I remember one of the first times that I tried to really cook; I was 22. I had refused to pick my college girlfriend up from the airport. I could tell by her tone that she was upset when I spoke to her from a hostel payphone in Dublin, “Babe, I’m getting back to Pittsburgh the same day as you. I’m gonna be tired and I have class the next day. Can’t you just take a cab and I’ll see you on Tuesday?”
And so my plan to fix things was to cook. I remember looking at this recipe from some “just 3 ingredients in 10 seconds” book given to me by mom. I remember how adverse I was to the idea of the recipe that took the least amount of time, the least effort and the least amount of ingredients to prepare out of anything else in the book.
“Three mustard chicken?” I saw on page 10 of the poultry section, “That sounds dumb. Why does one need 3 mustards rather than 1? Besides, I only use gouldan’s, sometimes Grey Poupin and those are reserved for my turkey sandwiches. Boundaries are boundaries even in attempts to right the wrongs of monogamy!”
Still, I tried the recipe. I was not only surprised at how easy it was to throw the chicken in the pan, whip up the three mustards together, add some lemon juice, some salt and lather the concoction onto the chicken breasts with a glass of Rioja in my right hand, listening to Van Morrison, gazing at the Cathedral of Learning in my Shady Side apartment window, but I was also surprised at how fun it was.
“I can get used to this,” I thought to myself, jiggling the chicken and laughing out loud at the sound it made.
After the soon to be ex-girlfriend arrived, I self-servingly woofed down the meal, while she barely ate anything. Maybe it was lost on her. Here was a girl who made me read her grandfather’s memoirs about the Holocaust out loud while he beat me at Chess!
After we argued about why I didn’t pick her up from the airport, she took her blanket, her tooth brush and just left, “What,” I said, still chewing, as she packed up all the things women leave in our apartments to mark their territory, “you don’t like the chicken?”
“No.” she said continuing to pack and now crying in motion.
“Too salty,” I said with false authority and gesturing with my hands like an Italian Chef de Cuisine, “Next time I’ll use less salt.”
“I’m breaking up with you, your an asshole.” She cried, looking at me in disbelief. She gave me a hug and a goodbye kiss and walked out the door. I was left standing there. I looked at the 3 mustard chicken on the kitchen table. I took another forkful and tried it, again, looking to see if in fact it was too salty, “its not that bad actually,” I thought to myself. Maybe it made her stomach upset. She was the sensitive type.
The case of our breakup is about my entire experience in the art of cooking. I'm a simple man with simple needs when it comes to a palate, kind of like a 17th century farmer or an American explorer. River water and buffalo is what satiates. If I need seasoning...I add salt. If I come across a pretty squaw in my travels and contract syphilis, so what? It will run its course for sure and the burn is part of life experience anyway. The scar tissue makes us stronger!
I mean don’t get me wrong, I love food; all kinds. And I will even try anything, like the time I was wondering the ancient streets in Fez, Morrocco. I had already had Tagine at the Suk in Casablanca, so how bad could the side street chicken have been? It took about 10 minutes after lunch while I was lost in the alleyways of the Medina to turn around running and screaming for a bathroom.
I make pasta, eggs, the tortilla Espanola that I learned while living in Madrid. In fact, that is the only reason that I prefer Spanish wine. My refrigerator has meat, fruit and vegetables, yogurt, beer. I make my own lunch for work. Its not like I eat fast food every day. But its true that when it comes to fine dining, I’m a troglodyte. I feel like I am a well rounded individual. There are a few ledges, I’ve yet to traverse. Cooking is one. Cooking is in my special "list of things to do before I die" category. Other things include gardening, piano, French and power tools.
When my brother decided that he was going to culinary school it was as if he were a ba’al T’shuva going to study Torah in a West Bank Religious Zionist Yeshiva; a hyperobole of unexpectedness to say the least. There is nothing in the formative experience of his life - which is similar if not identical my formative experience - that would have even predicted this happening. I remember him not even being able to cut an onion well into college; and being made fun of for it.
