Truck (3 page)

 

Kenmore Microwave Oven Use & Care Manual and Cookbook.
Never used it. Number of recipes: 25.

 

Simple Cuisine,
by Jean-Georges Vongerichten. I bought the book after reading a review extolling its combination of simplicity and sophistication, principles I trust guided Jean-Georges when he catered Donald Trump's third wedding, where simplicity and sophistication convened for Foie Gras with Quince-Pineapple Compote, Lobster Daikon Rolls
with Rosemary Ginger Sauce, and Caviar-Filled Beggars' Purses Topped with Gold Leaf. I have memorized his edict that the essence of any vinaigrette is to use one part acid to two parts oil. Number of recipes: 205.

 

Balti Curry Cookbook,
by Pat Chapman, founder of the Curry Club and self-described “curryholic.” Sometime in 1984 at roughly 1:15
A.M.
Greenwich Mean Time my English friend Tim stumbled from a Cannock pub and led me to an Indian restaurant called the Padma, where I ate my first curry. I have craved coriander and poppadams ever since, but stop short of calling myself a “curryholic.” When Tim mailed the cookbook, he enclosed a few Curry Club packets with which I was able to concoct some passable dishes. As for the cookbook, I admit I have never used it, in spite of the titillation inherent in a subtitle that promises to reveal “
The exciting new curry technique.”
Number of recipes: 100.

 

Indian Meat and Fish Cookery,
by Jack Santa Maria. Also from Tim. This one I used, if only to make my own Garam Masala, which sadly came down on the side of sawdust. Number of recipes: 239.

 

Beaver Tails & Dorsal Fins,
by G. Lamont Burley. Subtitle:
Wild Meat Recipes
. My rifle-toting grandfather gifted my nonhunting mother with this little number during the deer hunting season of 1986, which by chance coincides with that period of time in which my younger brother John was working through his amateur taxidermist phase and had become prone to storing partially resurrected subjects in the freezer. You'd get a hankering for some maple nut ice cream and find your access blocked by pelts and frozen snoots. I retain the book for sentimental reasons, and for the possibility that I may one day be required to barbecue a skunk (page 16). G. Lamont Burley claims to be an all-around woodsman and ridge runner, and I believe him. Number of recipes: 42.

 

Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices,
by George Leonard Herter and Berthe E. Herter. In the tradition of G. Lamont Burley, only edgier. Consider the introduction:
“For your convenience I will start with meats, fish, eggs, soups and sauces, sandwiches, vegeta
bles, the art of French frying, desserts, how to dress game, how to properly sharpen a knife, how to make wines and beer, how to make French soap, what to do in case of hydrogen or cobalt bomb attack. Keeping as much in alphabetical order as possible.”
Included are instructions on how to buy wieners. Number of recipes: 94, not counting those for beer, wine, and French soap.

 

Rival Crock-Pot 3½ Quart Stoneware Slow Cooker
. Recipe pamphlet for use with the Model 3100. The Beef Stew is not bad. I cannot vouch for the Magic Meat Loaf. Number of recipes: 25.

 

Betty Crocker's Dinner for Two Cookbook
. Mom again. “You can always freeze the other half,” she'd say, but the implication remained. This is the 1958 edition, and I cherish it for the funky artwork. When I was a child I leafed through it like a picture book. Number of recipes: 491.

 

Good Housekeeping's Family Favourites
. The Great Britain edition, as you might infer from the
u
. A gift to my mother from her English pen pal Pat in 1957. Twenty-seven years later I would slink into Pat's house at 4
A.M.
smelling of curry. Recipes include Jam Roly-Poly, Mutton Broth calling for scrag end of lamb, an imponderable Sheep's Head Broth, and the legendary—you're the naughty one here, not the British—Spotted Dick. Number of recipes: 500.

 

Let's Start to Cook
. Published by the
Farm Journal
. Time and time again, I turn to this one for the basics. Most remarkable for the cover art, produced in 1966 by the design firm Kramer, Miller, Lombden, Glassman and featuring stylized green beans, cupcakes iced with what appears to be Gillette Foamy, and an orange sherbert salad the size of your head—all on a hot pink background. Ten years later the same firm designed the cover art for the Messianic Records release
Songs for the Flock,
available at press time through the Jews for Jesus Web site.
Songs for the Flock
features a photograph of yearling lambs, thus making the album cover more appetizing than the cookbook cover. Number of recipes: 300.
Think Like a Chef,
by Tom Colicchio. This is where I learned to roast the tomatoes. It is also where I picked up the term
pan-roasted,
which sounds simple and classy, even if you're just frying chicken. The photographs in this cookbook are pure glistening titillation. Number of recipes: 111.

