Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Duane is the author of several books, fiction and nonfiction, including the surfer classic Caught Inside. His writing has appeared in Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, GQ, and elsewhere, and he is a contributing editor at Men's Journal. Duane lives in San Francisco with his two daughters and his wife, the writer Elizabeth Weil. Visit his Web site at www.danielduane.com

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HOW TO COOK LIKE A MAN

BLOOMSBURY

Contents

Preface: A Man's Place Is in the Kitchen......................................xi1. You Are the Way You Eat....................................................32. On the Cookbook as Scripture...............................................183. Recipes Are for Idiots Like Me.............................................354. We All Need Something to Believe In........................................505. What French Women Can Teach Us.............................................636. The Happy Hunting Ground...................................................757. On the Role of the Menu in Human Affairs...................................848. The Meat Period in Every Man's Life........................................1059. My Kung Fu Is Not Strong...................................................11910. On Cooking and Carpentry..................................................13411. Gluttony as Heroism.......................................................15312. Recipes Are for Idiots Like Me, Take Two..................................17913. What We Talk About When We Talk About Our Last Supper.....................195Acknowledgments...............................................................201Selected Reading..............................................................203

Chapter One

The aphorism most frequently repeated from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's 1825 war horse, The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, has to be the one that goes, "Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are." The old French glutton means something quite different, I believe, from today's more prudish (if linguistically more economical) "You are what you eat." The contemporary iteration expresses only a Puritanical Anglo-American view of food as fuel, or medicine, or poison, while Brillat-Savarin boasts rather of an insight he's had about the expression of cultural identity and aspiration through dining habits. It's the latter I find most useful in explaining my wife, at the time of our meeting. Exhibit A, first sighted on a knotty-pine bookshelf in the pretty young Elizabeth "Liz" Weil's own studio apartment, on a fine block in San Francisco's Mission District: Joslyn Presents Bernard Schimmel's Masterpieces, the obscure 1976 Continental cookery classic published by the Joslyn Art Museum of Omaha, Nebraska, where Liz's grandfather, Bernard Schimmel, had been the leading culinary light and bona-fide inventor of the Reuben sandwich, in honor of a poker buddy, Reuben Kulakofsky, a local Lithuanian-born grocer. (Brillat-Savarin, once again: "The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star.") Liz told me this on our first date, after an indifferent dinner at a crepes joint and a follow-up drink at a fashionably sleazy dive bar. We were sitting nervously on Liz's perfectly respectable couch, talking fast like the earnest young bookworms we were, when she related a classic immigrant story. Bernard's father, Liz's own great-grandfather, had been raised in a hotel in Russia and come shuffling through Ellis Island before building four hotels along the midwestern rail lines: the Cornhusker, in Lincoln, Nebraska; the Hotel Lassen, in Wichita; the Blackstone, in Omaha; and the Hotel Custer, in Galesburg, Illinois. He'd then trained each son in a different hotel specialty—hospitality management, accounting—and he'd sent young Bernie to become the first American graduate from the famous hotel school in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1928. When Bernie got back-tall and handsome, in Liz's framed black-and-white—a cordon bleu with an inordinate love for Scotch whisky, he'd married a Jewish girl named Beatrice and taken over the Custer, turning the Homestead Room into Illinois's leading Temple of Gastronomy. Live Maine lobsters on refrigerated rail cars, Blue Point oysters out of New York, fresh Italian truffles, in season: the Weils were understandably proud of this guy, and of the way he'd raised his three lovely daughters, Judy, Mary, and Connie, regionally midwestern and ethnically Jewish but gastronomically French, largely viewing the Reuben sandwich as nothing but a cute family sideshow.

Chain hotels and the rise of air travel, in Liz's telling of the family tale, crushed one Schimmel hotel after another. The last one standing was the Blackstone of Omaha, widely known as the finest hotel between Chicago and San Francisco, along the old Lincoln Highway. That's where all the Schimmels retreated, and that's where Bernie deigned to publish, for the benefit of Omaha's house wives, his tips for Sweetbreads à la Reine, Beignets au Fromage, and Coquilles St. Jacques. Copies of Schimmel had since been given like a secular Torah to every one of Bernie's seven grandchildren, including Judy's youngest, the leggy, brown-haired young journalist passing all this along to me. Herself raised in Massachusetts, matured in Chicago, and devoted to marathon running and to clean, simple food, Liz had long since established a family Law of Nature by which Liz Hates Fancy French Cuisine So Don't Even Bother Trying To Make Her Eat It, and yet none of us can escape the way we've been raised: whether she liked it or not, she could order expertly in the finest of restaurants; her simplest plate of tomato-basil pasta revealed an artistic sensibility, and she certainly knew her foie gras from her pistou.

As for who I was, sitting on that couch and wishing I had the guts to make this beautiful girl stop talking and kiss me, there's more to learn from the "You are what you eat" formulation. I, too, had a great-grandfather come through Ellis Island, but as an illiterate Irish laborer bound for the New York slums. If you believe Jane Ziegelman's 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement, that pretty much means he didn't have a food identity—as in, none, given that English oppression had long since replaced Irish cuisine with potatoes alone, and then, when those potatoes rotted in the wet Irish fields, with nothing at all ("How do you like the sound of nothing for dinner, you dirty fucking Irishman? Does nothing work for you and your ten dirty dying Irish children? Oh, excuse me, I have to go gorge on Beef Wellington"). Couple that with my father's comfortable upbringing in the Irish Catholic schools of 1950s Los Angeles, and with his mid-1980s bodybuilding obsession, when left-wing Berkeley lawyers were supposed to be out jogging or roller-skating, and you can see how divorced I was from any notion of food as joy, or ethnic identity. Dad would hit the gym after work, pump pyramid sets of bench press and bicep curls, building up those pecs and arms, and then he'd come home to chug a bottle of predigested protein and pick gingerly at Mom's cardboard pork chops (not her fault, just the way supermarket pork was, in the seventies). While I plowed everything Mom made, to convince her that she was a good cook and that we all loved her—true, on both accounts—Dad would leave the table, slip into the kitchen, and taper off with a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly, and a stick of butter, cycling through all three with the same spoon. Later, I would open the fridge, stare at Dad's plastic protein bottle, and ponder that word, "predigested," wondering why my own father drank...