A Time for Quieter Cooking
Dinner As Metaphor for the News [RECIPE]
A few weeks ago, we had a spate of very warm weather, which resulted in our turning on the gas grill, giving it a quick cleaning, and grilling a small pork shoulder, which I had patted down with lemon zest, toasted and crushed fennel seeds (the only reason we grow fennel in the garden), fennel salt, red pepper flakes, garlic, olive oil, and fennel pollen, the latter of which is roughly the cost of a year’s tuition at a good private college.
I brushed the grates with neutral oil (high burn-point), shut off one side of the grill so that I could cook over indirect heat, put the pork shoulder on the grill, closed the hood, set my timer, and walked away. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, so I wasn’t worried.
Fifteen minutes later, clouds of delicious, garlicky porcine essence floated through the window between the deck and our dining room. I got up to give it a quick brush with a combination of lemon juice and olive oil and went back into the living room, where I sat down to read the new DeVol kitchen “brochure” (which is as thick as a phonebook and as close as I expect to come in my lifetime to having the DeVol/marble/AGA combination I yearn for). We were listening to some good music and I was counting my many blessings when I saw flames licking out the side of the grill.
Although the pork shoulder was not sitting directly over the hot burners, it dripped sputtering fat and oil onto the flavor bars beneath it, which were then ignited by the propane element about six inches away, resulting in the meat literally bursting into flame, like a Phoenix.
Cooking should not reflect the chaos of one’s life, but back then it did, and it does now, only the chaos is not of our making; it’s a very distracting, very chaotic, and very loud time.
I took my longest tongs and moved the burning pork to the furthest possible unlit corner of the grill. Still, it flamed; I rolled it over, and…nothing. I went back into the kitchen and grabbed a deep cast iron pan with my left hand (I’m still in a shoulder immobilizer), covered the pork and waited for it to go out, and then covered the flaming grill grates and waited until the two-foot blue flames shooting out of them quieted down. And then I put the pork on a platter, walked into the kitchen, and covered it loosely with foil to let it rest because it must have been exhausted.
How does it look, Susan said.
A little dark, I said.
How dark --?
Like charcoal, I said.
At which point Susan got up, chiseled off a piece of incinerated pork redolent of fennel pollen, garlic, and propane, and wrote our friend Simón de Swaan a note with it, just to see if she could.
The point of this story being: Sometimes, wild, live-fire cooking is just not what you want when the world is spinning out of control around you. We have a habit of doing this: shortly after we met, Susan melted a few drops of Colonial Gray vinyl siding off the deck-side of her cottage one night when we were grilling something called Cowboy Steak, after having a massive fight with my mother followed by Susan’s ex-girlfriend’s usual Saturday night-at-8-pm phone call just to check in and see how we were doing because we were not yet together a year, and you know how that goes. Cooking should not reflect the chaos of one’s life, but back then it did, and it does now, only the chaos is not of our making; it’s a very distracting, very chaotic, and very loud time.
The week following the pork incineration, we started inadvertently cooking much more peaceful food: we made poached eggs on toast, salads of every variety, long-simmered chicken soup, lemony pasta tossed with slow-cooked arugula, peas, sliced asparagus, and an obscene amount of zucchini, showered with a hefty grating of Parmigiana. We really didn’t even need to turn on the hood fan: nothing was being cooked in a screaming hot skillet. And oddly, I found myself a little calmer, which is how I would describe most of my friends who cook in a vegetable-forward manner. It’s not that they don’t eat meat – they do. They just don’t do it all the time, and not under threat of immolation when the world is simultaneously coming to an end.
We did have some lamb the other night – a little boneless butterflied leg, rubbed with toasted, ground cumin, olive oil, and sea salt, cooked on top of the stove – and when it came to decide what to have with it, Susan looked at me as if a light had gone off.
Remember that dish that you used to make, with the garbanzos and the red onion? How about that?
It had been years. The last time I made it was when we were going to an outdoor concert to see what was left of The Beach Boys, and our friends arrived with Tupperware containers filled with everything from cold pasta salads to dips and chips. My garbanzo bean concoction had traveled well, and the thing that makes it so lovable, I guess, is its combination not only of flavors, but textures. There was crunch (slivered, toasted almonds), salty creaminess (sheep milk feta), a bright pang of citrus (lemon zest), a spike of red wine vinegar, and the rich warmth of cumin and rosey harissa.
So we made the lamb and I made the beans, and we realized that the former should have been the side dish to the latter. We wrapped up the leftovers in olive oil-brushed warm naan (grilled inside on our ancient Le Creuset stovetop grill), spread it with labneh, drizzled it with hot sauce, and it was better than the original meal.
I am a griller, I will always be a griller, and I consider it a personal win because it required overcoming a lifelong fear of fire (owing to the itinerant magician hired to entertain at my third birthday party, who made a Milkbone turn into a bunny and then burst into a ball of flame. Therapy for years.). When we stayed at a cottage in Scotland last June, we broke the seal on the property’s brand-new Big Green Egg –which is basically a home tandoor--and we loved it so much that we’re hoping to acquire one.
But for now, I want quieter food cooked with less trauma. I want an abundance of flavor, preferably from ancient spice routes as old as time. I don’t want to risk incinerating dinner. I don’t want to be so distracted by the news that my pork turns into a flaming football.
I just want peace.
