgia, a made a five-star meal out of three bass I caught in a farm pond, two pears from a tree near the pond, some Golden Chanterelles I found under an oak, blackberries from a bramble thicket, and a duck egg I’d just been given.
In 1998 I made Alouettes sans tête for my mother, and it made her as angry as I’d ever seen her.
When I was little, my mother would come home from work, make a martini, open a can of Stokley green beans or a jar of B&M baked beans, or some Green Giant corn, and say, “Dinner!”
After my grandmother came to stay with us, we had beef stew that my grandmother made in a pressure cooker. And chocolate chip cookies for dessert.
At the dinner table my grandmother would say to my mother, “You can’t cook.”
My mother would say, “I know.”
“It’s because of the polio,” my grandmother would say. “You just never learned.”
This conversation happened over and over again before, one night, I finally asked, “What’s ‘the polio?’”
My mother finished her martini.
“It’s an illness that takes away your desire to cook dinner,” my mother said.
And then she got up to make another martini.
“Your mother can’t cook,” my grandmother whispered to me.
“Because of the polio,” I whispered back.
“Not anymore,” my grandmother told me. “She doesn’t have polio anymore. She can’t cook now just because she doesn’t want to.”
“Why doesn’t she want to?”
“Makes her feel like a housewife,” my grandmother said.
That was the first time I realized that my mother was the only mother I knew who didn’t stay home all day. All my friends’ mothers worked in their houses, making dinner and making beds and making things cleaner.
My mother was a teacher.
My very delicious and extremely French meal of Alouettes sans tête, sometimes called Provençal beef birds, upset my mother because she thought I was taunting her inability to cook. I wasn’t, but we had a very complex relationship. That experience, incidentally, is why I hated the movie Babette’s Feast. I identified.
On the positive side, the first meal I cooked for Lee, in 1999, remains one of my greatest because Lee liked it and we’ve been together since then. It wasn’t just the flourless chocolate cake, which she described, at the time, as “embarrassing.” I’d fallen in love with her at a bookstore. Or, more precisely, I’d fallen in love with the way we talked to each other in a bookstore. First about books, then about everything, finally about staying together, which we have done since then. But the flourless chocolate cake didn’t hurt.
I have now made, according to Lee, one thousand five hundred and seventy-three examples of “the best meal I’ve ever eaten.” Not counting Christmas wild Scottish pheasant and Thanksgiving pie made with a pumpkin from our yard.
Which brings me to the best meal I’ve ever made. It’s the one I’m making tonight. Because now is when I’m making it, and now is the best time to make a best meal. I like remembering the handmade pasta and black truffles I made for Lee’s birthday one year. I like remembering the morels in cream sauce that I made for a previous agent of mine when she came to visit. I like remembering the roasted partridges and pears with Ducasse jasmine custards.
But I like best what I’m doing right now, writing this sentence and thinking about what I’m going to make for dinner in just a minute.
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