Pork Stew & The Oracle of Delphi

“So she lives out in the middle of nowhere?”
“Nowhere, man. Nowhere’sville. Population her. Except it’s Greece”
“Shit, man. Greece?”
“Straight up. Old Greece. Like Trojan War and whatnot. Ulysses and his gang.”
“Right. Hercules and Zeus and Hera and all those super white looking Renaissance Art Picture People.”
“Word. Neoclassical, bro.”
“And so this Sybil lives out there, in the middle of nothing, just crazy as bat shit?”
“Over a hole in the ground that’s smoking. Like just exhaling this super toxic gas.”
“And she’s sitting there, on some kind of three legged stool, just doling out fortunes?”
“Scary accurate, bro. Like dead on, each time. Your boy Oedipus could tell you.”
“Couldn’t draw a picture though…”
“Sybil layed it down, man. She’d come on w/ these prophecies because she didn’t see them as prophecies, she saw them as fact.”
“Fact? Bitch is straight tripping, head full of smoke. No fact there.”
“Fact. She don’t control the wind, she just reads the leaves.”
“Fact. I don’t know what that means.”
“Bro, it means that she stirs the soup but sees the ingredients separate.”
“So she’s a cook?”
“Man, we’re all cooks.”
“I thought she was a fortune teller.”
“Same thing, bro. You telling me a kitchen ain’t some spot that’s sitting on an opening in the earth, with some kind of steam, some kind of smoke, running through? You mean each one of us doesn’t arrange our day, our lives, into these little routines, this careful and methodical undertaking, adding to this life to reveal what it is to be living?”
“Whoa, what’s up, man?”
“Pork stew, my friend, that’s what’s up.”

Pork stew has always been what’s up.

There is a way of shedding the past, extricating the deadweight of remorse, in the way the meat gets trimmed, the way the muscle is divided time and time again to make a larger body. The Oracle’s knife is always sharpest.

There is the invocation of the Gods, which is to say ourselves, as the olive oil bubbles and jumps in the cast iron skillet. It is in the song the pork sings as it sears and browns. The senses of smell and hearing, twins, speak at once. The Oracle is Analog, not Binary.

The Green Chile’s flesh is softer than hope. The burn of the pepper, the tears that flow, are clear and bright. It was said that Hera wept the night’s sky; the Oracle wept the Ocean.

The Red Pepper is bawdy. Free of the past. Free of the future. There is only one way to sit on a three legged stool.

The Carrot and the Cilantro are secret lovers, each sweeter than the other. Each brighter, each cheerier. The carrot has a kind of speech impediment. Cilantro has a lisp. They are so, so in love. The Oracle knows a thing or two about love.

Stew is never really “done”. That’s the part of the riddle the Oracle does not share. It is simply is a constant state of becoming, there in the roux. What she sees in it, sees the face of your Other, it has nothing to do w/ your future. It has everything to do with your now. That Oracle, there on that rock, there in Ancient Greece, did not have a past and did not need a future. She had a stool, and a boiling cauldron. She had a spoon and stirred the soup. She simply read the leaves that blew in front of her, and reported the news, which is really the past.

And then she would add salt.

Bucket Of Cake

It was abysmal, this cake I made for my friend some 1000 miles away, some 25 years gone past. It was a double chocolate cake w/ a chocolate ganache. And, for a small amount of time, it stood on a pedestal, stacked like so much Celtic masonry, and drenched w/ thick, silky, chocolate that is neither cream nor liquid, neither solid nor liquid. And for that moment, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, on his Birthday, I looked at this silly and delicious cake that shook comically under its own weight. And even when it began to fall, began to give way all-slo-motion-sexy, as the ganache began to dam and burst across the slow rise of the cake platter, it was an excellent cake, made for my friend, Jeff Odum.

It is magic, cake making. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Don’t cotton to those polyester hucksters, those t.v. Charlatans. Pay no attention to the pretty magazines, with their glossy pages that make the cake look more vixen-like than appropriate. It is cake, after all; and not some kind of tart.

Cake making is sorcery. Spells and Incantations. Bits of this. Parts of that. Knock thrice on the counter before you separate the egg. Every kitchen is warmed by superstition, calmed by strict belief systems. This recipe calls for a stiff cup of coffee, before anything else.

Coffee? How can this be Odum’s cake if I put coffee in it? He doesn’t drink coffee.

But I so love the idea of a recipe that calls for a cup of strong coffee, stiff coffee. The sort of coffee that has been sitting all day, cooking on the hot plate. Thick, jittery tar. This is the sort of coffee I would make in our dorm room, and leave unattended too often, too too often. In those days, back then, back there.

