While you were gone, I searched the internet looking for something to warm us both in these miserable times. Away from home, I couldn’t finger the edges of my cookbooks, some of them now chewed clean off by the 60-lb puppy whose existence has rounded out the world of my familiars, past and present. We all are still settling into one another.
My New York Times Cooking app is a familiar crutch – looking for a chili that’s not the Silver Palate recipe of my twenties, but still approaches the depth and richness of that “Chili for a Crowd.” I have only had one other chili that surpassed that recipe, and it was served to me in Grey Horse, Oklahoma at the Osage Dances at the camp and cookstove run by my friend’s kin. The sweet taste of venison stewed slowly, the smoke of the fire on the beans, the taste of it in the mouth with some frybread and suet pie. I don’t ever want to leave that memory’s place. I can hear the drums and the light bells on ankles and feel the whoosh of hair on my check as the dancers reverse and repeat in the not-so-far distance. The smell of hickory and leather, the cool touch of beads in the hand. Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins were right, “Chili for a Crowd” is indeed a miracle-worker.
Looking for something with poultry instead of the beef, pork and veal that settled in our stomachs in the mid-80s, I find Pierre Franey’s “Turkey Chili” and the tasting notes promise: “It’s fabulous, it’s healthy and it can be cooked in about a half hour.” You’re all in, because what’s not to like about the word “fabulous”? I’m queer, we’re here, get used to it. I am all pins and needles with anticipation – will my love like it, will it measure up to the moment we are in, on the eve of a very consequential election where we are so worried that hate will prevail. Look at the data from across the world – hate is trending. I try to do some grading with CNN on in the background, but the political ads murmuring disgust for my transgender kin prevent me from feeling like my attempt to pull this moment from the fryer is not only doomed to fail, but also a bit like facing a swiftly moving train armed with a few long-past pretty flowers and a cracked wooden spoon. I’m hoping that this chili, with blends of white and dark meat and a quick simmer in chicken broth will indeed be rich and warming. Will put a pin in hate for at least another day.
I am reminded that Pierre Franey – a Burgundy born French American – cooked across two iterations of haute cuisine, the New York restaurant, Le Pavillon, where he became executive chef in 1952 and alongside the younger Jacques Pépin when both were hired by Howard Johnson to overhaul some of the chain’s recipes. For many working people, and single parents out there (of which my mother was one), “HoJo’s” was our haute cuisine, simply because it was not fast food, it smelled like your Nana’s kitchen, and the tables reminded me of the way eating out in the future was depicted on The Jetsons.
I teach in the late afternoon for three hours, as does my love, so I have to watch my time. How to pee the puppy boy and the old dog (now 16.5 years old and counting) and prep the first floor of the house against his propensity to chew on books and take pottery from shelves to his ginormous bed? How does he manage to get most of them from shelf to dog-bed unscathed?
I know my purchasing must be efficient, so I make a list culled from a thorough look at the forbidden fruits of a now disorganized pantry. Running over the items there, often replicated – why does anyone need three tins of oatmeal? – I smile. It is a pantry so much like the one we all have, where healthy ingredients find themselves at the far four corners of the narrow shelves and only the couscous box is ¾ empty, while the various brown rices and other healthier starches seem so neatly arranged in their abandonment for quicker nourishment.
I have no time for forgetting, so I make a grocery list on my computer and print it out, folding it into the side pocket of my cargo pants. I clear the living space of potential dog-chewing enticements and am off to the local Whole Foods. After procuring two pounds of turkey, I pick up a package of blended ground beef with a bit of brisket in it, just in case in a moment of feeling insecure about the dish’s potential depth, I want to throw that package of lean white meat turkey to the edges of the freezer like its pantry kin. My love and I are mostly past alcohol in this iteration of our older selves, but I conclude that this long day’s journey into night will need the fortification of a good Grenache.
I teach my class, inspired always by what my students focus on, by how their verbal palate brings something from the texts before them, breathless and alive. And now to the cooking. The marrying of spice and vegetable, the simmering of it all and yes, the worry of the pleasure it will or will not invoke. I grate enough cheese to clog an artery, but my love is lactose intolerant, so I whip up a simple guacamole with two kinds of chips. The bouquet of flowers I select was on sale, but after a bit of culling, it begins to look like whoever put it together actually cared.
I pop the cork on the Spanish wine, pour a glass as the rice simmers, and chuckle about a moment a few months ago when I actually tried to tell a friend who worked in a Michelin-starred restaurant how to cook rice. She forgave me because in these times we are at once loving and overbearing, tired of being terrified to go outside while being outside and trying to feel the sun on our faces – exhausted because everything and everyone you love, including this earth, is being inundated with violence.
The night wears on and the table is still just so; the house filled with the rich smell of a stew on simmer. I am reminded of how years ago, when I asked my students in my Food Studies class to bring forth a food memory, I expected them all to be of a certain order of glad. A student raised their hand and started sharing one memory of a homecoming that ended with a plate of spaghetti in a rich red sauce sliding down a dining room wall.
Whatever the next hour or tomorrow might bring, I know that the rich smell of someone cooking for you is always sharpest when you first walk through the door. That is the spot I want to stay in – that particular place at the threshold of love’s offering, staving off hate and all of its attendant kin like a well-stocked, though somewhat neglected pantry.
A grocery list:
Lime
Sour cream
Cheddar
Chips (corn)
Cornbread mix (if I have the time)
Turkey (white and dark meat)
Rice
3 cups canned diced tomatoes
Chili powder
Red kidney beans
Bay leaves
Jalapeño
Oregano (fresh)
Celery
Large red pepper
Fresh parsley & dill
Chicken broth
* A friend told me about Simon Ortiz’s piece, “How to Make a Good Chili Stew” soon after I posted this short essay. So happy to find this piece of his and to think across Ortiz’s poem/recipe and MFK Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf. I travel after them indeed.
the professor's table 