FoodSexLit

Part I: The Elixir of Marriage

The first time I attempted to make stock, it was Thanksgiving weekend, I was just-married, and I was inspired by domesticity.  I had just mastered risotto, was in-love with its soothing richness, and every cookbook I read urged me that using my own home-made stock would bring the dish to the sublime.

My then mother-in-law graciously contributed her enormous turkey carcass (not free-range or organic, but it would have to do) and I hauled out my gigantic 20 quart stock pot, collected my aromatics (an onion, a carrot, a celery stalk, an ineptly tied bouquet de garni) and prepared to rise to the heights of domestic goddesshood.  As I covered the contents of the pot with water, I had a vision—gleaming Tupperware containers of stock gracing my freezer shelves, alongside an ice-cube tray or two of golden cubes that I would melt into pan sauces to add depth . . . to say nothing of the risotto that I would produce!  I made a mental note to figure out how to casually, modestly, work into conversation with future dinner guests that my stock was from scratch.

At this point, perhaps I should clarify “inspired by domesticity.”  In November of 2002, my three-month-old marriage was failing.  The last time I could remember we had sex was the one failed attempt from our honeymoon when I fell asleep.  The closest I came to an orgasm was that first taste of creamy risotto, or a crisp sip of champagne while sautéing onions.

Just before my wedding ceremony, as she surveyed the alter with its three Catholic priests and sole Lutheran minister, my mother said gleefully, “There’s no way this marriage is getting annulled!”  After my sixteen years of Catholic education, my stint as an alter server, my youth spent singing in the church choir, say nothing of my undergraduate minor in theology, getting a divorce was simply not an option.  Besides, there were all the wedding presents.  And we had a house I loved.  A German Shepherd (we named her Alexandra (Alex for short) because that was what my sister-in-law wanted to name her first child) I adored.

So I threw myself into saving my marriage the only way I knew how—as if it were a competition—or a battle.  My weapons of choice: china, crystal, and gourmet meals.  I had a hutch filled with Waterford and Wedgewood, a drawer full of linens, crystal vases to fill with fresh flowers.  I also had Julia Child, slimmed down for the new millennium in a slim green and white volume.  Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom: Essential Techniques and Recipes from a Lifetime of Cooking, was my Art of War.  Just like the housewives of the 60’s, I was learning the joys of French cooking, but without the gigantic tome of Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume I, what with its myriad of ingredients and complicated diagrams.

In fact, Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom was an elemental part of our courtship.  It began when my mother borrowed my copy and started making the recipe for sautéed beef steaks for the “romantic dinners” that were (and still are) my parents’ weekly ritual.  When people ask them how they have stayed in love all these years, both my parents will say the same thing—the romantic dinner.   Saturday night, my mother sets the table with her best china, linen, and crystal, and then prepares a special meal.  When I was young, the menu contained a main course with something expensive we didn’t eat every day: steak, shrimp, crab, veal.  And as I was young in the eighties, when flambéing was über-popular, I have vivid memories of my mother lighting a pan of meat juices and alcohol on fire to make a pan sauce.  We children were always invited into the kitchen for the performance (or perhaps I insisted upon being present.)  It was all very high-drama.

There’s an expression about learning how to live at the knee of a parent.  Standing at my mother’s side as she threw a match into her orange Le Creueset sauté pan of, say, Pernod, I learned how to create romance.

So when I fell in love with the man who would later become my husband, I promptly took Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom back and started copying my mother.  I was living in a gorgeous house with two friends from childhood—an old West Seattle craftsman with a generous, covered back porch and a wild, woodsy garden.  After being sure my roommates were out of the house (or at least out of the kitchen) I would set the table for two, light candles everywhere, and then make my own version of the romantic dinner.

While I never attempted to flambé my pan sauce, Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom clearly explained the concept of deglazing the pan.  I felt very grown up, slicing tiny little purple shallots into the browned meat bits sticking to the pan, and then dousing it with wine and canned stock.  I used Swanson’s broth at that point, because that was what my mother used.  I was careful to get the fat-free, low sodium kind, because that was what all the cookbooks suggested.  Never beef stock, because the cookbooks also warned against using canned beef stock—if you didn’t make your own, if you HAD to use canned, you were to substitute chicken instead.   The romantic dinners apparently worked, because he asked me to marry him.

Once married, I grew more ambitious.  After I tasted my mother-in-law’s sublime pot roast, something my mother had never been able to make properly, I turned to Julia for her variation on Beef Bourguignon—French pot roast, aka  Daube of Deef.  Later, I started making the Beef Bourguignon itself.  Comforting but sexy, these braised dishes fed a crowd (we often entertained large groups of our single friends.)  Yes, our romantic dinners had fallen to the wayside, replaced by large parties where I fed everyone with the passion I had used to lavish on my husband.

As I gained a reputation as a cook among our circles of friends, I started to feel like I was winning this war on marriage.  I was a better cook than my mother-in-law, a better cook than my own mother.  To up the ante, I stopped buying Swanson’s stock, and started buying the type of stock that came in boxes labeled “organic,” and “free-range.”

