I’m reading Man with a Pan by John Donahue , which tells the point of view of many different men and how they came to be the cooks in their families.  Short essays, some ten pages, some two pages but very interesting.  It’s made me think of the men in my life and their relationship to cooking, so I thought I would share this on Father’s Day.

My Grandfather

My Grandfather lived upstairs from us during most of our formative years.  They owned the building and while we were growing up, we were the only ones living on the other floors.  My grandfather loved to garden, so we shared those chores and the bounty.  My grandmother owned a toy and card store on Broadway, and went to work in the morning and came home in the late evening even after my grandfather retired.  When he retired it was his job to cook dinner every night for the both of them, then he would pick my grandmother up at the store and they would either drive or walk home to the food waiting on the stove.  My grandmother didn’t retire until we moved away, and she was in her 70s, so he did this for quite a while.

His favorite method was to boil something to death, as was my grandmother’s.  I think a lot of their food was dry covered in gravy, and soggy limp vegetables.  They also loved huge amounts of fresh cut up vegetables, so whenever we would stop by, we would grab bites of the fresh.   When my grandfather retired for a few years, he also made lunches for those of us who went to Catholic school and were home for lunch.  I didn’t know of any friend’s grandfathers or fathers that cooked, but it didn’t seem strange to us.  My grandparents worked things out in a way that worked best for them.  When my grandmother finally sold her store and retired, I think she took over the cooking.  I was away at college, and we had moved from Queens, so I’m not really sure.

My Father.

Growing up, my father didn’t cook for us much.  The boy scouts were the kids who had the benefit of his cooking expertise – mostly dumped in a cast iron pot or foil packets.  He was great with foil packs of backpacker cuisine that required only boiling water.  When I was about 14, my mom was working nights, and I did most of the cooking for the family when she wasn’t there.  Around the time I was 16, my father decided vegetarianism was a neat thing to try.  He was very particular about the vegetables he would eat though, so only things like eggplant Parmesan (which I never learned to love ) or millet burgers (another I never could like) became added to our menu.  This from the man, who never ate beef stew because he didn’t like vegetables cooked or mixed in with meat.  Our vegetables were usually on the side because he didn’t like them – and he decided vegetarianism was cool and so should be part of our diet – but only if he picked the vegetables.  He didn’t interfere with my cooking most nights, so I was good with that.

My dad became a librarian in his 40s and though we just moved to New Jersey, it was because of my mother’s job as a college professor that we moved.  One of his earliest jobs was for a Philadelphia library (cue the Rocky Music) that right after his hire had a strike.  An agreement was made to let go of the newest hires that hadn’t been there long.  So he was out of a job – with 6 kids and a house mortgage.  My mother still had an income, but since his library experience was almost nothing, he took the first job to come along – in Ohio.  Most people were appalled that my parents would live apart and that my mother wouldn’t uproot us again to travel to Ohio.  So for two years my father lived in Ohio and worked at a college library in Gallipolis, Ohio – and cooked his own food.  I think this is where it really started for him.  He had the free reign of his own tiny trailer kitchen, without having to worry about the opinions of all his children.

When my dad came home from Ohio permanently, he didn’t jump into taking over the chores of cooking, but by the time the kids moved out, he was doing most of his own cooking.  His style of cooking was by the book; he had to have every exact ingredient as the book mentioned.  There was no deviating from the recipe and if you were missing ingredients you went to the store – or you sent the kids.  This might require several trips, or several kids, which is why we didn’t hang around when dad was cooking.  He also took over the entire kitchen – which was en-route to the backdoor.  I went to Ohio for college (found a guy and stayed) for most of the time, so only saw it when I was visiting.  His kitchen ventures could take up an entire day.  More than one cookout for my mother’s colleagues (or was it choir friends) had them eating in the dark with the bugs at 9 pm because he was making the perfect barbecue meal. Thank goodness for the screen house.

