What Does it Mean to Cook, and Do You Need a Stove? Julia Child, Michael Pollan and Me

I used my stove so infrequently that Con Edison sent me a letter suggesting that I turn off the gas, since they were charging me a minimum monthly fee and they just didn’t see that as fair. How pathetic is it when even your utility company takes pity on you?

And so I sit, humbled once again in the home of my friends Mark and Diane Iocolano, as Diane casually flips finely diced zucchini in a sauté pan; plops four corn cobs into an eight-quart stock pot half-full of chicken broth; and uses a wooden fork to stir a chopped vidalia onion and extra virgin olive oil in a heavy pan known as a brazier. The pan, pot and brazier sizzle and simmer side by side by side on burners at least four times more powerful than the standard oven.

Half an hour and 14 ingredients later, this will be risotto. “There’s no exact recipe for risotto; you put in whatever you like,” she is saying in a kitchen fitted with maple book shelves up to the ceiling, which hold about a third of her 500 cookbooks. “I want it to be kind of summery.”

I read the article by Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine, clearly hooked to the new movie about Julia Child, in which he says “a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves” and he laments that cooking has become “increasingly archaic.” He is certainly not describing Diane, but he is also not describing me. There is no evolution for either me or Diane; in both cases, we are continuing a family tradition.

The first meal Diane remembers making was stuffed artichokes, with garlic, bread crumbs, parsley and olive oil, when she was 11 years old. Actually, though, that was only the first “real meal,” as she puts it. At seven or so, she remembers inventing what she called squish tomatoes – cut-up fresh tomatoes with olive oil and shredded pieces of bread.

I cannot remember cooking at all until I was 20 years old. It was the summer after my sophomore year, and I was working in the city where I went to school, but living off-campus: the college dorm, and thus its dining room, was closed for the summer. The first time in the apartment, I remember boiling something, opening a can of something else onto a pan, putting it all onto two plates, and then watching my roommate taste it, not make a face, and keep on eating it. Eventually, I got him to say that he thought it was good. I wondered, though, whether I had been cheating. Does it count as cooking if you open up a can? There is a “cook” button on my microwave (to the left of the “defrost”, and under the “melt”); if you press it, are you cooking?

What does it mean to cook?

“Sometimes I consider cooking to be more assembling,” Diane says reassuringly, as she works on her gleaming granite countertop — taking the bing cherries from their Moroccan bowl, pitting them, slicing them and putting them atop the arugula (that’s the beginnings of what will be the salad); sticking the tiny padron peppers in a small black pan with olive oil (that, once blistered and blackened and sprinkled with maldon sea salt – one of the six kinds of salt she keeps handy –  will be one of the appetizers); cutting up South Carolina peaches, placing them artfully in a square silver-colored pan, and pouring Amaretto liqueur atop them (which, when baked, will be one of the desserts). Every few minutes, Diane has inadvertently rearranged the top of her counter into a new still life.

Some foodies, Diane tells me, have compared cooking not to painting but to music, and cooks to composers. You have to take all these diverse instruments, each with its own special sound, and blend them into a pleasing and harmonious whole. It’s also like conducting; you have to keep everything going simultaneously. Is it just a coincidence that Diane has in one of her cupboards a “mandolin” – not the musical instrument, but a slicer (of apples, potatoes, cabbage, etc.) that looks a little like a miniature guillotine? She brings out another cooking implement that looks exactly like a stringed instrument, maybe a dulcimer; its name in fact is the Italian word for guitar. “The chitarra is used to make square macaroni, which my grandmother served with sunday sauce after church.”

“Square macaroni?”

Diane discourses on the word macaroni. Americans think of macaroni as only the kind of pasta that’s in macaroni and cheese, elbow macaroni. But Italian-Americans, at least of a certain age, call all pasta macaroni.

And Italians in Italy?

Diane goes to her laptop, ever connected at the other end of her kitchen counter, and sends an instant message to her cousin Pia, who lives in Rome.

“What do you call macaroni?” she writes, with barely a hello.

“Ziti, rigatoni, penne rigate,” Pia writes back. In Italy, macaroni is apparently a distinct class of pasta.

Both my grandmothers hated to cook. My maternal grandmother was forced to serve her husband only meat and potatoes night after night; she took no joy in satisfying such a dull palate. My paternal grandmother was reportedly so cowed by her mother, who was by all accounts an excellent cook and lived to 95, that she learned how to make only one dish.

My mother’s view towards cooking sounds almost political. Before I was born, she told me, she was an idealist when it came to pies; she would use my great-grandmother’s recipes. But disillusion set in; she soon thought it a waste of time. She would pour her creativity into the meal, it would be eaten by the men of the household, silently, without response, and that would be the end of it. How more satisfying to just boil a bag of creamed spinach and, with the time saved, write a children’s book, or at least grade papers.

My father loved to cook – about three times a year. He’d carefully purchase the ingredients, make sure the table was just so. It reminds me of the joke that Jay Leno used to tell about the difference between men and women – women do all the cooking and cleaning and washing and childrearing. A guy fixes the doorknob. And then he says “Honey, come look, I’ve fixed the doorknob.”

Diane’s mother made manicotti from scratch. There’s a catch. It was her job. Diane’s father has owned an Italian restaurant, Angelo’s, for more than half a century. He is 90 years old.  Diane never wanted to work in her father’s restaurant, and she still doesn’t. But she’s
never far from food, and not just because she’s a chef in Manhattan.

She seems to think cooking will add some spice to my life. There is certainly plenty in hers – this meal alone includes (but is not limited to) dishes spiced by a sprig of lemonthyme she bought at the Union Square farmer’s market; Ceylon cinnamon sticks from Kalustyan’s, a South Asian spice store on Lexington and 28th Street; mint leaves
from the backyard of her country home (“You plant one little plant and it takes over the whole garden”); basil leaves from the flowerpot she keeps on her sill; Star anise – which
look like miniature jelly fish – that for some reason she keeps in large quantities in her cellar. She also bought a hunk of parmesan cheese (she calls this Parmigiana) from Costco and grated it through her Cuisinart food processor (she turns her nose up in disgust at the thought of buying a bottle of grated cheese)

Mark, my friend since high school, leaves his computer to join us in the dining room, and we sit down to a table lit by candles, graced by wine glasses and colorful bowls of food, and laden with linens. The risotto, which looks like a simple rice dish, is a sublime balance of
tastes. Mark had chosen a Drusin Prosecco di Valdobbiadene – that’s a sparkling white wine, in a smooth black bottle – from one of the 54 slots of their kitchen wine rack (which is not to be confused with their refrigerated wine cellar, which holds their better wines).

“Let Mark show you how to make a marinara sauce,” Diane suggests.  I could pour it over just about anything, and call myself a cook. Diane has only two rules for the beginning cook:

1.      Cook what you like.
2.      Follow the recipe exactly. Until you know what you’re doing, don’t substitute ingredients.