Cooking

I came quite late to cooking, real cooking I mean, not just searing meat on a grill and boiling frozen vegetables. Gradually from the early days of making a home with the mother of my children, I slowly, tentatively, began to try my hand at certain dishes or tasks.

Making bread was first. The smell of rising bread, followed by the warm, rounded odors of baking, made me love that small subset of the larger enterprise called Cooking with a capital “C.” In those days, forty years ago almost, the only cooking shows other than local were Julia Child, French Cooking all caps, and the Galloping Gourmet, centered around an Australian guy who drank as much wine whilst cooking as he did prepare food. I liked the recreational aspects of the GG, but the fancy French dishes of Julia Child interested me not at all, in spite of how entertaining I found her.

Nowadays, of course, cooking is everywhere, books, TV, local workshops, glossy magazines and specialty stores providing all sorts of fine (expensive) cooking ware. I still do it simply, mostly out of necessity. I possess one sauce pan, several microwave-safe dishes and a motley assortment of cooking implements. In short, whilst cooking I am forced to improvise. Tonight, for instance, I made some tomato sauce, using canned tomatoes and tomato paste, mixed with sauteed minced garlic and onion plus an assortment of spices and herbs. I then had to transfer the sauce to a serving dish, wash my one sauce pan, and cook the pasta, ladling my cooling sauce onto the hot noodles.

A sauce that paled before my grandmother Nana’s spaghetti sauce, which contained various garden peppers, black olives and mushrooms. And meatballs. Spaghetti without meatballs was not done at Nana and Boozle’s house. Nana would cook this sauce all afternoon, forcing mass salivation amongst the children. In spite of this long preparation, at the moment when Nana began to bring the dishes to the table, Boozle would absent himself to the bathroom. “Franklin! Couldn’t you have done that sooner? All the food is on the table.” We ate eventually, wonderful spaghetti with heaping servings of sauce on mounds of noodles. In that sauce the tomatoes, tomato paste, onions, garlic, olives and fragrant, sinus-opening amounts of assorted herbs and spices were finally allowed to fulfill the promise of the afternoon’s delightful odors. We children were given large round spoons to facilitate winding noodles onto our forks. Yum.

My sauce does not come up to my memory of Nana’s perfect spaghetti, perhaps because hers is now seasoned with nostalgia. But it was good. (burp!)