How to Cook Like a Man by Daniel Duane

Author:Daniel Duane
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2012-12-25T17:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

What Is Cooking For?

8

The Meat Period in Every Man’s Life

Anthony Lane, writing in the New Yorker, has wondered why so many of the best food writers are women: Alice, M. F. K., Kamman, Reichl, David. The answer, he suspects, lies in their presumed understanding “that it is enough to be a great cook, whereas men, larded with pride in their own accomplishment, invariably try to go one step too far and become great chefs—a grander calling, though somehow less respectable, and certainly less responsive to human need.” Mea culpa, as charged, and not of mere culinary misdemeanors, like wearing a toque around the house, or demanding that my toddler daughters call me “Chef” (although Audrey once did, reading me like a book, at age three, playing for laughs, “ ’scuze me, Chef!”), but of the full domestic felony. Set adrift by the end of my Chez Panisse years, I’d been unable to find a cookbook that compelled me toward completionist fantasies. Without any dreams of cookbook completion, I could no longer bring myself even to tick off recipes. Soon, I’d developed the notion that, instead of torturing my wife with grand meals for peace-loving friends, I should simply commit myself to culinary woodshedding, the private study of discreet skills that a chef might someday need, even if he never planned to earn his living by the knife: bread-making, for example, with sourdough starters eternally on my person, even in the back of the car, so that I would never miss a feeding; and then knife-sharpening, for which I bought several Japanese wet stones and began studying knifegeek videos, learning to prove sharpness by dry-shaving my forearms. A guy at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market told me about a fish distribution warehouse that would sell super-fresh product to walk-ins, if you called ahead. So I bought a book called Rick Stein’s Complete Seafood, befriended the men down at the cavernous Ports Seafood distribution warehouse, and made a stab toward becoming a fish master—although Liz began worrying that shellfish, in particular, bothered her stomach. (Ridiculous, in my view; purely emotional female reaction to my claiming a traditionally female power in the home, the power over diet, dinner.)

But then I read, along with every other American foodie, the two obvious food-related bestsellers of that moment: Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford; and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan. Buford chronicled a mentorship under Mario Batali, learning to cook inside Batali’s restaurant kitchens, and also the fun he’d had in butchering a whole pig at home. (“One of the chicest things a chef or committed foodie can do today is pick up a whole pig from an organic farm and portion it out, cooking its defrosted chops and trotters for months to come,” writes Sara Dickerman, in a seminal essay from the period, titled “Some Pig: The Development of the Piggy Confessional.”)

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