Best Food Writing 2013 (56 page)

And I've told them, over and over, what I believe is fundamentally true—if you're going to cook, you're going to get cut. You're going to burn your hand getting the cast iron pan out of the oven. You'll get lime juice in your paper cut. You'll itch your nose after dicing a jalapeno, and in the most jarring manner possible, clean out your entire sinus cavity. Or like Lucy when she was two, you might scrape your tongue on a box grater trying to lick off the cheese.

If you cook long enough, it'll happen. You can minimize the pain
with safety measures, a policy of no fooling around and attentiveness, but make no mistake—cooking, when done correctly, is a full-body contact sport.

And to prove that point, a kid-on-kid smack-down was happening in my kitchen. It was the chives. Edie hogged them. Lucy wanted them for my eggs. (She's a purist, liking her eggs oozingly runny, with a little salt, nothing else.) Edie, working on the omelette, felt she needed most of the cheese and chives in hers.

Lucy found the “Omelette Defense” severely out of bounds and, from what we could gather from under the covers, Edie elbowed her in the face. Lucy pushed her back. There were accusations and whimpering, then all out screaming.

“I hate you, Lucy!”

“I hate you, too!”

David peeked out the door. “No fighting at the stove, girls.”

To which both girls ratted each other out furiously, and Edie started to cry.

“Mommy!”

David, God bless him, said simply, “It's Mother's Day, girls. Figure it out.”

The girls looked irritated by his lack of support. Lucy walked over and pulled the bedroom door shut.

Cooking can make people cranky.

Then, there was an eerie silence. For a long time. I presumed eggs were cooking, cheese was being shared and sprinkled, herbs falling like a light rain over the food.

Or they were dead.

I finished “Shouts & Murmurs.” There was nothing more to do. Silently and slowly I cracked open the door.

What I saw amazed me. A kind of intuitive cooking was happening.

They were looking at each others' pans, deciding when the eggs were done. They were checking whether the whites shook all jelly-like, which meant they weren't quite ready, or if the yolks were getting too solid and pale at the edges, which meant they were over-cooking and wouldn't be messy-runny. Lucy saw that bits of stray cheese were frying a little in the pan. She leaned in and shut off the gas.

They weren't following a recipe. They weren't even cooking the
way they had seen me do it. It was their own thing, all intuition and senses—sight and smell, the sound of eggs sizzling in butter, the sight of edges crisping up. It's exactly the way I had hoped they'd learn to cook.

I notice they defer to me when I'm in the kitchen. They ask me questions about doneness, when food is ready to be turned, flipped or stirred. Sometimes they just hand the egg to me because they might break the yolk, but they know I won't. I'm the sure bet.

It's easy to take over and have them do less.

But when they are alone, and there is no one to defer to, they have to figure it out themselves. I cannot hog the process. There is no safety net, so they simply depend on themselves to make decisions about the cooking.

David, unsure of why I was peeking through a crack in the door, came over to mock me, but ended up hooked on the action.

When they could tell the whites were not like jelly anymore, and the yolks were still a jiggly molten orange, they grabbed the spatulas from the jar on the counter. Lucy worked her eggs and mine onto plates.

Edie got her eggs on the spatula but couldn't quite negotiate the flipping. Lucy stepped in—all hurt feelings forgotten—positioning her spatula on the other side of Edie's eggs. The omelette flipped up and landed sort of lopsided in the pan.

Close enough.

They let it sit for a moment and then, they each put a spatula under a side of the omelette. They were already moving when they realized the plate was not on the counter where it should be. So they carried the omelette, balanced across two spatulas, as if it were a hurt kitten on a pillow, cautious step after cautious step, across the kitchen. It was like watching a high wire act.

No one took a breath until the omelette made it unscathed onto the plate.

David and I both realized Edie had forgotten to shut off the gas, but we refrained from saying anything. Although it was killing me. I had this thought that maybe we'd be gassed to death. I felt the urge to cough a little.

That's when I heard Lucy, rummaging for forks and napkins.

“Dude, turn off the gas.”

Edie ran over, switched off the knob. And like her neurotic mother, (apple meet tree, tree meet apple) Lucy walked over and worked the knob again to make sure it was off.

Ah yes, a family tradition of OCD.

David, seeing an opportunity, went out for coffee refills. They frowned at him a little, but he assured them he was simply on a coffee run. Lucy said he should cover the left side of his face, so he couldn't see her eggs. He obliged and poured us more coffee, one-handed, shielding one whole side of his face.

I got back into bed. I pretended to read my Kindle. I waited to be called for breakfast.

But the call never came.

I expected a beautifully-calibrated table setting, maybe a cloth napkin, a wilted, hand-picked dandelion in a glass milk bottle, a hand-drawn card with hearts. What I got was much less refined. The girls brought their masterpieces to the bedroom. They shoved plates and forks into our hands and plopped themselves on the bed. Lucy flipped on the TV with the remote and Edie settled into my lap.

“Eat Mama,” was all she said.

This was it. Mother's Day.

Eggs and
iCarly.

We ate our eggs, all lumped up on the bed together, watching bad kids TV. Edie ate nothing.

My eggs were lovely, a little over-salty (in a good way) with runny yolks that puddled neon-yellow, a mad scattering of chives and melted cheese. Lucy has a heavy hand, so there was never any hope for a light dusting. The omelette must have been pretty good because David inhaled it before I could get a taste of it.