 

Thirteen cookbooks, 2,320 recipes. And you wonder why I get short of breath? Not so bad if you cook three meals a day. But right off the bat, you figure breakfast is shot, recipe-wise. I make pancakes maybe twice a year, usually from the recipe on the mix box. Otherwise it's coffee 'til noon and whatever carbohydrates I can scrounge, the primary danger being that I will run an errand taking me within six miles of a gas station with a doughnut rack. Lunch—even if you work at home, which I mostly do—is rarely the time to cook. Usually I eat out of a can or plastic container, or make a sandwich. So let's say I'm very rigorous and use three—no let's not be silly,
two
—recipes to make supper. Subtract for the fact that I wind up eating outside the house two nights per week. Take off two more nights for all the times I wait until I'm too hungry to cook properly and instead binge on fig newtons, jerky sticks, or a 1992 Minnesota Twins plastic stadium cup full of Lucky Charms. Now we're down to six recipes per week. I am blessed with charitable friends who invite me in (or are too polite to turn me away) for dinner roughly twice per month, and as long as I remain on speaking terms with the relatives, Christmas and Thanksgiving are off the table. Ten days a year I go deer hunting dawn to dusk and return home sapped of culinary initiative. Once a month I shop hungry and wolf down broasted chicken and jo-jos in the IGA parking lot. Finally, the average adult has two to four common colds a year, average duration one to two weeks, let's split the difference and say three ten-day bouts. No one wants to cook food they can't taste, so that's another thirty days shot. At this optimistic pace it will take me fourteen years, ten months, and fifteen days to get through every recipe in the house.

And we haven't even addressed the Internet, otherwise known as the Devil's Mind-Fryer. I recently developed a jones for snickerdoodles, so I entered “snickerdoodle recipe” into a search engine, which in point
three-eight seconds returned the usual thousand hits and assorted iniquities. The world is impossibly ornate. Feeling a twinge of panic at all the overload, I selected a single recipe site, the plan being to narrow things down. I typed “snickerdoodle” on the home page and it scrolled out twenty recipes.
Twenty recipes…
for a cookie containing a sum total of seven ingredients not counting the cinnamon. Operating in this range of abundance locks me up. How in the name of sifted sugar do you choose? What if the all-time world-record blue-ribbon who's-your-grandma finest snickerdoodle recipe ever committed to a gingham-trimmed note card is sitting there like one of the nine original Beanie Babies at a yard sale and I skip it for a mistranscribed abridgement of Aunt Tooty's Double-Doodle Snickerdoodles supplied by Sylvia G. in Omaha who frankly skimps on the butter? How will I know what might have been? The logistics and bulk staples required to cook one batch of all twenty recipes are prohibitive. Three minutes ago I wanted a cookie. Now I am leaning into my computer screen, hand on mouse, face frozen in a rictus of dither.

 

When I took them from the oven, the chocolate cookies were chocolatey to the point of muddiness and crumbled at the lightest touch—I may have miscalculated the exact dimensions of “½ square bitter chocolate.” The others turned out beautifully, each bite commencing with crispy resistance, then yielding to a moist center, the richness of the butter pressing fatly against the tongue. And then a sip of coffee, the cookie sweetness melting and giving way to the dark surge of the beans.

The recipe indicated that the remaining dough could be stored for up to one year.

It didn't last three days.

 

In part to mitigate the barren state of the earth, I have decided to order seeds for my garden. I possess the perfect armchair for the task, a saggy old green thing that came from my grandmother's basement and now sits on a rug beside my homemade bookshelves. Sinking into the worn
cushions, I spend the remainder of the afternoon leafing through seed catalogs and recharging my chamomile tea. It is as if a sunlamp has been turned toward my soul. My winterbound spirit thaws, releasing sense memories—the
shink, shink
sound of a hoe cleaving sandy soil, the press of a hard seed between the pad of thumb and forefinger, the scratchy hiss of squash leaves moving in a warm breeze. I am
this close
to writing a poem. Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and
Playboy
combined.