The reality is this; Jerry not only broke a stereotypical role by learning to cook, but I would argue, has shaken the very foundations of our clan's social convention; that has bred a benign shtetl-like chauvanism, handed down to us generation after generation; an unspoken social structure requiring women to cook everything. This is the way it has always been since yeme kedem. The man is supposed to be useless in the kitchen; simply because, that's not where we hang out. I've only seen my father barbeque. I've never seen him over a stove. Once he put tinfoil in the microwave and almost burned the house down. On school nights I used to sit on the couch watching television with my father, waiting for dinner to be ready. We would eat. Dad would go back to the couch to watch TV again, I would help do the dishes and that was it.
We grew up with food not what New Yorkers might refer to as cuisine. Cuisine to me was one of those Lean Cuisine microwavable TV dinners that Zayda would eat (and me too nowadays). The only thing that he could cook was eggs, and they were runny and they were DELICIOUS. We grew up on 1980s staple meals; pasta & meatballs, steak, chicken, fish, salad that only had lettuce, tomato, onions and cucumbers with creamy italian dressing. In the summers we had corn on the cob and corn bread. In the winter we had beef stew with biscuits. On Tuesdays we had tacos. If dad was out of town on business we would have fajitas with guacomole. We learned that from our favorite restaurants at the Oxford Valley Mall like Houlihands and T.G.I. Fridays.
Mom definitely began experimeting with more recipes at this point. Eventually weird things started to show up in our meals, like oranges and raisons in our salads and cold soup in the summer. Isn't soup supposed to be hot?
In the beginning, eating ethnic exotic foods meant getting hand made Raviolis at Freddy’s in Trenton on Friday nights, and the poo poo platter at the local Chinese place on Sunday nights. Eventually sushi and Indian food crept into our lives at some point in the 1990s. Our own ethnic food was kasha & bowties, brisket, matzah ball soup, kuigle and Jewish apple cake. And even though neither sets of my grandparents have any clue as what part of the pale of settlement we originated from, they have the same thing to say about my great, great grandparents. All the women were great cooks and they all fought the Czar with a spatula!
It is family legend that my great great grandmother, fed a stew she was making to a platoon of Russian soldiers when they demaned food. Of course little did the soldiers know that they were soon to have disentary from the soapy bath water that she added to the pot for them.
If it is difficult to change intrenched ideological dispositions over the course of centuries, imagine how difficult it is to change the palate of a family in a few years time. My Zayda said that all beer tastes the same, but that "Pabst Blue Ribbon; now there is a beer." I'm the same way with food. Why? Well simply because that is the way I grew up.
It is now commonly accepted thanks to Erik Erikson that adolescence is an era of searching on physical, mental, spiritual and sexual levels. It is the first time that we make meaning of our lives by creating our own personal stories with narrative, complete with themes, motifs, symbolism, mis en scene and mythology. The creation of a personal narrative in this fashion is a process known as “selfing."; a person’s identity acquires qualities of cultural and historical specificity in the given society. My selfing never involved cooking, just eating.
So while I may come across as dismissive about my brother's new found passion and profession, its not that at all; its just that I am hardwired to look at food like Tevye the milkman rather than Daniel Boloud. I've learned a lot from my brother over the past year and half from the art of cutting things, to tasting things, to pairing the correct Malbec with a halibut. Its a world I never knew existed. And its amazing that he was able to break the "selfing" cycle and discover something that he might actually be objectively passionate about without social and cultural conditioning.
I just wish they would do away with the term gastronomy because it makes me think of my pre-yoga gastro-intestinal exercises that I do while listening to Shalom Chanoch unplugged on my I-Pod.
If its out of the ordinary for my brother to discover cooking in his mid 20s, then it must be somewhat offsetting that I now practice Yoga and listen to Israeli rock n' roll.
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