2/9/94

The Spice of Life

With the holidays coming up, one craftsman of the kitchen finds that too many broths spoil the cook.

    When the phone rang, I was watching pro wrestling. My wife was on the balcony hanging the laundry. "Would you get that?" I bellowed, "I'm busy."
    It was her cousin Ethel, the pushy one. She wanted to know if we'd be home for the High Holidays and if so, would there be any caraway in our food, because she's allergic. My wife asked me, just as Mad Dog Vachon was pinning the elusive Leprous Albino. Without hesitation, I said yes, we'd be eating nothing but caraway.
    That's how I came to be hoodwinked into Doing My Part: cooking for the holidays. And no, my wife said, it couldn't wait until the wrestling season was over.
    No, she said, we couldn't celebrate Rosh Hashana with takeout.
    Yes, it would be a sin to eat TV dinners before Yom Kippur.
    No, we couldn't afford to spend Succot in a hotel.
    But yes, she was prepared to compromise: she would do all the inviting. Well, we couldn't be expected to eat alone, just the five of us, could we?
    "So what should I make?" I said miserably.
    "Chicken."
    "A No. 2 chicken, or a No. 3?"
    "For the chicken Kiev you'll need breasts, for the consomme you'd better get a No. 3. But Uncle Dudu hates fowl, so we'll have sauerbraten also, and while you're at it, his girlfriend is vegetarian so buy a Nile perch."
    "What's this? I have to do the shopping too?"
    "Yes. And take the kids with you. While you're standing in line for the minced carp, they can select a nice goose, because that's what the Mandelbaums like. Hetta's grandfather asked specifically for cholent, and I understand your brother-in-law Yossi is still talking about the mock chopped liver you made for his birthday party last year. That should about do it, except there's not a vegetable in sight, so make the candied carrots, breaded cauliflower, Brussel sprouts in Hollandaise and of course a green salad. Yams instead of potatoes. And special for you, make a chocolate pie, it'll go nice next to the apple crumble. The coffee I'll make."
    I said I would see what I could manage to do, in whatever spare time I had available, though I couldn't promise that I wouldn't have to put in a lot of overtime at the office because....
    She pointed a very sharp carving knife at me. "Start now," she explained.

THE CASHIER at the supermarket surveyed my purchases. "Are you buying for the Sheraton Hotel?" No, I corrected her, the Orbaum Hotel. She said her name was Olga, she was a new immigrant, and when my kids invited her to sup with us she gladly accepted, and asked if I knew how to make borscht. Ahmed, loading the groceries into my car, asked if only Jewish people were permitted to celebrate the High Holidays, and could he bring his sister. He told me where I could buy a sheep cheap, which I could slaughter myself.
    When I got home, I found my wife in bed with second thoughts. "Maybe we should have tzimmes instead of candied carrots, for more Jewish content. Though you shouldn't use any sugar because Libby is diabetic. Three people called to say they're not allowed salt, two are gluten-intolerant, it's duck the Mandelbaums like and not goose, and it's ridiculous how much cholesterol we're serving. The fat kid next door ran away from home and I couldn't not invite him and he's Moroccan, so the gefilte fish would be politically incorrect. Frank has psoriasis so I want no finger food, Moishele adopted some eastern religion and he has an ulcer so I don't know what he'll eat, and his wife is on a hunger strike because of the occupation or the Bosnians or something, so make one portion less of everything. Zeitz is a Satmar so you have to buy all the meat by his butcher, and Miriam is a flag-waving vegan so maybe we shouldn't be serving any meat at all, though on the other hand, Zeitz is bringing his butcher. Oh, and I just started a new diet, so I'm only going to eat rhubarb."
    I wondered aloud if any of our guests might object to a twitching sheep rotating on a spit next to the table. 

