I Can Cook 3 Things
“Would you be upset or only embarrassed,” I asked my wife last week, “if I bought Soylent?” She admitted she saw nothing inherently wrong with me drinking a flavorless meal replacement. But she was definitely embarrassed for me. I work from home, we have a lovely kitchen, we live near a Whole Foods. There’s no reason I can’t cook myself a nice lunch every day, or even occasionally make dinner. The few times I do cook, I enjoy it. But for the last decade, I’ve known only three recipes.
I can cook scrambled eggs, chicken Parmesan, and salmon.
“Scrambled eggs” sounds like a bullshit recipe, like saying I can cook oatmeal or a sandwich. Mine are a full breakfast. A very specific breakfast taught to me by Gordon Ramsay, in the only cooking video I’ve ever watched twice.
I probably found it on Reddit or Tumblr, definitely under some headline like “How to make scrambled eggs the RIGHT way.” Ramsay makes a creamy scrambled egg with crème fraîche, along with toast, mushroom caps, and tomatoes on the vine, in what I’ve since learned is a very typical cooking video. So why did this one stick, and not the dozens of others I barely finished watching?
Part of the appeal is the chichi ingredients. To cook at home instead of going out, I have to give up one of my favorite things: spending too much money. I like a recipe with pricier ingredients, like tomatoes on the vine, or crème fraîche that goes bad before I’ve used it up.
There’s also the stated purpose of Ramsay’s breakfast: “the most amazing way of waking up the missus on a Saturday morning.” It’s a silly conceit—he’s got a whole film crew in the kitchen while he pretends his wife’s upstairs sleeping—but, in my mid-twenties, it helped paint me a picture, one in which I was the urbane kind of bachelor who kept tampons and a fresh toothbrush in the medicine cabinet.
Finally, and most importantly, there’s Ramsay’s prescriptivism. I didn’t want to learn a task — anyone could do that, and I could pay them for it. I wanted to learn a style. It wasn’t enough for me to do something right. I had to know that someone else was doing it wrong. Whisk the eggs in the pot, not a bowl (and, yes, not a pan); salt them after, not during; take them off the heat now and then.
I didn’t have to follow these directions blindly. In the four-minute video, Ramsay says “because” eight times. Whisk the eggs in the pot because they’ll break down better over heat; take them off the heat because now the heat’s in the pot; use tomatoes on the vine because the vine is a handle.
Many of his reasons are debatable or circular; what does “break down” mean that “whisk” doesn’t? But at least it feels like I’m doing something for a reason. And all of this is about feeling. It’s a delicious meal, for sure, but so are all the ones I can’t cook. This video worked like a TV commercial: It sold me a lifestyle and a persona. If I make these eggs, I am capable of pleasing a woman. If I make these eggs, I am making informed choices. These eggs can only be good because other eggs are bad.
Three times early in our relationship, my wife says, I tricked her with food. For our first date, I took her out for sushi, which she thought I could afford. Soon after, I made her my eggs, which gave the impression that I always kept food in the house. And when I cooked her chicken Parmesan, she assumed I was actually a good cook. Because, when someone knows only three recipes, one of them is never chicken Parmesan.
Apparently it’s a relatively complicated recipe. But when I saw it on Reddit — not even in a post, but in a comment replying to another comment — I didn’t have much to compare it to. I just accepted the idea that “cooking dinner” meant over an hour of prep and two rounds of baking. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the dish is easy only because it’s the opposite of Ramsay’s eggs. There are no decisions to make, no skills required, no patience or attentiveness to timing. And I’m terrible at timing.
There are many thriving subreddits full of cooking advice, but I found this recipe only because it wasn’t on those — it was in an AskReddit thread titled “Share the secrets of your trade/Life’s little easter eggs.” Between tips about free hotel porn and improved night vision, user “happybadger” posted this chicken parm recipe. “Want to win a girl’s heart with an awesome dinner?” the post asked. Bam: Once again, this dinner would get me laid. And it’s idiot-proof. Chicken cutlets (skinless, sorry), bread crumbs, egg, cheese, sauce. Easy.
Happybadger gave one Ramsay-style “do this, not that” direction: Get real mozzarella and Parmesan, not the pre-shredded stuff. “It has anti-molding agents in it and tastes like shit.” At my cooking level, this was a real pro tip, like tracing the alphabet with your tongue. Of course, I used a jar of Ragú. Still, it was enough to convince one woman that I could cook, until she found better reasons to like me.
My third dish is my own recipe for stovetop salmon, invented to celebrate my first solo apartment in New York, after noticing a sale at the Key Foods seafood counter, then Googling “salmon recipe” and ignoring the results. You stick a salmon fillet in a pan, you take it out of the pan, you eat it with greens. It stinks up the house for hours. I’m allowed to cook it only with the windows open.
I still don’t cook much. But I’m slowly expanding my repertoire as my wife teaches me technique and timing. She learned to cook without recipes; instead, she learned how to match flavor profiles, what to sauté first, how often to stir or flip. I think in terms of a few recipes that require ingredients; she thinks in terms of ingredients that could be combined in hundreds of ways. It’s a responsive approach that works with what she’s got. It’s an approach that would let me scramble eggs even if I ran out of chives.
So I’m learning how to brown onions and garlic, and I know that one of them goes in the pan first. I can make chicken stock from scraps, and I can make vegetarian chili with just three or four minor consultations by phone. I very much cannot make quinoa. But I’ll keep working toward my simple goal: having a complete meal ready when my wife comes home, cooked without ever checking the internet.
