Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

Be careful what you get good at doin' 'cause you'll be doin' it for the rest of your life. -Jo Carson

How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?

I was purely content to sit in the car and wander around my own mind. Watching the world itself, the people in it, and my whole internal life was more than enough to keep me entertained.

...as soon as I saw the three-bin stainless steel pot sink, exactly like ours, I felt instantly at home and fell into peeling potatoes and scraping plates for the dishwasher like it was my own skin. And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start.

It's hard to cook for kids, and when something doesn't appeal to them, instead of saying a polite no thank you, they instead break into a giant yuk face and shriek "eewww" right in front of you, as if you had no feelings at all.

It became such a recurring experience during this period when I was twenty -- to be starving and afraid of running out of money -- as I wandered from Brussels to Burma and everywhere in between for months on end, that I later came to see it as a part of my training as a cook. I came to see hunger as being as important a part of a stage as knife skills. Because so much starving on that trip led to such an enormous amount of time fantasizing about food, each craving became fanatically particular. Hunger was not general, ever, for just something, anything, to eat. My hunger grew so specific I could name every corner and fold of it. Salty, warm, brothy, starchy, fatty, sweet, clean and crunchy, crisp and water, and so on.

Be careful what you get good at doin', cuz you'll be doin' it for the rest of your life.

My father has said a hundred times, and I have paid attention, that it's stupid to let money be the reason you don't do something.

I had always wanted to contribute in some way. Leave a little more than I took.

This is the crepe. This is the cider. This is how we live and eat.

every session I had no fewer than sixteen girls with “allergies” to dairy and wheat—cheese and bread basically—but also to garlic, eggplant, corn, and nuts. They had cleverly developed “allergies,” I believe, to the foods they had seen their own mothers fearing and loathing as diet fads passed through their homes. I could’ve strangled their mothers for saddling these girls with the idea that food is an enemy—some of them only eight years old and already weird about wanting a piece of bread—and I would’ve liked to bludgeon them, too, for forcing me to participate in their young daughters’ fucked-up relationship with food.

There are two things you should never do with your father: learn how to drive and learn how to kill a chicken.

But it was from him - with his cool, long sideburns and aviator sunglasses, and box of watercolor paints (and artist's paycheck) - from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends.

unfiltered Camels, and box of watercolor paints (and artist’s paycheck)—from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends. From him we learned how to make and give luminous parties.

When you are the one throwing the party every night, emptying the ashtrays, making sure the tonic is cold, the limes fresh, the shifts covered, the meat perfectly cooked and adequately rested, the customers carefree and the employees calm and confident, it will leave its marks. Someone has to stay in the kitchen and do the bones of the thing, to make sure it stands up, and if it’s you, so be it.

I came to see hunger as being as important a part of a stage as knife skills. Because so much starving on that trip led to such an enormous amount of time fantasizing about food, each craving became fanatically particular. Hunger was not general, ever, for just something, anything, to eat. My hunger grew so specific I could name every corner and fold of it.

I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being-- the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole new person-- than you can the scheduling of a few line cooks in your operation.

That is my favorite kind of integrated person. Some of each thing and not too much of any one.

Each housing development has a "country" name - Squirrel Valley, Pine Ridge, Eagle crossing, Deer Path, which has an unkind way of invoking and recalling the very things demolished when building.

For the first time in probably the entire decade that had passed since I had seen or spoken to my own mother, I thought warm and grateful thoughts about her. She instilled in us nothing but a total and unconditional pleasure in food and eating.

No future graduate-level feminism seminar would ever come within a mile of the force of that first paycheck. The conviction was instant and forever: If I pay my own way, I go my own way.

I was firmly in the out-of-sight-out-of-mind camp, and had cogent, unflinchingly honest declarations I frequently made about losing a shared context, and sentimentalism, and the general faint hearted ness of most people-but I knew there were people in the world who remained friends, for life, with bunk mates from sleepaway camp, and this was that group of people.

The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up … then down … then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It’s a tired reading style. I’m sick of it. It attaches more importance to the words than the words themselves—as they’ve been arranged—could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name.

My parents seemed incredibly special and outrageously handsome to me then.

I was gazing at that full bushel of apples when she made her stunning, preposterous announcement, that I have possibly never recovered from. 'Jim it's over, and the kids and I have decided you should go.

Nursing an infant, in the first few months, really sucks up the day. I never get over and am always totally taken aback by the amount of time in a day it takes to nurse a baby. When you are all and solely what they eat in the beginning of their lives, which I am in the habit of being for about the first year—Marco a little longer, Leone a little less—it could be, if you were a less driven and energetic person than myself, about the only thing you accomplished in a day. Certainly in a vacation day. But I imagine the total sensory pleasure for the kid—to pass out at the tap, belly full of that rich, sweet good stuff, and then he is in a little incomparable sleep coma with his cheeks still smashed up against the warm boob firmly and securely held in the arms of his mother—and so I tend to give my kids their twenty minutes of nursing and then their twenty minutes of post-hookup nap, undisturbed, in the very position they fell into it in, regardless of my own discomfort, arm cramps or list of shit to do that day. If you do the math of that, in pure forty-minute increments, factoring that an infant needs to be fed every couple of hours … well, an eight-hour day can really fly by, and what I used to accomplish in that time gets reduced to a maddening fraction. A whisper more than zilch.

So what is there to make of the simplistic thing I've come to utter in explanation, which is so drab, so monochromatic, so water on top of ice even though it's the most direct, most distilled path from my heart to my mouth: I feel better without her.