    THE TRUTH is, I enjoy cooking. It relaxes me. The planning, the shopping, the mise en place  preparation, the knife-honing ceremony, the creative concoction of this ingredient with that, the daring experimentation, tasting, adapting, the sizzles and aromas, hungry anticipation and finally, the rewards: serving, eating, the rapturous compliments and groans of excess pleasure.
    That's when I cook for two. One main dish, a veg, a potato, all in maybe two pots. When my kids started on solid foods, that's when I retired as the family cook.
    A moral outrage, this was. An insult to my artistic integrity. I mean, just because Warhol once painted a Campbell Soup can, did a wife make him paint a supermarket shelfful of them? Did Rodin finish The Thinker and then sculpt The Thinker And His Family And Friends? Did Edmund Hillary climb the Himalayas? Did Einstein conceive the Theory of Relatives?
    I could have gone wimpering to my wife, and meekly begged off. But there comes a time when a man has to be a man, rise above the hurdles of life,  proclaim his courage equal to the blackest force of tyranny, and grip spatula in hand to cook, yea, to cook, for all who wait hungrily in his shadow. And this was that time.
    Only I couldn't find the spatula. After a considerable hunt, it was found to be serving as a makeshift spade, aerating the kitty litter. I dusted it off and proceeded.
    First, the mise en place. I spread out all the ingredients in front of me, and in back of me, covering both counters, the kitchen floor and halfway down the hall. It didn't take five minutes for the cat to pounce on the defrosting goose and the kids to pounce on me. "Whatcha doing, Daddy?" ("Cooking.") "Whatcha making?" ("Edible carpeting.") "Can I watch?" ("No.") "Can I help?" ("NO!")
    I arranged the various menus for maximum convenience, taping them to the kitchen walls. Sixteen of the menus called for a total of 21 diced onions. I put on an apron and my Gulf-war gas mask, and diced the afternoon away. Half of the onions I sauteed in the biggest pan I had; with the other half I kept everyone out of the kitchen.
    In no time I had steam billowing up from five gas hobs, the oven stoked, the food processor jitterbugging on the counter, and the still-iced goose nuking in the microwave.
    Wife came by to check on progress. "Anything finished yet?" No, I said, but pointed to the three garbage bags bursting with vegetable peelings as proof that I had achieved something. She was indignant. "How much garbage can a man produce without coming up with something to eat?" I explained -- patiently, I might add -- that I was tackling the task horizontally rather than vertically, going step by step through all the menus together rather than preparing one dish at a time, an efficient, ingenious plan, I thought. Besides, I added smugly, that wasn't "garbage" in them thar bags; it was my intention to divide it up into equal portions and give each of our guests a New Year's gift of mulch.
    The woman was outta there like a chicken with its legs cut off.
    It came to pass that I discovered a flaw in the horizontal cooking system. The cauliflower doesn't take more than 10 minutes to prepare; the cholent needs a good 28 hours. Matters were proceeding apace, but alas, not at  pace.
    At the exact same moment the oil was precisely the right temperature to immediately introduce the breaded plaice, the water under the Hollandaise sauce threatened to boil and the eggplant caught fire in the oven. The consomme veggies could not be ignored a second longer, the cholent suddenly sloshed over and extinguished the gas, and my wife needed me urgently.
    "Sam!"
    "Not now!" I yelped.
    "Samuel!" That is my Pavlovian name. I dropped everything and ran. The toilet was flushing in the wrong direction. "Do something!"
    Stuck between a crock and a charred plaice, I froze, panicked. She shouted at me: "Something's burning!"
    Together we raced to the kitchen.
    "What --" she bellowed, surveying two dozen recipes in various stages of preparedness, "-- is going on in here?!"
    Thinking fast, I blurted: "I'm cooking." I leapt back into the fray, stirring, flipping, basting, explaining. "This orange stuff is carrots, like you told me to make. This could have been the sauce, that's the chalk mopped liver, the Pile nerch, the chicken balls in matzo soup, the baked ham--"
    "Sam!"
    "Yam! Baked yam, stop confusing me. The crapple umble..."
    "You're talking gibberish."
    "... The chocolate salad, the tossed pie..."
    "Are you okay?"
    "... The gefilter coffee..."
    "Oh, God, you've boiled over, I pushed you too far!"
    "... The klops, kreplach, krautkopf, grits, gribbines, guacamole, ozmazome, osso buco..."
    "Maybe you should rest..."
    "... Nuts..."
    "I'll finish up in here."
    "...Zwiebacks, beeswax..."
    "You go rest. Watch the rissoling."
    "Wrestling."
    "That's what I said. Now, where do I start. Jeez, what a mess. Have you finished anything yet?"
    "Yeah. My goose is cooked."