Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (29 page)

“It’s cold and drizzly here, but
really cozy inside,” I heard Isaac tell them. “Dad’s cooking and the
house smells so good. This is my perfect kind of Sunday.”

Once I committed a couple of hours to being
in the kitchen, I found my usual impatience fade and could give myself over to the
afternoon’s unhurried project. After a week in front of the screen, the
opportunity to work with my hands—with all my senses, in fact—is always a welcome change
of pace, whether in the kitchen or in the garden. There’s something about such
work that seems to alter the experience of time, helps me to reoccupy the present tense.
I don’t want you to get the idea it’s made a Buddhist of me, but in the
kitchen, maybe a little bit.
When stirring the pot, just stir the pot.
I get it
now. It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able
to do one thing at a time, one thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly.

Unitasking.

All that first winter of Sundays without
Samin, and several of the weekdays thereafter, we enjoyed a variety of tasty pot dishes:
sugo over homemade pasta, braised short ribs in dashi, a pork-and-chili stew, braised
duck legs, a vegetable tagine, coq au vin, beef stew, osso
buco, and
so on. After some practice, I found that two hours of so-called active cooking time
followed by a few more of unattended simmering could produce three or four nights’
worth of good and—I don’t mind saying—occasionally exceptional home cooking.
I’m counting leftovers; stews and braises are infinitely more delicious the second
or third night.

But one Sunday afternoon that winter, while
Isaac and I were at work in the kitchen, we cooked up a little experiment, a plan for a
family dinner later that week that would constitute the precise negation of all the
cooking we’d been doing to that point: “Microwave Night.” The deal
was, we would each choose whatever entrée most appealed to us in the frozen-food case
and make a dinner of them. How much time would we save? What would it cost? And what
would the meal be like? Isaac saw it as a chance to indulge his desire for fast food. I
was indulging a more journalistic curiosity.

So the next afternoon, after school, we
drove to the Safeway, grabbed a shopping cart, and wheeled it down the long, chilly
aisle of freezer cases holding the microwavable dinners. The choices were
stupendous—almost stupefying, in fact. It took us more than twenty minutes just to
decide among the bags of frozen Chinese stir-fry, the boxed Indian biryanis and curries,
the fish-and-chip dinners, the multiflavored mac-and-cheese options, the Japanese gyoza
and Indonesian satays, the Thai rice bowls, the old-timey Salisbury steaks, the
roast-turkey and fried-chicken dinners, the beef Stroganoff, the burritos and tacos and
fully loaded hero sandwiches, the frozen garlic bread and sliders, and the cheeseburgers
preinstalled on their frozen buns. There were whole product lines targeted at women
trying to minimize their caloric intake, and others at men looking to maximize theirs
(the “Hungry Man” promises “a full pound of great-tasting
food”), and still others aimed at kids dreaming of an authentic fast-food
restaurant experience at home. I hadn’t spent much time on this
aisle in years, so had no idea just how many advances there had been in the technology
of home-meal replacement. Every genre of fast food, every ethnic cuisine, every
chain-restaurant menu item known to man and commerce now has its facsimile in the
freezer case.

Judith was willing to go along with our
dinner plans but declined to join us shopping for it. She had requested a frozen
lasagna, and Isaac spotted a bright-red box of Stouffer’s that looked halfway
appetizing. Dubious about eating meat under the circumstances, I first checked out a
vegan “chicken cacciatore” entrée, but the lengthy list of ingredients—most
of them ultraprocessed permutations of soy—put me off the mock meat. So I opted for an
organic vegetable curry from Amy’s that seemed fairly straightforward in
composition; at least, I recognized all the ingredients as food, which is saying a lot
in this sector of the supermarket. Isaac agonized for a good long time, but his problem
was the opposite of mine: There were just too many tempting entrées he wanted to try.
Eventually it came down to a call between the bag of P. F. Chang’s Shanghai Style
Beef stir-fry and Safeway’s own frozen French onion soup gratinée. I told him he
could get them both, as well as some frozen molten (sic) chocolate cookie he’d
been eyeing for dessert.

The total for the three of us came to
$27—more than I would have expected. Some of the entrées, like Isaac’s stir-fry,
promised to feed more than one person, but this seemed doubtful given the portion size.
Later that week I went to the farmers’ market and found that with $27 I could
easily buy a couple pounds of an inexpensive cut of grass-fed beef and enough vegetables
to make a braise that would feed the three of us for at least one night and probably
two. (The variable, as ever, is Isaac’s appetite.) So there was a price to pay for
letting the team of P. F. Chang, Stouffer’s, Safeway, and Amy’s cook our
dinner.

I don’t think it’s boastful of
me to say that none of these entrées did anything to undermine my growing confidence in
the kitchen.
True, I don’t yet know how to engineer dishes that
can withstand months in the freezer case, or figure out how to build little brown ice
cubes of hoisin sauce, designed to liquefy just in time to coat the vegetables after
they’ve defrosted but not a moment sooner. And nothing I learned from Samin could
help me design the consecutive layers of cheese curds and croutons topping the
chocolate-colored cylinder of frozen onion soup like a Don King fright wig.

