What's Cooking?

"I'm at the age when food has taken the place of sex in my life. In fact I've just had a mirror put over my kitchen table." Rodney Dangerfield

I like food.

Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that I like to eat. Liking food implies that you care about what you eat or take some care with its preparation and display. I don’t. I am not a gourmet. According to Webster’s, a gourmet is “a person who likes and is an excellent judge of fine foods and drinks . . . SYN. Epicure.” I guess the word “fine” is the stopping point. The word gourmand came to mind. Again, according to Webster’s, a gourmand is “1. orig. a glutton [hmmm] 2. a person with a hearty liking for good food and drink and a tendency to indulge in them to excess. SYN. Epicure.” Good as opposed to fine food? Of course, that word “epicure,” is listed as a synonym for both. All right, I’ll bite. An epicure is “a person who enjoys and has a discriminating taste for fine foods and drinks.” In the synonym section, Webster’s differentiates between gourmet and gourmand as synonyms. Words like “refined” and “connoisseur” are there. Anyway, I’ll stick by my assertion that I like to eat. Today is a good example. I had off because it is Dr. King’s day. I ate a bowl of Kashi’s Cinnamon Harvest cereal and drank a small glass of light orange juice. For lunch, I went to Big Lou’s, a place that boasts 20 different types of hot dogs. It’s in Hallandale, and I discovered it yesterday when I was driving around trying to find an Army-Navy store. I had two large hot dogs with mustard and relish (the relish was a bright, Kelly green). I still haven’t had any fries for 2006 (I’ve sworn off). For dinner, I went to Sonny’s Barbeque. I had the salad bar and a plate of sliced pork. I only made two trips to the salad bar, which included salad, black olives, pickle slices, sliced red beets, cottage cheese, macaroni salad and, I’m ashamed to admit, several pieces of cheddar cheese (I can almost feel the arteries again closing up). I read The Miami Herald with breakfast and read Prime, a novel by Poppy Z. Brite, with the other meals. In fact, it’s because of Poppy Z. Brite that I’ve started examining my obsession with eating (and, to a lesser degree, food).

If you don’t know Poppy Z. Brite’s work, you should. I first became aware of her work because my daughter was reading her in high school. She wrote dark, gothic novels about lost souls, vampires, and the like. In fact, one of her novels is called Lost Souls. Another, even more disturbing book is Exquisite Corpse. I became interested in her fairly recently when I came upon her blog and was struck by the fact that a famous and talented writer was so accessible. She was writing about the devastation of her beloved city, New Orleans, and her own personal losses due to Katrina. The name of her blog, Dispatches from Tanganyika, comes from the lore of John Kennedy Toole, someone I had heard of but had never read until I read Poppy’s entries about him and his wonderfully insane novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, which also takes place in New Orleans. Strictly speaking, I guess Dispatches is a LiveJournal rather than a blog, though I’m not sure I know the difference. I sent away for her latest book of short stories, The Devil You Know, after reading her journal entries. I bought two copies and gave one to my daughter for Christmas. She hasn’t read Poppy in many years. Poppy’s work has been going in a different direction though she insists she hasn’t turned her back on her earlier work. There are a couple of stories in the book about two young chefs, Rickey and the G-Man, which I liked. There are also a couple of stories about Doc Brite who, aside from being the coroner of New Orleans, is also a gourmet (see, you knew there had to be a connection somewhere in all of this to my opening lines). In fact, in one story, Doc Brite goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure a steady diet of her favorite food from her favorite chef. Poppy’s knowledge of cooking and food is incredible. She has been married for 10 years to Chef Christopher DeBarr though I suspect her love and knowledge of food came before him. When I saw that she had written a couple of novels about Rickey and G-Man, I decided I wanted to read them.