My dad planted the herbs in herb barrels – they had to be barrels, pots would never do, to go along with his culinary creations.  He never gardened except those herb barrels.  My dad lived for Ravioli Fridays – every Friday was ravioli (frozen ravioli) and his real love.  I grew tired of it and haven’t eaten it much since I left home, but my father would have dreams about ravioli night.  Though we have different styles, I probably got my sense of culinary adventure from him.  I’ve been known to leave a wake behind in my kitchen that could rival his (one of my mother’s pet peeves).  The saddest time was when he was suffering from cancer, could no longer stand long amounts of time to cook and his chemotherapy robbed him of his taste buds.  My mother never was able to find something that could please him, he ate food, but never felt the passion again.  At his funeral, my mother talked about their unconventional life where he was the cook and grew herbs.  The summer after he died, I was weeding  out his herb barrels and my mother decided to join in and help.  She was ripping up the herbs in favor of the weeds, because not only didn’t she know which was which, but she didn’t have a sense of smell to help her along and I thought about how true those words were.

My Husband

My husband and I started dating when we were 20, while I was the cook for years for my siblings, he never did.  One of our first dates he invited me back to his house for a home cooked meal.   His room mate actually did the cooking and left it behind for him to claim as his work.  My husband added the finishing touch to meatloaf by throwing a layer of american cheese over the top of it.  That was one of his earliest contributions to all of my cooking.  Every time I walked away from the stove he’d find something to throw american cheese slices into.  Baked beans required several. Sometimes I would stay in the kitchen to make sure it didn’t happen.  Mostly I did the cooking and he did the cleaning in our early years.

We both worked full time, so we started switching off nights of who picked up the kids and cooked dinner.  My husband became really good with a box mix slowly gaining more confidence, though we still disagree about why one would mix a can of tuna and a can of chicken together in the same pot.  I tried not to make fun of my husband’s cooking because it meant so much to me that he did that chore (not all of his brother’s will).   He and I often cook together and when there’s a family meal he will take care of a lot of the grunt work for me, chopping, slicing, peeling, whatever I want.  We often can in the summer together – salsas, apple sauce, sauces and soups.  He can make a really good salsa – and when the kids were growing up, noisy juice was their favorite Sunday breakfast treat.  He’s in charge of the vegetable garden, I’m in charge of the herbs, though we cross over and help each other out.   We love to experiment with cocktails, though he’s more vodka and I’m more whiskey.  I love a man in the kitchen.

My Son

My son is the frustration of my life.  When he was little, he tried to be a picky eater.  At a young age, he could identify the applesauce, and if he saw it he would only eat applesauce nothing else, so we hid it behind the milk jug until he ate his other food.  I would make meals, but I wasn’t a short order cook.  If he didn’t like what I served, he could leave the table when everyone was done, but didn’t get any snacks after dinner unless he first ate dinner.  He often went the evening without eating food because he didn’t like the color of the food or that they were touching.  That worked for him until he hit a killer growth spurt in second grade and woke up with horrible hunger pangs.  I explained that if he ate dinner his stomach would stop hurting and so he started eating.  One time in his early teens he told me that he didn’t love vegetables, he ate them because he had to and that was okay with him.

I’ve never gotten him to love cooking except one year in high school when his friend would come over and they would cook dinner while I worked.  I told them what to do and how to do it and they had fun in the kitchen.  He liked it because his friend would converse with him the entire time.  My son’s favorite thing about dinner is the camaraderie and conversation, the eating sustains him.  The friend was very comfortable in the kitchen because he did it at home all of the time and he liked that I introduced him to a few new meals.

My son will go for the easy out when it comes to dinner, so he always cooked the boxed macaroni and cheese with hotdogs or opted for sandwich night.  My daughter will experiment and come up with some good ideas.  My son’s experiments consists of throwing frozen vegetables in the microwave with some other frozen stuff over some frozen rice.  He once over boiled the spaghetti so much it dumped into the rinse collander as one big lump of mush.  He does much better at that now, so while it’s a slow learning process, he is learning.   As long as he has a box of cereal and milk he may never need to touch the stove.  While his sister will cook most nights while she is home on summer break from college, he would rather do the dishes.  He’s very gracious, he eats what we make for dinner and mostly his opinions are good about other people’s cooking.  If I were to invite a teen boy to dinner, he would be the one to invite.   I hope that someday a spark will light and his desire for good food will match his love of good company and he’ll have the perfect table  of both.