How to Cook Like a Man: A Memoir of Cookbook Obsession by
Theres the eternal question of art for arts sake or for the buyer/viewer. When it comes to food we know its about the one who is going to eat the food, but its difficult to wrap your head around the fact that atleast courtesy would call for exclusion of bell peppers from the ‘pav bhaaji’ if your audience does not like the peppers, but it wont be the real pav bhaaji if you get compassionate. The author is in for a surprise when he ends up ‘interested in food as love – food as sustenance, generosity and balm’ after years journey of hacking at cookbooks.
I like reading anything about food and cooking. After reading ‘how to cook like a man’ by Daniel Duane, when I realised that ‘No Cheating, no dying I had a good marriage. Then I tried to make it better’ was by his wife Elizabeth Weil, I was curious to know the effect of the author’s cooking straight from the horses’ mouth.
Daniel Duane has an obsession for cookbooks, especially the ones which have some chronological order associated with them. ‘the book’s A-Z quality – inviting me to cook every recipe therein –‘. The book being referred to is Chez Panisse Vegetables. He didn’t stop with that. He then moved to other books by Alice Waters. He justifies that ‘…my (his) compulsions came not from dysfunction or narcissism but rather from a healthy impulse to find joy and curiosity in everyday life’. But it wasn’t just a compulsion for the new dad, he was doing the cooking to feed his family that consists of a wife who likes to eat simple food.
The author’s wife refers to his pre-cook book days as ‘when food was still fuel for him’. Faced with all this food on the table, she wondered if he could offer her choices in meals. The chef conceded for choice in breakfast but not in dinner, which is when he gets to follow all the complicated and exotic recipes, not to mention the expensive grocery shopping preceding that.
His wife’s pregnancy, the house’s dire carpenting needs do not deter the man with a knife. He carried sourdough sponge along with him, if he went out of town so he could feed it regularly. Somewhere along the line when too many truffle recipes alienated him from his friends, he realised that he needed to mould his interest to meet his family needs instead of maniacally following recipes.
In the end he is at peace with culinary tastes of his family members. When he began he had two signature dishes. After years of making all the recipes, he has learnt the middle way of keeping his audience and their food taste in mind.
He is not just a home cook. Magazine assignments take him fishing, let him go on a steak marathon in Vegas, meetings with the food celebrities. This reporting life gives us a peek into the exclusive world of food.
When he met Alice, he asked what she would do with a certain set of ingredients and that’s when I realized that I read an article of his in ‘food and wine’ which combined this experience as well as cooking with Thomas Keller.
In cooking you begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of the appetites – courtship, marriage – you start with the object and end with the ache – Adam Gopnik