So how did it all taste? A lot like airline
food, if you can remember what that was like. All the entrées tasted remarkably similar,
considering how far-flung the culinary inspirations. They were all salty and had that
generic fast-food flavor, a sort of bouillon-y taste that probably can be traced to the
“hydrolyzed vegetable protein” that several of the dishes contained. This is
an ingredient-label euphemism for monosodium glutamate (MSG)—basically, a cheap way to
boost the perception of umami. The dishes all tasted better on the first bite—when you
might be tempted to think,
Hey,
not half bad!—
than on the second or third, when those words would be unlikely
to cross your mind. There is a short half-life to the taste of a frozen dinner, which I
would peg somewhere around bite number three, after which the whole experience rapidly
deteriorates.

Oh, but wait: I’ve skipped over the
cooking, or
not
cooking, segment of our meal. Which you probably assumed, as I
certainly did, would be nominal, and so not worth going into in this account. That is,
after all, the reason people buy these frozen dinners in the first place, isn’t
it? Well, if it is they’re sorely mistaken, because it took nearly an hour to get
our entrées on the table. For one thing, you could only microwave one of them at a time,
and we had four to defrost and heat, not counting the molten frozen cookie. Also, one of
the packages warned that we would not get optimal results in the microwave: The various
stages that made up the frozen brown rocket of onion soup would meld together
pointlessly in the microwave. If
we wanted the gratinée effect
promised on the package, then we had to bake it in the oven (at 350˚F) for forty
minutes
.
I could make onion soup from scratch in forty minutes!

Isaac didn’t want to wait that long,
so we ended up taking turns standing in front of the microwave. Is there any more
futile, soul-irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a
microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner? Time
spent this way might be easier than cooking, but it is not enjoyable and surely not
ennobling. It is to feel spiritually unemployed, useless to self and humanity.

Anyway, as soon as the first dish was hot,
we swapped it out for the second, but by the time the fourth entrée was hot enough to
eat, the first one had gotten cold and needed re-nuking. Isaac finally asked permission
to start eating his onion soup before it got cold again. The advent of the microwave has
not been a boon to table manners. He was already down to the bottom of his bowl when
Judith’s lasagna emerged from the oven.

Microwave Night turned out to be one of the
most disjointed family dinners we have had since Isaac was a toddler. The three of us
never quite got to sit down at the table all at once. The best we could manage was to
overlap for several minutes at a time, since one or another of us was constantly having
to get up to check the microwave or the stovetop (where Isaac had moved his stir-fry
after the microwave got backed up). All told, the meal took a total of thirty-seven
minutes to defrost and heat up (not counting reheating), easily enough time to make a
respectable homemade dinner. It made me think Harry Balzer might be right to attribute
the triumph of this kind of eating to laziness and a lack of skills or confidence, or a
desire to eat lots of different things, rather than to a genuine lack of time. That we
hadn’t saved much of at all.

The fact that each of us was eating
something different completely
altered the experience of (speaking
loosely) eating together. Beginning in the supermarket, the food industry had cleverly
segmented us, by marketing a different kind of food to each demographic in the household
(if I may so refer to my family), the better to sell us more of it. Individualism is
always good for sales, sharing much less so. But the segmentation continued through the
serial microwaving and the unsynchronized eating. At the table, we were each preoccupied
with our own entrée, making sure it was hot and trying to decide how successfully it
simulated the dish it purported to be and if we really liked it. Very little about this
meal was shared; the single-serving portions served to disconnect us from one another,
nearly as much as from the origins of this food, which, beyond the familiar logos, we
could only guess at. Microwave Night was a notably individualistic experience, marked by
centrifugal energies, a certain opaqueness, and, after it was all over, a remarkable
quantity of trash. It was, in other words, a lot like modern life.

I thought about that at dinner the following
night, when we sat down together to eat one of the pot dishes I’d made the
previous Sunday. Duck, which I had braised following Samin’s recipe, with red wine
and sweet spices in my new terra-cotta pot. Since the dish had been in the fridge since
Sunday, it was easy to skim off the fat before putting the pot in the oven to reheat. By
the time the sweet smells of allspice, juniper, and clove began to fill the house, Isaac
and Judith had gravitated to the kitchen; I never had to call them to dinner. I brought
the pot out to the table, and began serving everyone from it.

The energies working on the three of us at
the dinner table this evening were the precise opposite of the ones that had been loosed
in the house on Microwave Night. The hot, fragrant casserole itself
exerted a gravitational force, gathering us around it like a miniature hearth. It was
no big deal, really, a family sharing a meal from a common pot on a weeknight, and yet
at a time when so many of the forces working on a household are so individualistic and
centrifugal—the screens, the consumer goods, the single-serving portions—it’s a
wonder such a meal ever happens anymore. It certainly doesn’t have to, now that
there are easier ways to feed a family.

There’s something about a slow-cooked
dish that militates against eating it quickly, and we took our time with dinner. Isaac
told us about his day; we told him about ours. For the first time all day, it felt like
we were all on the same page, and though it would be overstating things to credit that
feeling entirely to the delicious braise, it would also be wrong to think that eating
the same thing from the same pot, this weeknight communion of the casserole, had nothing
to do with it, either. Afterward, when I lifted the lid from the pot, I was glad to see
there would be leftovers for lunch.