Blissful though it is, the annual seed catalog review adds up to a perennial tradition of willful delusion. It begins responsibly enough. Scientific approach and rigorous intent. As, for example, in the selection of beets: Notepad at hand, I calculate the harvest date of fifty-three-day Red Aces as opposed to sixty-day Cylindras, factor in the hybrid vigor of the Red Ace, take into account the sliceability of the Cylindra, cross-reference all results with the applicable hardiness zone, jot my selection in neat preruled columns including item name, associated catalog number, and miscellaneous starred comments, and then move briskly on to a hard-eyed evaluation of kale. I am in essence a minor god, with plans for my few square feet of the earth. I shall sow, and I shall reap. I am a catalyst in the cycle of life. I am also distracted by all the pretty pictures.

The seed catalog is printed on paper of the same texture as your gaudier supermarket tabloids—a stock perfectly suited for oversaturated photos of Royal Burgundy Purple Pod Bush beans, overfluffed sheaves of savoyed spinach, and lurid tomato shots with every fruity globe so taut and flawless it might have been snatched from the chest of a prefab starlet. Carrots are arranged in arresting bolts of orange. A neon splay of Bright Lights Swiss chard vibrates like a beer sign in a health food store. Purpling stems of beet green plunge into the dusty lavender crown of the stout root, sliced open in one photograph to reveal a glistening fine-grained core the color of deoxygenated blood. The play of sun and shadow on a grapelike cluster of Sweet Millions miniature tomatoes is so mustily conveyed that your parotids clench at the thought of the skin popping under the pressure of your molars and the subsequent sweet gush of pulp. A pair of Bell Boy peppers reflect the light with a blue
tinge that suggests the exact feel of the cool green lobes against your palm, and I am drawn straight into summer. It is as if the catalog ink is spiked with chlorophyll. Rigorous intent begins to fray. Never shop for groceries on an empty stomach, they say. Corollary riff: Never order seeds when the world is frozen stiff and leafless.

Scientific process? That vaporizes the minute I hit the cucumber page. Ain't no such thing as
a
cucumber. You've got your Sweet Slice Hybrid. Your Fanfare. The Ashley. The Marketmore, the Cool Breeze, the County Fair Hybrid, the Orient Express, and the Sweet Success. The Diva. The Homemade Pickles is slotted just below the SMR–58, a juxtaposition implying a genetic journey from Grandma's backyard patch to a petri dish in some lab. Claims are made regarding the resistance of certain cucumbers to scab and mosaic. Others tolerate powdery and downy mildews. Some are parthenocarpic: able to set perfect fruit without cross-pollination. Some are designed to grow in a lowly pot, others thrive on a trellis. Over sixteen variations on a cucumber in the space of a single page. My carefully notated columns begin to dwindle.

In the end my order includes kale, carrots, parsley, dill, cilantro, summer savory, lemon balm, basil, sweet marjoram, oregano, lettuce, okra, parsnips, peas, squash, and tomatoes. Also three packets of cucumbers: a pickler, a slicer, and the Orient Express Hybrid. Checking my notes, I see I chose the Orient Express because the catalog copy said it would thrive on a trellis, and
I have a trellis
.

The seed catalogs promote several varieties of “burpless” cucumbers. I have yet to find one promoted as “burp-
ish
.” This is flatly a missed marketing opportunity. Among my rural and roughneck acquaintances are no small number of folks who not only savor the art of eructation, they cultivate it. There are guys on the fire department capable of melisma. I have seen a woman throw her head back beneath the Jamboree Days beer tent and let loose a burp so resonant polka dancers were moved to applause. I know men longing to belch a full-length version of “Free Bird.” Beer works, but it impairs your ability to play air guitar. There are people out here who would go out of their way to plant row on row of Burp-Mor Hybrids, County Fair Honkers, and Belching Divas.

Now that the seeds have been ordered, I have hit the apogee of my
gardening season. You lick the envelope, or click
Send,
and you think, “There.” As if you have returned the hoe to the shed, or bundled the last cluster of garlic. Today I am buoyed by hope and visions of a rank harvest. Once the seeds arrive, all subsequent horticulture is executed within the context of reality and is therefore trying.