Besides, it was a chocolate cake, And the magic of chocolate almost always needs a mule like caffeine to close the deal. The dust of cocoa powder (Dutch) floats in the kitchen light. The cat is confused, but won’t show her hand. The smell that blossoms, as the boiling water flood the chocolate dustbowl, is that same smell of life that I smelled in West Texas, in the dessert, after it had rained

Chocolate and butter. Buttermilk and Sugar.
Baking Powder. Baking Soda (Duran Duran)
Vegetable Oil & Vanilla. And salt, always salt.
And eggs, big fat farm eggs – yokes yellow as wheat
Well, Art Class Wheat , you know, REALLY yellow.

It was that sort of thing we would scrawl on the loft structure we built of Sophomore year, and kept through our Senior year, and willed to those underclassmen who shared our taste in music, which is how we called the shots, back then, back there.

Had I made this cake, this abysmal failure of cake then I would have seen portents, I would have diagnosed cast dye. I would have fretted over the bad geometry. I would have shaved down the domes. I would have planed them all to hell. But as I pulled them from the pans yesterday, each one heavy and off balance as a hemisphere is apt to be, I recalled this one thing about Jeff, above all others.

Jeff hates pretentious jerks.

He’s not a guy who spews a lot of hate. Hell, the cat is all love, really. Crumudgeonn? Sure. But that’s always been true. Frustrated w/ small minded humans? Always. But, honestly, why aren’t you, too?

Get a grip. It’s really that simple. Get a goddam handle on what’s going on. Doesn’t mean you can necessarily boss it around, make it tote that barge, or lift that bale. But if you are honest about it, about who you are in it, well then life tends to be pretty sweet.

And so when it fell, and it collapsed , I moved to get that really big piece of Tupperware. I shoved it in, fighting time, fighting gravity. And I was upset.

I had ruined the cake. It was the sort of thing Jeff would never do. But then I remembered, no. We had destroyed endless recipes in out time after college, in Northern Virginia. There were repeated failures, which we ate to extinction.

And that was the thing about cooking w/ Jeff, living w/ Jeff: it never really mattered how rickety the loft was, how loudly I snored, how scientific the coffee pot became, how many pounds of bacon we wasted on a horrific experiment w/ home made ice cream. We were together, aligned, touched.

We were banned from playing Pictionary together due to an incident in 92.

And so to see his cake fall, it was awful. I questioned my sorcery, accused the spirits that cohabitate the collective that is my kitchen. And then I heard Jeff’s voice in my head::

“mmmmmmm bucket of cake mmmmmmmmmm”

It is now , of course, my mantra.

But it’s Jeff’s cake. And, yeah, it’s delicious.

Coleslaw

It was my Aunt Patti who made the potato salad; it was my Mom who made the coleslaw.

My Aunt Patti’s potato salad was legendary. A kind of Westport, Connecticut slight of hand. Classy all the way, proud in its starch. My Mom’s coleslaw betrayed her Appalachian roots, and my father’s way of counting.

It was a thing, you see, in our house, to count mayonnaise jars. They were collected and used for pins, nails, tin soldiers, dice, pencils, pens, book ends, bowling pins (that didn’t go over well), homes for convalescing goldfish, light prisms for housecats, piggy banks, thumb tacks, paint brushes, or even as a thing from which one might drink. But mostly it was a sign of wealth. That’s what my father would say. “Sign of wealth”. He had a way of making pronouncements, my father.

He had worked in a Hellman’s Mayonaisse Factory when he was a kid, summers before college, before the draft. He was no good at factory work. He was intimidated by the rough men he worked with who could crack half a dozen eggs at a time, two hands at a time. My father, left handed, would fumble the crack, his eyes lost in the color of the yolk, the color Van Gogh had been able to explain to him. The factory workers teased him, but took him to see Duke Ellington in a club on the South Side, where left handed Jewish painters didn’t go. He owed it all to the job he resented, in the place that smelled like eggs, where the fat hung in the air, stayed in the weave of his clothes.

An extravagance, is mayonnaise, counseled my father’s mother, who lived in a kind of luxury that only those who fear poverty are able to attain. She had married badly, but divorced exquisitely. Still, she could not shake her immigrant habits of hording, mixed w/ the shame of possession. She would wear furs and disallow mayonnaise in her pantry as a kind of pretentious extravagance. It is the one step of assimilation that tiny, Russian/Puruvian little girl couldn’t make.

My mother’s family, being from that part of the Cumberland Gap that is more Dell than Holler, grew up on farm mayonnaise that was always a little too rushed, yet absurdly kept for too long. The fat of the yolk, heavy w/ Virginian sloth, would overtake everything. My mother’s family was skimpy when it came to oil. It, like many things in my Mother’s childhood, was a kind of unfulfilled promise.

