an advice column

Hey! I was Googling myself--I don't do it often, but a woman does what she has to do--and I discovered that an old column of mine, written under duress in the months before the year 2000, had made it to a Web site concerning Tudor history. I'd forgotten all but the column's idea.

http://tudorhistory.org/humor/advice.html

all you can eat

From J.S. Borthwick's Dude on Arrival, p. 73:

Julia Douglas and Sarah staked out their table and then joined the buffet line. Sarah was staggered. A hundred salads, forty breads, and little hot dishes for dipping into or pouring onto pasta, toast points, shells, croissants. She sighed happily.

"Someone else's food is heaven—I really don't like to cook, though I keep buying cookbooks. In case I can catch the interest—like the plague."

Liberal guilt

10/3/99

Good deeds and a clean conscience have their rewards, but they won't put dinner on the table.

In the late '80s, when I was still on the bright side of 35, I remember scampering from our Rountree rental home toward the supermarket, full of big plans, no doubt. I'm sure some mad cooking inspiration was driving me, the dish to die for.

But a horrid sight stopped me short. I'd seen all too many bottles lying smashed against the gutter. But this was worse. Threatening big shards and insidious semivisible ones lay sprawled over the sidewalk before a little house near National Avenue.

Yes, I could walk around, and I wanted to, heaven knows. But a bad upbringing held me back, one fraught with pathological feelings of guilt about actions that had nothing to do with me. Think of the futures hanging on *my* action: Children and pets might slash their tender flesh. The homeowner might be sued. All from my negligence! Aiieeee!

I hate bursting in on strangers, but I had to tell the homeowner what evils might await. My timid knock summoned a nice woman, several decades my senior and rather frail. After I'd explained the situation, she asked: "Would you clean it up for me?" Now this was going a bit far! I'd done my bit! I'd rid myself of potential guilt, hadn't I? "Sure. No problem," I choked out, and she fetched a broom, a dusptan and a wastebasket. Sheesh.

The job took forever, of course. Broken glass always does. There was glass in her lawn, too, and visions of fatal lawn-mower accidents forced me to search those little leaves for the hated shards.

At first, my mood was anything but bright. But as the task neared an end, I cheered up. I'd done the right thing! No, my thoughts hadn't been pure or noble, but I was, in the words of the Wizard of Oz, a phil ... phil -- a good-deed-doer.

Not for long. The object of my kindness smiled at me sweetly, no doubt taking in my scraggly attire, and said: "Here. Take this." She held out three shiny quarters. "Oh, no, please," I gasped, but she insisted. I couldn't ruin *her* feelings of doing a good deed for my own, could I? For shame!

I didn't go to the supermarket or whip up the dish of my career. I was too tired and hungry. I slunk home, 75 cents weighing down my pocket, and vowed never to let good-deed-doing get in the way of dinner.

***************

Speculations on what might have been tend to the ridiculous -- especially when they have to do with me and cooking. What if, on one fateful day, I had proceeded to the store and bought a botulism-bubbling can? What if my creation had burned down our kitchen, and the spouse had left me? Gosh, I can't take all this possible guilt. I'm probably very lucky that I was waylaid from my purpose by a sidewalk full of glass.

The spouse took me out to dinner that night -- to a very inexpensive littl'e Korean place in center city. We'd never been before, and the meal was very nice. Or nice until we noticed that the place took neither checks nor credit cards. Cash? Who carries cash? We scrabbled through our wallets and gathered up enough for the tab, and not much more.

You think I was relieved? Hah! I had before me a disaster, a full plate of both guilt and shame. Our tip wouldn't hit the proper range. I've been a waitress, and I know that servers are taxed on tips whether they get them or not. So there was guilt. And shame, too -- can you imagine walking out of a place when you've had a good and inexpensive meal, and not even leaving a lousy 15 percent? Black depths of horror opened up in front of me.

Then, suddenly, I felt my pocket. Three quarters. Not much, but it saved my sense of self. Good deeds can pay off, in their own perverse fashion.

Now that I have filled you all with uplifting thoughts, it's time to bring them back down to earth. Cauliflower is our subject today. The weather is changing, and I've been having cauliflower cravings.

Don't like cauliflower? That's OK. The spouse blanched when I mentioned my plans, but he helped snarf up the dish. And anyway, what we've got here is a basic gratin. If you want to, gussy up the cauliflower with onions and red peppers and anything else you fancy. Or take different veggies altogether (enough to cover a 9-by-13-inch glass dish), undercook them slightly, and give them the same treatment.

