I was looking up something on the net and came across this article from the New York Times published in 1996. It reminded me oh so much about years of dating women who got nothing about my obsession with cooking and it was nice to read an article by someone who shared my disdain for women who have an ambivalence for food. I have a hard time dating anyone who doesn’t at least somewhat share my obsession for food and cuisine. Until I find that person, I’ll remain the table of one so as to no longer undergo the experiences as described below, enjoy.
Cooking And Dating: A Guy’s View In the Kitchen
COOKING GUYS are different from Young Women.
This is a much remarked-upon phenomenon, the Mars-Venus stuff, and one which causes considerable difficulty for Guys, although probably also for Young Women. But what until now has not been fully understood, by this Guy, anyway, is how this concept applies to a particularly, and unexpectedly, treacherous area: cuisine.
There are Guys who have reached a state of evolution, sometimes what’s called a certain age, at which they are real foodies. We are talking about having more knives than the Turkish army, and sharper; keeping the Larousse Gastronomique at hand to check references; settling down in the easy chair of an evening to browse through "The New Professional Chef," the cookbook of the Culinary Institute of America, and owning pots and pans in the exact size and composition for each task (cast iron, enamel-clad cast iron, copper-lined with a combination of zinc and tin, Calphalon, and so on).
Such Guys view food as a celebration of life, an art form, an expression of warm feelings, a precious gift and offering. A fully objective analysis would also disclose what the military calls collateral effect: this could impress babes.
Some Young Women, it seems, view food as a hostile entity whose sole intent is to produce fat on their thighs.
What we have here is a hidden discontinuity.
In large part, this is due to the fact that Guys approach food as they do most things. Like, for example, war. Or its corollary, sports. When a Guy starts cooking, he wants to be the Joe Montana of mousse, the Michael Jordan of julienne, the Cal Ripken Jr. of roasting. I mean, this is serious stuff.
Consider the following.
A Guy is having dinner with a Young Woman, nice place. She is suspiciously poking a fork at the goo on her pan-roasted free-range chicken with garlic and rosemary. What he is not noticing is that she is herding it into concealment under a radicchio leaf.
"It’s not bad for something based on a roux," the Guy casually notes. "Personally, I would prefer to do it as a reduction sauce."
Reduction, what, the Young Woman is thinking. The gravy is on sale?
So, now having craftily insinuated that he can cook, the Guy is gratified when the Young Woman innocently suggests that perhaps, sometime, he might like to make dinner for her. He is saying to himself, "Heh, heh."
Indeed, as the great M. F. K. Fisher noted of bachelors, in "An Alphabet for Gourmets" in 1949, "The wonderful dinners they pull out of their cupboards with such dining room aplomb and kitchen chaos" demonstrate that "their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual."
For some reason, on the appointed day, the Korean market on the corner has stocked a couple of boxes of currants, almost never seen, among the standard raspberries and strawberries. Currants, cassis, making the connections, remembering a meal in Paris, a magret of duck, sliced in an arc, a piquant cassis sauce.
"If there are currants on the market," the predatory chef says as they come out of the subway at Broadway and 79th Street, "perhaps we’ll do a magret."
A what? The French detective?
Right, currants still there. Down Broadway, to Citarella at 75th Street, where there are approximately 700,000 carnivores shrieking to be fed. The Guy takes No. 127 from the ticket machine and elbows into poultry position. Half an hour later, the Young Woman’s eyes are rolling around like marbles. Finally, a breast of duck, fresh from the Hudson River Valley, is secured. This is a monster hunk of meat; these ducks must be the size of Great Danes.
Back uptown, quick into a gourmet mart to paw through the herb box for fresh rosemary. None. Never mind, Broadway Farm, on Broadway by 85th Street, is sure to have it. What, no cassis vinegar at Zabar’s? Well, there should be an old bottle in the cupboard. The first Korean market has most necessities, but the one further up always has shelled peas, which go with the rosemary, and fabulous teensy-weensy little haricots verts. By now, they have walked 15 blocks, in a driving rainstorm, accumulating grocery bags. What kind of a loon is this? the Young Woman is thinking. He can’t buy everything in one grocery store? The Guy is scooping up a gnarly knob a little bigger than a softball.
"What’s that?" the Young Woman asks in alarm. "That thing is ugly."
"Celery root, what the French call celeriac," the Guy explains, grabbing a bunch of containers of heavy cream and a brick of unsalted butter.
The cooking technique the magret requires is to basically fry the living daylights out of it, to get rid of the fat, but the meat winds up pink. Copper saute pan, bought years ago from Dehillerin, the terrific restaurant supply store in Paris by the old Les Halles. Patricia Wells goes there to treat herself when she’s finished a cookbook. Pat Wells? Probably the only American to be a regular on French television as an expert on French food. The thing is, the cooking duck releases huge quantities of fat, which must be constantly siphoned off with a basting tube.
"Fa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-t," the Young Woman observes. It was truly amazing, the Guy would reflect later, how many syllables could fit into a three-letter word, particularly when spread over six octaves.
"Right, ducks are real fat," he agrees amiably. "That’s how they can float in icy water."
The duck is working. The Guy deglazes the pan with the cassis vinegar and then throws in the berries. A big glob of butter into a frying pan with the fresh rosemary to finish the peas after a 1-minute, 37-second boil. O.K., the celeriac. And the food processor, the original, the real thing, the Robot-Coupe, used in French restaurants but later deracinated. Hardly anybody knows that. Celery root, some turnip, touch of mustard, big pour of cream for the texture. Yeah, cream; throw in some more.
"What are you doing?" the Young Woman asks.
Dimly, somewhere back in the far Neanderthal reaches of the Guy’s brain, there is a tingling. These are the old synapses, the innate instincts that over the eons have warned Guys of the approach of saber-toothed tigers, bosses and ex-girlfriends. Danger lurks.
"Celery, this is celery," the Guy explains urgently. "Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, that’s all they eat, celery."
"Not like that," the Young Woman replies, with considerable accuracy.
So, O.K. Guys get obsessive. But be fair; there are two sides to this.
The other side is the ambivalence with which the modern Young Woman views food. Above all, there is the question of appearances, and we’re not just talking about thighs. The Young Woman is trying to be thin to be pleasing, and the Guy is force-feeding her like a goose being raised for its liver. There are actual documented cases in which Young Women have delicately picked at a perfectly good meal in public, then sneaked home to gorge on junk food.
This ambiguity almost inevitably manifests itself when a Young Woman tells a Cooking Guy that her favorite foods come from something called "The Moosewood Cookbook," which strangely appeals to many otherwise admirable women. This is not a book about food. It is about vegetables. This book is not even printed in print. It is tricked up to look as if it has been handwritten to give you a warm icky feeling, instead of an actual meal.
Mentioning "Moosewood" is the culinary equivalent of a Young Woman giving a Guy the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel "A Hundred Years of Solitude" so that he can really get in touch with his emotions. Again, a well-meaning gesture, but one that is fundamentally misinformed. If Guys were truly in touch with their emotions, particularly those whose nature is to be nasty, brutish and short, they would go around punching people out. It has taken centuries of being repressed to get this far. Don’t mess with something when it’s just starting to work. Guys have nothing against vegetables. Vegetables have their place. It is right next to the meat.
There is a way out of this dilemma, expressed in the old Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis: Call out for Chinese.
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