Edie wanted to know if I was planning on licking the plate. I was, so I did.

It was Mother's Day. I could lick the plate if I wanted to.

This made Lucy smile.

Is there anything better for a little kid? To cook something, completely by themselves, and watch their parent love it so much they throw all manners to the wind and lick the plate spotless?

David cleaned the kitchen, washed the dishes. The girls jumped on the trampoline in the back yard. I could hear them laughing as I
started to read the
New Yorker
Fiction. I knew I wouldn't finish it, but even the start of it was good, freeing. A few minutes for Mom.

It was a good Mother's Day.

Which makes me wonder what they'll make this year.

Maybe I'll finish the Fiction this year. Maybe I'll relax and enjoy the sounds of them in my kitchen—our kitchen—making something for me with their own sweet hands.

Yes, that's it.

Still, I'm keeping the fire extinguisher by the bed/prison. Just in case.

 

 

C
OKE AND
P
EANUTS

By Carol Penn-Romine

From
Leite's Culinaria

From her home base in Los Angeles, food writer and cooking teacher Carol Penn-Romine roams the globe, leading culinary tours and blogging about world cuisine at
HungryPassport.com
. But she's also a native Tennessean—and scratch a Southerner, you'll always find a hankering for Southern food.

B
ack when I was a preschooler in the ‘60s, I'd beg my daddy to let me tag along with him on his weekly trips to the farmers' co-op in town. Okay, I didn't so much beg as I did scurry into his truck and wait with the certainty that he couldn't possibly say no. The reasons behind my insistence on going along on this excursion were twofold. It was an escape from our quiet Tennessee farm for a taste of the city (Kenton, population 1,495 at the time), an outing I otherwise made only on Sunday mornings, when we went to church and everything else in town was closed. It also meant I got to indulge in my Coke-and-peanuts habit.

Daddy and I would pull into the gravel lot of the co-op, park alongside the other dirt-encrusted pickup trucks, and make our way to the low building with a dull corrugated-metal roof and walls that smelled of burlap and old wood. There we'd find a handful of farmers sitting around, their tractor allegiances displayed on their caps. (My daddy was a John Deere man.) Aside from selling seed and fertilizer, the co-op constituted the only social outlet most farmers had outside of church. We usually found them discussing crops, either
mourning the lack of rain or lamenting its excess. It wasn't a place to linger all afternoon. Just a place to sit for a spell.

But before taking a seat on the odd chair or packing crate, my daddy, just like every other farmer, would first drop 15 cents into the cigar box on the counter. He'd pull a glass bottle of Coke from the chest-style vending machine that'd forgotten how to accept change and grab a pack of Lance's Spanish-Roasted Peanuts from the rack on the wall. Then he'd lean back and luxuriate in the break from the vagaries of an occupation that relied on the good graces of the Lord, all while taking part in one of the South's true culinary eccentricities.

The ritual, a sweet Southern tradition, is simple: Open the bottle of Coke and take a couple of swigs. Tear off the corner of the cellophane sleeve—one of those single serving-size packages that contain no more than a handful of peanuts, the ones with the rusty skins still attached—and shake some nuts into the bottle. Then drink. The first few sips are the best, when the Coke is at its coldest and the peanuts at their salty crunchiest. If you linger, the Coke gets warm, the peanuts turn soggy, and the whole thing is about as appealing as drinking from an old bottle that's been dredged from the bottom of a pond. This treasured custom is, to us Southerners born before LBJ took office, what the tea ceremony is to the Japanese.

Somewhere around the age of six, I decided I was big enough to quit sharing with my daddy, who, I'm quite certain, was happy to be free of my backwashing ways. My first try, I grabbed both sides of the bag and ripped the top completely open, which left me with no way to corral the peanuts into the narrow bottle opening. Most of the nuts missed their mark, bouncing off my legs and onto the rough wooden floor, where they remained—the three-second rule not being applicable in a place where people wear the same boots they used to tromp through pig droppings. Sacrificing those few peanuts was just as well, seeing as I hadn't yet figured out that I had to first sip some of the soda so as to make room in the bottle for the nuts. Still, enough of the nuts made it in for me to succumb to this early experience of mixing sweet and salty.

Witness to this first feeble attempt was our sometimes farmhand Kinch (Mr. Kinch, to me). The next time my daddy and I came in, Mr. Kinch bought me a Coke and a pack of peanuts, squatted down
alongside me, and sat me on his knee. “This here's how you do it, Sister,” he said, taking my tiny hands into his large, roughened ones and gently guiding me through the requisite steps.

It wasn't long before I became adept at assembling this Southern-bred cocktail. Bottle in hand, I'd lean back against a mound of seed corn or cottonseed sacks, propping the rear legs of my chair the way I'd seen the men do. I'd take a languid swig and pick at the rusty red peanut skins that clung to my mouth in a studied fashion with my thumb and ring finger, imitating the grown-ups I'd seen picking bits of tobacco from their lips while smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

Coke and peanuts wasn't something we indulged in at home. Sipping “Co-Cola,” as it was called in the South—we Southerners never having met a syllable we wouldn't lop off to conserve energy—to quench one's thirst was considered wasteful. My mother actually kept a couple of bottles on hand at all times, but they were strictly for medicinal purposes, much like aspirin, calamine lotion, and Merthiolate. If you had an upset stomach, Coke was the cure. Despite this, I never connected it with being sick, but rather with the promise of feeling better.