Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

[Disclaimer: Before I even get started, no -- this is not some sexist "the woman cooks and the guy eats" idiocy. Mrs. FLJerseyBoy would tell you, I think (hope!), that I do a fair amount of cooking. What this entry concerns is watching how women cook.]

When growing up, I didn't have much opportunity to be bowled over by watching my mother cook meals. Oh, she cooked them all right -- she cooked damn near 100% of them. But she cooked to my father's taste and to the family budget. Neither constraint encouraged excessive creativity in the kitchen.

So then I got out into the real world, or what passed for it, and started to cook for myself. Or rather, "cook" for myself. My college roommates and I specialized in exploiting the frozen-foods section of the local Pantry Pride (R.I.P.), and that was about it. And whenever I've been on my own, I fall back on that habit. Luxurious dining is equated with pizza, barbecue, and Chinese restaurants.

It was thus with a real sense of wonder that I first encountered what it means, really, to cook. What drove this lesson home was the experience of watching people who'd really thrown thenselves into it over the course of their entire lives: women, in a word.

I don't know how they do it. They follow recipes -- kinda. (Heck, I can do that much.) But then they sample the product, or don't even bother with that step: they just know that "it" (whatever the it of the moment is) needs Tabasco or other hot sauce, or needs fresh basil (whatever that is) or a splash of white wine, or needs to simmer for just 10 minutes more, or needs to be run under the broiler for a few minutes. And none of these steps are documented anywhere in the recipe.

The photo accompanying this post shows Mrs. FLJerseyBoy in one of the early stages of our Christmas 2004 meal. Aside from the teakettle, there are two main items on the stovetop:

• Her patented "Christmas aromas" brew, in the small pot on the left front burner. As far as I've been able to discern from watching her prepare this, it consists of water, cinnamon sticks, slices of apple, orange, and some mysterious items from the spice cabinet. Vanilla among others, I think, though I wouldn't swear to it. All of it simmered to just below a boil, and left on a burner the whole day.
  
• In the big pot is the annual Christmas wassail. This contains various fruit juices (orange, pineapple, and, uh, apple?), more cinnamon sticks, nutmeg (maybe), no doubt some other stuff, and the Secret Ingredient: cinnamon "red-hots" candies. (See, I have learned something after all.)

She prepares this the way she always does. Somehow, her memory manages to bridge the intervening 12 months so that she needn't refer to a recipe at all. To say merely that this is outside my experience fails to do justice to the word "outside."

But it's not just the end result I'm talking about here. The food (or beverages, or olfactory experience, in this case) is wonderful, absolutely. But it's the preparation of the food that undoes me.

Mrs. FLJerseyBoy represents the culmination of this undoing. I sit on a stool at the kitchen counter, offering my services when I fantasize I'll be able to contribute something but mostly just trying to stay out of the way. She'll be standing there sometimes with a hand on her hip, sometimes with both hands occupied with ingredients and/or implements. The muscles and tendons in her feet and ankles and calves stretch and relax, stretch and relax, as she shifts her weight ever so slightly to stir a pot or whisk a sauce or slice a lemon. And the whole time, she continues to carry on a conversation...

I've seen the same kinds of behavior in other women, although Mrs. FLJerseyBoy raises it to the level of high art. (Now that I think about it, I've also seen a form of it in my kid brother the architect -- talk about talents skipping a generation!) It's a complete, completely unfathomable mystery to me.

And I just love to see it.