In fact, the source of the recipe -- Springfield resident Royce Cordes, whose fund-raising "The Gardener's Cookbook" was recently featured in this newspaper -- wants you to play around. *You* may hit the culinary jackpot I doubtless missed more than 10 years ago.

SWISS BAKED CAULIFLOWER FLOWERETS

2 small cauliflower

2 teaspoons salt

1 cup shredded Swiss cheese

2/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1/3 cup seasoned bread crumbs

1/4 cup melted butter

Cut cauliflower into flowerets. Cook, covered, in salted water until barely done, about 10 minutes (or steam about 8 minutes, and salt afterward), then drain. Put in buttered 9-by-13-inch glass dish. Mix cheeses, crumbs and butter in a bowl, and sprinkle over veggies. Bake in a preheated 400-degree oven until crisp on top and bubbly, about 10 to 15 minutes.

Wandering this world

Before I got really old and bitter (the Dubya years), I had begun to notice that the poor saps who sat near me on the copy desk or in design were occasionally listening to my random outrageous remarks.

During my two years at the Austin American-Statesman, I played an amazing amount of Jonny Lang while driving to and from work. So I spoke of a former fave: "Breakin' Me." "That's what all of us older women want to hear, you know: cute young guys in agony because they treated us wrong." Stop, drop, and roll, Dick, roll.

I heard guffaws on that one.

Btw, the Lang version of "I Am," a song by the artist known again as Prince, is brilliant, in my humble opinion. And I used to smile nonstop at "Second Guessing."

sensitive keyboards

My keyboard story (not very interesting):

New Mac keyboards are getting very flat, very compact, and disgustingly sensitive. I grew up on old typewriters and was a disaster at typing, anyway. (For years I couldn't get a job as a secretary because of the typing tests; here in Springfield, at SMS/MSU, it wasn't permitted to backspace over errors until only a few years ago, and I make a lot of them.)

When I bought my new iMac last March, I messed up when ordering the keyboard; I was so excited that I just chose the standard model, which has no forward-delete key. And I'm all about deleting both past and present. I gave that keyboard to the spouse, who doesn't like the space that the number pad takes, and I ordered an older-fashioned keyboard for myself. Then it started to rain in Springfield, and the ants came in. Heck, they started to mass upstairs on my desk. I fought womanfully against them, but it got to the point that I was putting piles of Borax on my desk, and the Borax started to fall into the keys. Soon, I could barely pound letters out of that Macally IceKey keyboard because of all the grit, and perhaps, as the spouse said snidely, all the Diet Coke that may have been spilled.

No matter. The big family crisis called me away to Texas for most of the summer. In the garage there in Austin (built by my husband, btw), you can find my dad's first iMac, the one he killed with pipe tobacco. When I'd visited in February, I looked and thought seriously of stealing the old keyboard that came with it for my aging and distressing eMac. But in the summer, I noticed that the old keyboard was up with his new iMac. What happened? I asked. Dad just couldn't deal with typing on the new one, my little brother said. With permission, I took the rejected newer keyboard home. A mixed blessing. I have no grace when typing under pressure.

The story of my crash course in typing might be rather more interesting. But it's not for the faint of heart. That was back in 1971, a year that really belonged in the 1960s.

Nice bit of Capon

I'm stunned that I'd never posted this piece before. Brilliant.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection, 1967, 1969, pp. 39–40.

Economy is not one of the necessary principles of the universe; it is one of the jokes which God indulges in precisely because He can afford it. If a man takes it seriously, however, he is doomed forever to a middle-income appreciation of the world. Indeed, only the very poor and the very rich are safe from its idolatry. The poor, because while they must take it seriously, they cannot possibly believe in it as a good; and the rich, because, though they may see it as a good, they cannot possibly take it seriously. For the one it is a bad joke, the for other, a good one; but for both it is only part of the divine ludicrousness of creation -- of the _sensus lusus_ which lies at the heart of matter. And that is why all men should hasten to become very poor or very rich -- or both at once, like St. Paul, who had nothing yet possessed all things. The world was made in sport, for _sports_; economy is worth only a smile. There are more serious things to laugh at.

O the sad frugality of the middle-income mind. O the humorless neatness of an intellectuality which buys mass-produced candlesticks and carefully puts one at each end of every philosophical mantlepiece! How far it lies from the playfulness of Him who composed such odd and needless variations on the themes of leaf and backbone, eye and nose! A thousand praises that it has only lately managed to lay its cold hand on the wines, the sauces, and the cheeses of the world! A hymn of thanksgiving that it could not reach into the depths of the sea to clamp its grim simplicities over the creatures that swim luminously in the dark! A shout of rejoicing for the fish who wears his eyeballs at the ends of long stalks, and for the jubilant laughter of the God who holds him in life with a daily _bravo_ at the _bravura_ of his being!

