THE SEATTLE TIMES
PACIFIC MAGAZINE
By TERRY MCDERMOTT
I grew up in a land of literal milk and honey. The cows and bees weren’t the only ones blessed with fecundity.
The rolling hills to the west of the Mississippi River Valley are one of the world’s` great fertile places. The soil is so dark and rich it sometimes doesn’t even seem like dirt. It possesses a density and a dampness that have more in common with chocolate cake batter than a potato field in Eastern Washington. This land pumps out corn and cattle and alfalfa and soybeans and oats in such prodigious quantities that when I was a boy families would make a very good living on a mere 120 150 acres. And I’m talking about real families here. Our seven kids was considered a middling amount.
So why can’t people there cook?
Oh, they prepare food, alright, and eat it in sometimes prodigious quantities. A typical breakfast in my aunt’s farm kitchen might feature a bowl of dry cereal w ith fresh berries, cream and sugar — for dessert. The breakfast itself — which wou ld be served at say 8 o’clock after three hours of work called chores, a kind of warm-up act to the day’s real labors — might start with fried eggs, a selection of meats including such tidy cuts as a loin cut pork chop, baked ham or ground chuck. It would almost always include freshly baked bread and homemade preserves, milk, coffee and juice.
Lunch, which was called dinner, would on a normal day be several times that large. On special occasions, say, threshing days when cousins and neighbors would gather at a different farm every day to cut and thresh oats, maybe 20 women — wives, daughters, cousins — would work in the kitchen from dawn until long after dusk preparing three full, heaping hot meals. Lunch on a threshing day would be served on planks laid across 50-gallon barrels and would include enough food to feed, oh, Wallingford, if everybody there was especially hungry. Most discussions of food centered on the amounts not the taste. To say that anybody gave conscious thought to the taste of the food while preparing it would be like accusing them of following fashion, which, unless you’re talking about whether to wear the green John Deere cap or the red Farmall, they most definitely did not.
I do not say these things to be cruel and do not intend them to be read as criticism. I’m one of them and would have remained so always had I not proved such a miserable failure at my chosen profession.
I had dreamed for most of my life of being a writer. The origins of this dream a re unclear to me, beginning maybe when reading John Tunis’s “The Kid From Tomkinsville,” or “Tom Sawyer,” but I don’t know. These are guesses. As I got older the dream became more elaborate. I knew where I would live — above a rocky coast — what I would wear — dark turtlenecks — and what I would smoke — a carved pipe with a curved stem.
I imagined the titles of books and, this was the best, the blurbs that would go on the back cover announcing me as the voice of a new generation. Needless to say, I never actually wrote anything.
Still, I nurtured the vision through adolescence, through four long years in the military, through college and graduate school and a procession of very bad jobs. I wrote scores of research papers in school, hundreds of news and sports stories afterward, political speeches and advertisements, even for a while direct mail solicitations. I was a professional writer, but none of this really counted. My wife at the time hated all of it. So did I. Beneath the surface charm of this stuff, which was plentiful, I knew it wasn’t really writing.
So in the winter of 1979 we set out from the Midwest for the rockiest coast imaginable — Oregon. We rolled into Portland in mid-winter in the midst of one of those famous Columbia Gorge ice storms, jobless and ecstatic. I had a source of income — a political consulting job that required no work. I had a pipe. I had a book to write.
I set to work on my little Smith-Corona portable on a novel about , well, that was a problem. It was about everything: peace, war, life, death, technology, Wittgenstein, innocence and the end thereof. This book was going to be a new beginning, not just for me but probably world literature as well.
My wife took a job with a local school district and I sat in the second bedroom of our suburban duplex apartment and began to type. I made elaborate outlines, character sketches, plot developments, scene treatments. I made everything except a story. All this stuff in my head didn’t seem so wonderful when it got t o the paper. At some point in my life I had promised myself that when I finally did write a novel, by god, it would be a yarn. It would have the intellectual content of a Bertrand Russell treatise, but it would be a story you could get lost in.
Unfortunately, I did. Get lost, that is. Living in a strange town where I knew almost no one proved a double-edged sword. I had no diversions, but I also had no help. I slowly began to realize what the problem was: I had no idea what I was doing. Properly, this scared the bejesus out of me. I knew everyday when I walked into that room I was preparing to fail. I began doing what I think any normal person would do. I began avoiding the room.
I read an essay a couple of years ago by Michael Talent that was as insightful on the job of writing as anything I’ve ever seen. It was called The Talent of the Room and it was about the one absolutely necessary skill you must have to write. You must sit by yourself all day in a room, alone. This might not be up there on a par with, say, welding structural steel on a skyscraper, but it’s a very hard thing to do.
I couldn’t just outright not go in The Room. I had to have an excuse. I began to cook. At that point my sole relationship to food had been on the traditional Midwestern male end of it — I ate, sometimes in prodigious amounts. I had no idea, really, how to cook anything.
I began searching for recipes and as I progressed a little I began looking for ever more elaborate recipes. The value of this elaboration was the more work the food preparation required, the sooner I could justify leaving The Room. The first really complicated meal I attempted was a Julia Child TV recipe for Veal Oscar — a hollandaise smothered concoction of veal and asparagus. If I remember right, I got the asparagus out of a can. This was a good indication of the overall quality of the dish, but I was undaunted. I didn’t know any more about cooking than I did about writing novels, but it didn’t matter. The cooking was not work. It was an escape from it. It was play. And so it has remained. I learned about cooking in the best, if not the most efficient, way one should learn about anything — through simple curiosity. Because it was play and non-competitive, I was willing to try almost anything. This can lead to some spectacular failures and it has. I remember a coq au van that was so disgusting to look at I wondered seriously if aliens hadn’t abducted our real dinner and left this space rock in its place.
There have also been triumphs. The recipe below began life as a Pierre Franey version of Shoemaker’s chicken, evolved through research at home and in a Greenwich Village Italian restaurant into its current somewhat complicated but easily accomplished form. It’s a perfect dish for days when the writing goes poorly. It has a festive quality that you hope causes everyone to think you are a wonderful person whether or not the typewriter tells a different tale. And the novel? Everyone died in the end and so did it, page by page in a fireplace while dinner roasted companionably in the next room.
—————————-SHOEMAKER’S CHICKEN—————————————-
Ingredients:
1 chicken, cut up for frying
1 lb. Italian link chicken sausage
2 dozen whole mushrooms
1 lemon
1 tbspn olive oil
2 tbspns butter four cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 cup flour
1 1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup Italian parsleyPreparation:
1. Place the whole sausages in a sauté pan with 1/2 cup wine. Cook covered under medium heat for 20 minutes.
2. Uncover and cook until wine evaporates and sausages brown. Set aside.
3. While the sausages are cooking, wash and dry the chicken. Reserve the back for stock. Dust with flour.
4. In the largest sauté pan you can find, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil and sau té the chicken under medium heat until golden brown and cooked through, about 20-30 minutes.
5. Deglaze the sausage pan with 1/2 cup wine, cook the mushrooms in the wine, covered, for five minutes.
6. Uncover and cook until wine evaporates and mushrooms brown, about one minute.
7. Combine the sausage and mushrooms with the chicken.
8. Melt the butter in the center of the chicken pan. Add the garlic to the butte r. Sauté briefly, about one minute.
9. Under high heat, squeeze the lemon juice into the pan; stir.
10. Add the final 1/2 cup of wine.
11. Sprinkle the parsley throughout.
12. Cover and cook 3 minutes.