The first novel was Liquor. It tells about Rickey and G-Man’s relationship, how they came to work in restaurants, and how they eventually became the owners of a very successful restaurant called Liquor. They are sponsored by a famous, if somewhat disreputable, chef named Lenny. Rickey is the star. Handsome and high-strung, he agrees to let Lenny bankroll them as they know they would never have enough money to open a restaurant otherwise. What makes them unique is that EVERY dish has liquor in it. They decided to combine New Orleans’ two loves: eating and drinking. In that sense, New Orleans is like my hometown of Buffalo, though the word “gourmet” probably wouldn’t be applied to too many Buffalonians. When I went back to Buffalo this last summer to visit my wife’s grave, I was reminded of how great a part eating plays in everything they do up there. I am true to my roots. Getting back to the novel, Rickey does manage to earn the enmity of one of their former bosses who reaches bottom in his own life, mainly from his own ineptitude and his coke habit, who decides he’s going to kill Rickey. The novel is exciting and suspenseful with an assortment of interesting characters, chief of which is the city, itself. Poppy’s knowledge of food, food preparation, and food consumption, is encyclopedic. What I started wondering, though, is whether everyone in New Orleans is like this. It seems as if even the most down-and-out street person has an epicurean knowledge of food. I don’t know, but I’ll take her word for it. People like that impress me. It’s kind of like the other-worldly air that New Yorkers have, a savoir-faire, that the rest of the world, or at least the rest of this country, can’t quite match. I started Prime, which is the second novel about Rickey and G-Man, and it has the same elements as the other though I’m not sure where it’s heading as it’s two years after Liquor, and the boys and their restaurant have been doing well, though some things appear ominous.

What I still come back to, though, is the idea that my life-long affair with food has been somewhat bogus. I often say to my students that you don’t need to know how a computer works in order to use it. I might say the same here: you don’t need to know everything about food in order to eat it. My grandmother was a good cook and baker. The highlight of Christmas was not the presents but the tubs of assorted cookies she would bake for all of us. No one made chocolate chip cookies like she did. My mother was never a cook. When we moved from my grandparents’ home to our own apartment when I was in fifth grade, I became the cook for us. I do remember her attempt at lemon meringue pie (one of my favorites). We had to drink it because it never hardened. A staple of life in Buffalo is the Friday Night Fish Fry. We would go to the Park Meadow on Russell and Parkside. I never ate fish, but I would have scallops. Once a year, my grandfather would treat us to lobster. I didn’t realize I was allergic to that until I had moved to Florida and had more access to seafood. I never had to cook while I was married because my late wife did all of that. She was a good cook, but we both liked to eat out. We did it a lot. When my daughter decided to be a vegetarian at a very early age, it got even harder for her to cook because she wasn’t fond of too many vegetables and was a very fussy eater. My wife found that very frustrating. My daughter has become an excellent cook. Dealing with cancer and frequent chemotherapies over a 17 year period also made it harder to concentrate on cooking. When I became diabetic, my wife made every attempt to cook healthy for me. Unfortunately, that also required smaller portions of things, something I was not a fan of, nor was I very gracious about it. Even after the two blocked arteries and subsequent surgeries, I still wasn’t the best candidate for healthy living or eating. For both of us, eating was a kind of therapy, and something we both shared. It didn’t take the place of sex, but it was often easier. Now that I am alone and, like George Costanza once said, “I can’t imagine any situation where I will ever have sex again,” I guess it has taken the place of sex. If it’s any consolation, at least I’m getting a lot of it.

I’ve tried to think as to whether I’ve ever gone to a restaurant that really had a chef and all the other line people that Poppy has in her kitchens in her books. At best, they are probably cooks, or sandwich makers, or burger flippers. The places I go to have set menus, are usually part of national chains, and have the word “fast” in their descriptions. I tend to have the same thing at each of the restaurants. That can get frustrating as the national chains often take things off the menu or add things I have no interest in. I’m not an adventurous eater. Not a gourmet. I call the cook at IHOP a chef. He wears a chef’s hat. His name is Elvis. His chicken penne pasta was excellent and what I always ordered until IHOP took it off their menu. In a real restaurant, Elvis could make what he wanted to make. I guess he likes it there as he’s been cooking there a long time (in South Florida years, anyway). Maybe Miami has real restaurants. Maybe Las Olas Blvd. in Ft. Lauderdale does, too. There is a hard-to-find French restaurant in Ft. Lauderdale called the Left Bank. We went there once. We thought it was too expensive and too fancy. We went to Ruth Chris Steakhouse on our anniversary once. I guess we didn't know about a la carte. It was the most expensive meal we ever had. The food was also terrible, at any price. That could be part of the problem. Given the fact that we were both raised in somewhat poverty, I guess we always felt funny about spending too much on anything. Gourmet, fancy, restaurants are expensive. Fast food restaurants are not. My wife’s favorite restaurant was the Roadhouse Grill. We loved their warm rolls. The salad was always crisp and fresh, and the steak was tasty and cooked just as we liked it. Hmmm. Maybe we were gourmets and weren’t even aware of it. It just took the right restaurant to bring it out of us. I haven’t been back to The Roadhouse Grill since my wife died. I’m not sure I ever will go there again. That’s the other part of the equation: the food is better when you have someone there to share the experience with. Otherwise, it’s just eating.