But even with this upgrade, the stock issue continued to eat at me.  In bed at night, as I read cookbooks and attempted to pull every inch of my flesh away from my husband’s body, jerking away if my thigh brushed his hip even minutely, a message began to emerge: if I were to be the perfect wife, then I simply had to make my own stock.

More significantly, neither of my mother-figures made her own stock.  The fact that both women had been happily married for years didn’t matter: clearly, good wives, wives worth their salt, made homemade stock.  It was economical (something I was definitely not) and far superior to the bouillon cubes my mother-in-law used (which, like canned beef stock, I now considered beyond the pale), the canned broth my mother used, and to the boxed stock I used now (which was expensive and still, I suspected, not as good as homemade.)

So Thanksgiving weekend, I decided to make turkey stock.  Never mind that the only thing you can really do with turkey stock is make turkey soup, which I have never liked.  I would have home-made stock in my fridge, and I would use every last remnant of the turkey, while, I thought self-righteously, my own mother just threw hers away.

I sat down with the Joy of Cooking to read it thoroughly.  Something about me: I always, always, always read the “About” sections in the Joy.  I used to call my mother when I didn’t know exactly what constituted “simmering,” or how long to cook carrots, but once, after about five of such phone calls in a twenty minute span, my mother asked me, tactfully I might add, “have you looked it up in the Joy?  That’s what I do when I don’t know.”  I thought back to the time my mother decided to master pies– she pored over her copy for hours, keeping it open as she darted from table to oven to counter and back again.  And my mother makes amazing pie.  So I started taking the Joy to bed with me at night, reading “About Beef,” “About Eggs,” “About Pork,” “About Dinner Parties” . . .

So before I attempted the stock-making, I read the seven or so pages carefully.  The Joy was full of warnings: Don’t add too many vegetables.  Bring the contents of the pot SLOWLY to a boil, then reduce it IMMEDIATELY to the “slightest simmer.”  When the fat pops its translucent bubbles like molten bubble gum, skim them away immediately, along with the impurities and froth.  Under any circumstances, you were not to stir said fat, froth, or impurities back in, or you would end up with a greasy stock.

The term “greasy stock” haunted me: it invoked all of my worst fears about myself as a woman.  It reminded me of reading one of the Anne of Green Gables books, the second one, I think, where a woman is condemned as a “bad housekeeper” because her dish towels are always greasy.  I’m not even going to comment on the state of my dish towels, back then or now.  Suffice to say their condition never fails to horrify my mother.  But a greasy stock was something else entirely—the dirty slut of soups.  A greasy stock, as warned against by the Joy, sounded like a horror to be avoided at all costs if one were to hold her head up in her own kitchen.  Suffice to say, that Thanksgiving weekend, my fate—as a good wife, a good cook, a good woman—was at stake.

So it was with no small amount of fear I started my stock-making.  The pot, filled as it was with the remains of a twenty pound turkey and the accoutrements of stock-making, took a long time to boil.  During that time, I felt very virtuous, thrilling to the sweet orange of the carrots, the papery white of the onion, the dark green of herbs, the delicate green of the celery, all rendering their sweet nutrients and flavors to the elixir of marriage just beginning to bubble on my stove.

When the pot finally boiled, I instantly turned it down to low, grabbed the slotted spoon and bowl I had at ready, and stared intently into its silver mouth.  There were large, lovely slicks of fat, golden circles of oil floating at the surface, but where was the gray scud of froth?  And, I now realized, I had no idea what “impurities” were.  So I started trying to scoop out those golden circles of oil, which, I realized, kept coming.  The wily fat slid and shimmered its way off the spoon.  To make matters worse, it looked as if I was getting mostly stock into my bowl.

I gave up after what felt like a long time of chasing fat.  Although I was convinced the stock was ruined, I simmered it for the three hours recommended by the Joy, then half-heartedly strained it, sloshing soup everywhere. Then there was the issue of getting the enormous quantity of liquid, a pale golden color, into receptacles suitable for storage. At this point, I realized I had no lids for the Tupperware jammed into one of the drawers in my kitchen.  Screw it, I thought, and grabbed the glass nesting bowls someone had given us as a wedding present.  I had already made a huge mess pouring the stock through a colander into my biggest bowl, and now I made even more as I poured my product from that bowl into a series of smaller bowls.

While the stock cooled, I cleaned my kitchen, throwing away the debris of vegetable and turkey parts, scrubbing the pot, wiping down the counters, taking my greasy dishtowels to the washing machine.  Then I covered each bowl with clear plastic wrap and placed each one carefully in the refrigerator, this time spilling only a little.

My stock was a very pale gold color, and even though the Joy had said a film of fat would form across the top (which I could then remove, effectively de-greasing the stock), the liquid stubbornly remained, well, liquid.  It was clear, not cloudy at all, but my stock lacked fragrance and depth.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, distinguished it from the boxed stuff I had been buying, from the canned Swanson’s broth, not even from the mixture made from bouillon cubes.  All evidence pointed to the obvious conclusion: my stock was a failure.  Of course, I never used any of it, not even a drop.

And after a week or so, I threw it out.

Coming Soon . . . Part II