Learning to Cook Outside the Lines
When I was about eight, my mother served stuffed grape leaves one Sunday for dinner. My parents always tried to expose my siblings and me to a broad array of cultural influences, but you would hardly know it from our dinner table preferences, least of all that evening. We picked, we poked, we pouted. My father’s mother, a diabetic, lived in a rest home but spent Sundays at our house. My mother was growing increasingly exasperated with our complaints when my grandmother cut in: “Marie, is this on my diet?”
That was it. My mother jumped up from the table and ran out of the room crying. Finally we tasted the grape leaves. I hardly need say they were good.
An appreciation for food and cooking does not come, generally, from a textbook or any predictable or prescribed route. It can come from good experiences and bad. I long imagined my mother—who had grown up on a farm, one of five girls—learning the culinary arts at her mother’s elbow. In fact that was not the case. She started out making Kraft dishes after getting married, she once told me. I believe time spent in the kitchen of a demanding aunt with whom she lived in high school and college was also an important influence. Teaching five girls to cook, I can only assume, was too much for my farmwife grandmother, but my sister—the only girl in our family—was more fortunate. She was tutored by our mother, who in time developed a rotating menu of beef stew, oxtail, cabbage with ground beef, pork chops and what we called okra gumbo, among other dishes. We loved all the regulars except liver. (Mom never backed down with liver.) My job was to wash dishes, take out the trash and rake leaves.
The summer before my final semester of college, I traveled to Michigan to sublet an apartment near my sister. Just before I arrived, the woman whose place I was to take over broke up with her boyfriend and I was left with no place to live. I quickly found another, but it was farther away and, with my sister no longer at hand, I suddenly realized I did not know how to cook or even, for all intents and purposes, how to feed myself. My sister then sat me down and laid out the basics: onion, bell pepper, fresh garlic and celery; thyme, sage, basil, oregano, salt, black pepper and bay leaves. I have put that brief lesson—it took maybe 20 minutes—to good use in the nearly four decades since, preparing any number of bean dishes, soups, stews and even baked chicken, though I am a fairly strict vegetarian.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t learned anything more. Au contraire. I have tinkered and endlessly reconfigured my sister’s suite of four vegetables and seven herbs and spices. My mother’s mother, I’ve been told, did not use recipes and so I don’t either. I rarely even measure ingredients. But I study them. I experiment. It took perhaps 10 years to gain a good understanding of the taste and function of each of the four vegetables. My focus since has been on spices and herbs. That could take a millennium. I’m in no rush, though. To me, cooking is less a skill than an element of life, the most vital merging of art and science, necessity and desire, that there is. Learning to do it should be an adventure. It has for me.
For years, I lived in New York City, perhaps the most overwhelming food bazaar on earth. (I once passed a Transylvanian bakery while biking in Queens.) Out of that immense banquet, my favorite item was a vegetarian version of thiebou jen, the Senegalese national dish, served at a restaurant in downtown Brooklyn. Classic thiebou jen is essentially a fish stew; this one consisted of multicolored chunks of bell pepper in a tomato sauce, served over couscous. I spent a decade trying to emulate it, but could never get the flavor, the richness, quite right. Last year at an estate sale I purchased some allspice — not the first time, as I recall, but it never took previously. Then I tried it in the thiebou jen. Bingo!
That success may also have resulted from freer use of olive oil. I put olive oil in most dishes but had long tried to keep it to a minimum, thinking I was promoting good health. Learning otherwise is not what boosted my use of olive oil, however. A disappointing dish is just too disappointing. Now I’m more concerned with getting it right. That requires more tasting, more intensity in the kitchen, and greater attention to what works and what doesn’t — i.e., better psychology, not just better seasoning. I’ve come to accept, for instance, that adding vinegar, molasses, and more tomato sauce at the end is no cure-all for a low-flavor dish. Placing greater faith in the tomato sauce already in the pot helps; tomato dishes never reach full flower till the third day, I find. More spices can too.
In my family, thrift is a mantra. (I’m not going to use the C-word.) And reducing the amount of seasoning is an easy way to cut costs, but not necessarily a good one. Lately I’ve been using more thyme and other herbs. That can backfire, of course, but you never get a good feel for a seasoning until you use too much of it. I’ve done that.
One of my goals now is to learn more about the colorful fresh peppers that populate the produce section of most supermarkets in America: habaneros, Poblanos, serranos, Anaheims. I love red beans and rice and like to add a jalapeño or two to the pot (plus a little white pepper). But flavor and heat aren’t the only things I’ve discovered about jalapeños. It turns out they cause my throat to close up. I learned that the hard way: at Subway with my mouth full…. Yeah, ugly. So I chop quickly or risk passing out. Red beans and rice, I figure, is worth it.
I believe I have an inner “ear” for taste and flavor. Another name for it might be instinct. That is what I listen to when I am in the kitchen. Where does it come from? From eating, of course, but not just that. “I would never let any of you color in coloring books,” my mother, a retired kindergarten teacher, said during a recent visit. “I would give you a sheet of paper and tell you to draw something. I never let my students color in coloring books. It stifles their creativity.”
So maybe I just cook outside the lines. To me, cooking with a recipe is a lot like driving with GPS. What I’m after is a full understanding of each ingredient. There’s a fuzzy distinction between instinct and understanding, though. I don’t know if I can sufficiently describe the difference between basil and sage, but I know it when I taste it — or smell it. Anytime I make soup, stew, or beans, I sniff the sage and thyme to determine precisely how much I want to add today — just those two, however. I don’t know why.
The greatest test of my understanding of ingredients surely comes when I bake chicken, since I do not taste it. The first time was when two of my children lived with me in Missouri. I was determined to cook for them several times a week and would pick up ideas on the way home in the evening, including from billboards advertising Kraft meals. (Touché!) Of course I hoped to sell them on the virtues of vegetarianism. Of course that did not work. Children want meat, and chicken seemed like the best compromise, but I didn’t have the slightest idea of how it is prepared. I did know it could dry out; I didn’t know there was an empty cavity inside into which I could stuff onions, peppers, and fresh garlic. (I’m more selective with celery.) I figured that would infuse not just flavor but moisture. I also added orange slices, since we had come from New York, where Chinese food is king.
After a generous dousing of thyme, salt, etc., I placed the bird in the oven and, finally, in front of my brood. The reviews were positive. Last month I baked another, perhaps my eighth or ninth. This time I included allspice, a little honey and nutmeg, but no oranges. My mother and sister were on the guest list. When it was all over, my mother gushed for a week about how good the chicken had been — the ultimate tribute. She added that my brother’s cooking is better, but that’s OK. I’m sure he tastes everything.