Into outer darkness then with the pill-roller and his wife. They have missed the point of the world; they are purely and simply mad. Man invented cooking before he thought of nutrition. To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its_ eternal_ purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is _taste_.

Pills indeed! Someday, no doubt, the dreadful offspring of that hapless couple will invent flavorless capsules which, when swallowed, will give the user a complete command of any desired language. Let us hope only that when he does, the sane among us will lobby for a law to keep such people from writing poems. Language is no utilitarian abstraction; English, French, Greek, and Latin are concrete delights, relishings by which the flavor or words and syntax are rolled over the tongue. And so in their own way are all the declensions and conjugations of beef, lamb, pork, and veal. Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful. Necessity is the mother only of cliches. It takes playfulness to make poetry.

Hog wild?

A column from Dec. 14, 1997:

Entertaining isn’t very entertaining. At least for me.

Part of the problem lies outside the kitchen. Guests seem to be oddly unsettled by a couch covered with cat fur, and while old hairballs hiding under coffee tables are old hat for me, they make some people squeamish, I’m told. And it’s useful to have a clear path around the books and newspapers through which visitors can walk without fear.

A greater problem in entertaining is psychic. I want to be perfect, and I want everybody to love me and admire me and maybe work me into their family legends. In the next millennium, let me be remembered as a demigoddess of bounty. “Yes, children, this meal almost recaptures the Feast of ‘93, when Alison worked magic with mushrooms and artichokes and lifted us from the yawning depths of mealtime despair.” Later, I’ll turn into a beauteous, albeit middle-aged, genie of the kitchen whose magical concoctions, once upon a time, imparted eternal joy and lengthy youth to lucky wanderers. In my dreams.

Fear of failure invites failure. And the most certain path to a failed feast is overdoing. Of course, I lose all sense of proportion. There’s nothing fun about proportion, and excess is always preferable to deficiency, at least where good things are involved. But I can be so frantic to please that I push more and more dishes onto the table, just so there’s more than enough for everybody, and if one thing doesn’t suit a particular palate, another thing will. Don’t like olive paste? Try these spiced nuts! We have them plain, too. Or this English cheese. And here’s one from Germany. Have you had any of my mushroom pâté? On a diet? How ‘bout these crunchy, negative-cal crudités? Let me bring out the yogurt dip. In short, I whip up a recipe for driving guests to an early exit.

Too much food is fine, of course, at a big party, if the cook can hold back his or her natural tendency to foist and to hover. But at a small party, you don’t want guests’ eyes to get wild and fearful as dish after dish piles up on the groaning board.

Years and years ago the spouse and I had over a single guest, a very intense, very jumpy young man who was a year behind me in grad school. I didn’t know what to make, so I made several things I knew, almost all heavy and laden with cheese. There was quiche and eggplant parmigiana and pinto cornbread covered with cheese and an elaborate salad, full of just about everything I could stuff in. I can’t remember what I made for dessert, for we never got that far. Poor Jim, who was a meat-and-potatoes guy, took a very few bites. He muttered, over and over, “Too good; too rich,” and then hightailed it out of there. I kid you not: He really ran, all the way to the library!

A little psychology and strategy could have saved a lot of overdoing. But what the heck? The spouse and I ate happily for days on the leftovers. And the apartment was tidy for several hours.

************************************************************

In the ‘90s, I’ve seen a lot of cookbook writers try to make up for their perceived gaffes in the two decades before. Revisions slash the fat and shun the dairy, ironically even as we learn that good fat is essential, butter isn’t the villain it was long thought to be, and eggs and cheese may be really good for us. When one of my favorite cookbooks, Mollie Katzen’s “The Enchanted Broccoli Forest” from 1982, resurfaced in a revision in 1995, I immediately checked its index to see whether my favorite recipe from the tome, one I have made over and over and over to high praise, had undergone any serious revision. The darn recipe had been dumped!

Here it is. I often halve it for small parties, and I’ve usually used cottage cheese instead of ricotta (blended or processed with the mushroom mixture) because I’m cheap and that’s what I’ve had around. Maybe the results would be even better if I behaved.

