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.