It's alive!

A Halloween piece from 1997:

First, dump a can of cream of mushroom soup into a wide bowl.

Don’t let the moment escape you, now. Savor the giant sucking sound, then the slurping glop. And look, oh, look! It’s alive.

I had to work up my courage to perform the task, I admit. I bought the can early last summer, but I just couldn’t face disemboweling it. Indeed, I carted that darn can from Springfield to Austin, Texas, unwilling to throw it away, but too squeamish to perform the ugly operation.

My subconscious seems to have tried rather desperately to save me the trauma, too, for what would come welling up in my memory but my first dinner party? Was I hoping to forestall the moment of goop?

Let me take you back for a moment, back to the ‘70s again, alas. In spring of 1977, I invited a couple of fellow students to my digs at — I kid you not — the Yum Yum Apartments in Carrboro, N.C. Here was a good chance to do something other than what I was supposed to do — wallow in Latin and Greek, laughin’ and grief — and I threw myself into the task of providing an elegant meal to end all elegant meals. You really don’t want to know all the appalling details. The soup is enough.

I just had to serve vichyssoise (by the way, the final “s” is pronounced; please don’t end the word with an “ah” sound, for it upsets me). Unfortunately, the recipes I had called for chicken broth; I wasn’t about to use chicken broth, and I did not deviate from recipes back then. Heck, I’d never even tried to make soup from scratch. But lo! In the gourmet section of the supermarket, cans of potato soup with no poultry product listed on the label claimed the name vichyssoise, and I pounced.

I was an innocent. I might have saved the day with a little more guile, a little less What You See Is What You Get. Maybe if I’d seen to dressing up the stupid store-bought soup with a few herbs or spices, and serving it into nice bowls, with no confession of its base genealogy ... but maybe not.

True twit that I was, I took the darned cans directly from the fridge, opened them in plain sight of the two young men, at least one of whom I wanted to impress, and saw the grotesque mound that starchy canned soup is wont to make as I plopped it straight into individual bowls. Had I said aloud, “I am not a cook,” I — unlike Richard Nixon — would have been believed without question or hesitation. I stirred wildly, but my effort, such as it was, was wasted. Even had the stuff been particularly palatable — and it wasn’t — the monster from the can had doomed the dinner.

Cans can be our friends: We eat what we can, and what we can’t we can. Or something like that. You should still be very sparing about availing yourself of the convenience when you’re having serious company over, but with close friends or spouses, you can be a little looser. If you look to an inside page, I’ll give you a dinner for two (or three) based on what you can find in two cans.

Still, some things are to be banned from the kitchen: No canned spinach. Ever. The spouse occasionally buys canned green beans and collards, and I overlook them, but surely neither I nor you would make them part of a respectable menu. Or canned corn — gag me with a spoon. Frozen can be forgiven; canned cannot.

And a can of creamed mushroom — or chicken or celery — soup? You know you can make a stiff white sauce and season it highly, so if a recipe you just must make calls for canned cream soup, you can easily improvise. Starting to waver? Read the ingredients. And think of the glooping, shuddering, monstrous blob. Finally, this past week, three days before Halloween, I steeled myself to slice into the bloody can, and I watched it spill its great curdled globs of greasy, grimy, gopher guts. The horror. The horror.
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When I promised you a meal based on two cans, I didn’t mean two cans would be all you and your guest or two guests needed to get reasonably fed. Sheesh. Grow up. You’ll have to drag the pasta out of your cupboard, or freezer, and cook it, and I suggest you add some chopped tomatoes and/or some steamed green vegetables to the meal. And you should have a hunk of Parmesan cheese on hand, or Swiss, or something, not to mention garlic and the usual other stuff. Anyway, to save yourself from the cooking crunch at the last moment, take can No. 1 and make in advance your artichoke sauce (adapted from a recipe in “Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home”). As you get ready to roll, cook pasta, heat up a can of black beans (there’s can No. 2), chop tomatoes and, if you want, steam green vegetables. Reheat artichoke sauce and grate cheese. Serve.

Easy Artichoke Sauce
3 tablespoons of olive oil
3 tablespoons of unsalted butter
4 cloves garlic, smushed and minced (clove size? whatever fits your palate)
1 14-ounce can artichoke hearts, rinsed, drained and chopped
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil or other fresh herb (in a pinch, since this isn’t for fancy company, you can substitute 2 tablespoons of fresh parsley and 1 1/2 teaspoons of dried basil)
1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice
Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Heat the oil and butter in a nonreactive saucepan. When the butter has melted, add the garlic and sauté for 2 or 3 minutes, until golden but not brown. Add the artichoke hearts, basil and lemon juice, and heat gently for about 10 minutes. Add black pepper to taste. Serve warm on, for example, cheese ravioli, spinach fettuccine or linguine, topped with grated cheese and chopped fresh tomatoes.