MUSHROOM & CHEESE PATE (1982)
4 tablespoons butter
1 pound mushrooms, coarsely chopped
3 cups chopped onions
1/2 teaspoon salt (more to taste)
1 teaspoon dry mustard (go for Coleman’s)
1/2 teaspoon dill
black pepper, to taste
cayenne, to taste
3 tablespoons dry white wine or dry vermouth or water with a splash of vinegar
1/4 cup wheat germ
8 ounces (1 cup) Neufchatel or cream cheese
1 pound (2 cups) ricotta cheese
For garnish:
paprika and freshly minced parsley

1. In a large, heavy skillet begin cooking the onions in butter over medium heat, stirring occasionally.
2. After about 5 minutes, when onions are soft, add mushrooms, salt, dry mustard, dill, black pepper and cayenne. Stir well and cook uncovered over moderate heat, stirring intermittently, for another 5 minutes.
3. Add wine, vermouth or water plus vinegar, and stir. Continue to cook for 5 more minutes.
4. Sprinkle in the wheat germ, stirring as you sprinkle. Stir and cook 1–2 minutes more, then remove from heat.
5. Cut the Neufchatel or cream cheese into the hot mixture.
6. Use a blender or food processor fitted with a steel blade to puree the mixture. Transfer puree to a large mixing bowl. Whisk in the ricotta.
7. You can bake the pate in a buttered deep-dish casserole or in two medium loaf pans. If baked in a casserole, you can serve as a spread, especially for crackers. If baked in loaves, which is what I always do, it will be sliceable and spreadable, also good with crackers and bread. (When you use loaf pans, oil them or spray them, and line with buttered waxed paper.)
8. Bake in a 400-degree F oven for 1-1/4 hours or more. (At the minimum time, the pate will look very liquid. I’ve found that it will set up nicely and be light and pleasing; on the other hand, I like the more intense flavor when I cook it for 15 minutes or more longer.) Cool on a rack and chill for several hours or overnight. When you use loaf pans, dump the chilled critters onto nice plates and peel off the paper.

Barbara Holland on cats

Barbara Holland links two of my favorite things--cats and artichokes--with her cat essay in Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences (1995).

Cats

For some people, the pet dog is just a bit too, well, predictable. Once you have come to know your dog and the one or two ways in which she differs from thousands or perhaps millions of other dogs, she's unlikely to astonish you; she's the same all the way through, like a banana. The cat is layered, like an artichoke.

Pleasingly, the outermost layer is fur. (Most dogs, too, are furred, but the product varies in quality, texture, density, and, lamentably, smell.) Naked ourselves, we long for fur. Fur is superior to human skin in every cosmetic and practical respect; it insulates the flesh, resists sunburn, and doesn't show wrinkles, bruises, acne, sweat, or cellulite. It looks much the same in old age as in youth. It feels good, too. We like to touch it, but in recent years a cloud (see Wearing Fur) has fallen over the ancient custom of appropriating animal furs and swaggering around pretending they're ours. If we're going to run our hands over fur, it's now correct only if the creature's still in it. (Actually, it feels better that way, the creature adding a warmth and solidity under the softness.)

For fur on the hoof, you can't beat a cat. It's exactly the right size to have around the house, it's naturally clean in its habits, and if it likes you it sometimes gives off a nice humming sound. In the winter, it's better to sleep with than a hot-water bottle, maintaining an even temperature all night and never slipping off the foot of the bed and dragging the blankets off with it. On the lap, a cat far outshines a child; it's lighter in weight and softer to touch, and doesn't whine, squirm, or object to having a book propped on its back.

If your relationship with the cat goes beyond the purely physical, you'll uncover a few more layers under the fur, though being but human you'll never penetrate clear to the intricate prickly geometry of the choke and the hidden heart under it. However, your cat, unlike your dog, will sometimes astonish you. Sometimes its mental processes will impress you. Sometimes it will simply baffle you, as in the matter of Jeoffrey and the shower.

Jeoffrey is a young Siamese, overweight, placid, and rather timid, with a consuming passion for people showering or, more precisely, people who have showered. The first sound the showerer hears after turning off the water is Jeoffrey shrieking and clawing frantically at the door. The door must be opened, has to be opened, on even the shyest guest, or Jeoffrey will tear it down. Once inside the steamy, damp bathroom, he purrs thunderously, trembling with pleasure, and rubs against the wet legs over and over, pausing to turn an occasional somersault of pure joy. When he's dried the legs to cat-height, he hops into the wet bathtub and dries that, still ecstatic, still purring.

Finally the bemused showerer puts on a bathrobe and emerges, accompanied by steam and Jeoffrey, who strolls across the hall with the drunken dignity of a deacon leaving a brothel.

I don't understand, but the occasional mystery, the otherness of cats, is part of their charm. Humans and dogs are all very well, but their familiarity breeds contempt. No one feels too familiar with a cat. Cats provide a needed outlet for the human imagination.

Or, if we feel we have enough to wonder about already, we can limit our examination to the fur; it's almost excuse enough for cats.