Cooking for Others: Fancy and Plain
By Alan Mintz Z"L
*
Tarte Tatin (Pear Tart). One of Alan's creations.
In 1971, at the age of twenty-four, while recovering from an automobile accident I discovered a passionate interest in cooking. I had always loved eating, and much of my social life in college had revolved around meeting people for dinner and taking part in communal meals. But I had done little real cooking, and my limited repertoire was taken measure for measure from the familiar countercultural cookbooks of the times.
In the enforced idleness of my convalescence, I somehow tuned into Julia Child's TV programs and my imagination was set on fire. For the next fourteen years I was preoccupied with the world of food: I read cookbooks thirstily; I struggled to master the basic techniques and to go on to develop my own style; I familiarized myself with exotic cuisines; I traveled abroad and made pilgrimages to some of the great restaurants. Most of all, I cooked daily for myself and on weekends for others, and I rarely stopped thinking, with anticipation, about what dinner would bring.
It began largely as a passion of the mind. Hobbling around my parents' house on crutches, hardly able to stand at a counter and hold a knife, I was transported by my reading into an ideal world which was at once sensuous and disciplined, and in which the very names of the dishes murmured of exotic pleasures. I was further enthralled by the alchemical mystery by which the raw and mundane foodstuffs of everyday life are turned into sublime preparations.
Yet the appeal was not just to the mind but also to a need for control over my life. My daily life was ruled by an unending round of hunger and satiation, and until my discovery of cooking I had made no connection between these cycles of desire and the possibility of my exerting power over them. The realization was simple but startling: by making my own food I could control the process of feeding myself.
The period during which I became a serious student of cooking coincided with my years in graduate school and with my first jobs as a college teacher. These were also the years of my living alone as a single man. During this time food was an immensely important presence in my life. Making dinner every night for myself was a source of great pleasure and even strength. I ate well, and my imagination was exercised by the challenge of realizing what I read in books in the praxis of my own kitchen. But most of all cooking was a way of giving myself something; I went through the usual course of relationships, but in the absence of the abiding love of a woman, I was often content to make that something food.
My preoccupation with food, I now know, was not untouched by elements of compulsiveness. I was least in control when I cooked for others. On weekends I prepared elaborate repasts for friends; I would stay up late the night before and lose myself in a reverie of culinary experimentation. The proffered meal would garner sincere compliments— if not always informed appreciation— but I would inevitably be left with a hollow and dissatisfied feeling. I was again confronted by the brute impermanence of food; I had worked so very hard and now it was gone, consumed. Yet there was something else that is endemic to all passionate cooks. What I had offered my guests was food, often splendidly served up, but what I really wanted from them in exchange was friendship, esteem, affection—in a word: love. Although attention to my food was easily purchased, the attention to me was not always forthcoming because I did not know how to ask for it more directly, and my strategy of culinary indirection yielded few results.
When I got married at the age of thirty-eight, a new chapter in my cooking life was opened. My wife was purportedly a good cook before we met, but when we merged our lives together, I took over the kitchen. I was faster and more practiced, and she was just as happy to be cooked for. But there was something wistful in her ceding her pots and pans to my territorial claims. She often says that she feels like one of the inhabitants of a third-world country who forgot how to work the land altogether when they were taught scientific farming techniques by Western experts.
Learning to cook for another person is not an easy business, or at least it was not for me. Happily, my wife enjoys food and savored many of the things I made for her. (What would I have done if I had ended up with someone indifferent to food?) But it took a long time for me to tune into what she really wanted to eat and felt good about eating, as opposed to some of the splashy, strongly seasoned and overly rich dishes that I liked and assumed she would too. There was a particularly rough patch not long after we were married when my wife was suffering from a chronic cough which could be exacerbated by eating acidic or spicy foods. For a longer time than I care to admit I simply did not want to get the message because it required restraining my normally free hand with garlic, vinegar and pepper.
It was the birth of my two daughters that caused the most drastic revision of my relationship to food. Before we knew it our oldest girl, who is now three, left baby food behind and went on, in ever so selective and unpredictable ways, to eating 'real' food. Here was another creature whose culinary likes and dislikes I had to learn to read. I do my best to follow the changes in her tactile and sensuous relationship to food and to be attentive to when she is most interested in eating things that are crunchy or squishy or melted or can be made into a sandwich. I find that if my wife and I are enjoying what we're eating (be it such suspect foods as fish, greens or lentils) then our daughter will often like it too, even if she puts off eating it until the next day.
Ceding sovereignty over the domain I have controlled for so long has been an adjustment as well. The kitchen is no longer mine alone, and I've learned that the only way I can hope to have my hands free for prepping dinner is if my daughter, perched on a stool beside me, can take part in the chopping and pouring. When I've been emboldened to do some baking with her, I've had to take pains to make sure every ingredient is readied and measured out in advance so that the fun does not dissipate with her attention span.
The reward comes in those occasional moments when she smiles on my efforts and tells me that she likes the bread I've baked or when she tucks into my roast chicken with visible relish. This is a kind of pleasure I have found in no other moment of my cooking life.
By far the biggest change has come from the unnegotiable fact time is scarce. My wife always wondered at my taking the time to prepare elaborate meals or experiment with new dishes. Now the element of choice has disappeared altogether. Working and raising children, even with some help, means getting the food out of the kitchen very fast—and often having to consume it even faster. This is cooking in the trenches on the frontier of family life. By contrast, the Sixty-Minute Gourmet seems to work to the rhythms of a graciously indulgent bygone era. To feed a family healthfully without a dependence on unappetizing and overpriced prepared food and 'fast' food and still eat well is an enormous challenge.
Rising to that challenge has in the end been invigorating rather than dispiriting. Far from throwing away twenty years of fancy cooking, I have had to draw upon all the techniques and tips I've acquired during that time in order to do my job with intense and furious precision. To walk in the door tired and hungry after a day's teaching and writing or an outing with the family and then sit down a half hour later to something edible and restorative is a feat which requires no small measure of imagination and disciplined skill. Yet while the challenge has its rewards, I will not disguise the fact that I look forward to the day when the demands will lessen and my kitchen will be returned to me.
In the meantime, I've let my subscriptions to the glossy food magazines run out, and nowadays the fancy cakes get baked only for birthdays. But I am not without imaginative nourishment. My current hero is Jacques Pepin because he has devoted himself, with no loss of elan, to simplifying classic techniques for family cooking. I have returned to my bedside books by M. F. K. Fisher and Elizabeth David whose wisdom and good writing give timeless pleasure. When I can no longer keep my eyes open I fall asleep, thinking about what to put on the family table for tomorrow's dinner.
* Alan Mintz, z"l, died suddenly a year and a half ago. He was a preeminent scholar of Hebrew literature and co-founder of the influential journal Prooftexts, which over the years has published many seminal articles in Sephardic and Mizrahi studies. When I was a recent Ph.D., he gave a boost to my vocation by inviting me to contribute an article on Tunisian Jewish writers to Prooftexts, and shepherding it through several versions to publication. He was a world-famous authority on S. Y. Agnon, translating, editing and analyzing Agnon's work. His last work on Agnon was published just before his sudden death, Ancestral Tales: Reading the Buczacz Stories of S. Y. Agnon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017) This autobiographical article written when his now-adult children were small presents him in a lighter mood, as his friends and family knew him, discussing perhaps his other major passion, cooking. This essay is published for the first time with profound thanks to Alan's wife, Susanna Morgenthau.