When they were young, and first together, my mother and father, it was hard for them. But, they were young and it was New York, and that is how things should be. They saved and lived on the cheap. They were a kind of frugal that is inherited. And yet they bought mayonnaise. Sign of wealth.

The slaw that my mom made was slap-dash and last minute. It was the effect of a mad grope across the transom of the refrigerator. There was always a cabbage. Forever and ever and as long as I can remember there was always cabbage in our house. She would sort of toss the head of cabbage over her shoulder onto the countertop. The head would roll around as she continued rooting. The carrots would come out followed by the red onion. She would set us to work in her kitchen, prepping her produce, as she went about making the dressing.

One brother would chop the cabbage into thin, neat strips. Each whisper of cabbage light as breath. He moved purposefully, intentionally, and forward to the end of the chore. He never would stop to see his work, to see how the cabbage would exhale and become light. The other went into the work of dicing the onion. It was he, of course, who would never cry. He was impervious to onions, dulled to everything else. He moved fast w/ the knife in a way you wouldn’t think a ten year old could. He was maddeningly precise. Each piece of red onion cut and planed like a diamond, glistening.

I would step on the stool in front of the sink and get to the task of peeling the carrots. I had a proper peeler, and not a paring knife. I wished I had the paring knife; I was terrified of the wobbly blade that spun in the metal grip. I was terrified of slipping, convinced I would miss the carrot entirely and peel my fingers instead.

“Hello Mr. Carrot!”
“Well Hello, Mrs. Carrot”
“Philip, stop playing with them and peel them!”

I would put the carrots down and begin peeling, looking out the large window my mom had fought for when the house was being built.

“Now you want a window?” he demanded. “Three apartments and a house in Staten Island. No Window. Now you want a window?”

“Yes”. It was hard for her to say.

“We don’t have the money.”

“We’ll cut back. On mayonnaise.”

When I would peel the skins from the carrots I would do it in short and timid strokes. I would turn them in my hands, the carrots turning my young fat palms a light orange, and I would think about how many friends I could make with rabbits if they might come by. I would look out the window, sadly disappointed that there were no rabbits. I stopped peeling and stared out the window at car in the drive way, and past the neighbor’s yard, and wondered what it would be like to be a rabbit.

“Philip! Don’t EAT them. PEEL them.”
My brothers would rush me to finish, critiquing my peeling.

“This isn’t how you would carve a canoe, is it?”

“Jesus! Leave some carrot”.

My mom would then have me taste her dressing. She said it was because I had the gift.

The truth is that my Mom didn’t like the taste of her own cooking. She turned her nose up at the fat, and worried about her figure that had already been wrecked by the three boys crowding more than her kitchen. She could not taste the dressing, much less bring herself to eat the coleslaw. She wouldn’t have my brothers taste it as they would always find some way to make some face, find some fault, claim victory where there is no battle. It is their way. But when I would taste something I would find myself in the strange and insular place of being. Rather, I would find myself surrounded by the sensation of self separate from anything, or anyone. It, in itself, was kind of mind blowing.

When you add what happens when sugar and mustard seed go toe to toe my lips begin to pucker. Vinegar is powerful kind of magic. The lush love of buttermilk is holy. The small firecrackers of ground black pepper are boisterous and full of life. And of course there is mayonnaise – so sublime in it’s ability to hold you like a tango partner. So gentle in its romance, yet so lingering in its absence.

She would mix it all together with little pomp, and secure it in that 1970s Tupperware that will survive a nuclear holocaust. We would pack into the car in the driveway and go to Aunt Patti and Uncle Guy’s house. We would eat dinner together, the way families and friends would.

My mother and Aunt Patti would share martinis. We ate this kind of pot luck often in my youth. And while my mother could not stand her own cooking, she loved Patti’s potato salad.

The View From Olympus

A watched pot never boils.
First of all: yes, it does.
Secondly, get off me. Don’t tell me it doesn’t when it does. Don’t pretend to know the future if you can’t lay your thumbprint on the present.
A watched pot never boils.



It is that very same voice I hear over my shoulder, craning and cramping my neck, while I stand next to my stove, hips squared against the counter tops.
It is the voice that tells me not only to get on with it, get on w/ something, but also tells me that thing I am doing, this thing right here, right now, well that’s clearly a mistake.
There’s chopping to be done, dishes to be rinsed, surfaces to be tended.
There’s knives to sharpen, lettuce to wash, bits of the refrigerator could stand a little love while I stand solidly staring into the boiling water. This mighty vaudeville of chemistry takes my breath away. No, that’s not quite right.

The thick, damp air climbing into my kitchen’s stratosphere, into the soft recess of my lungs, makes me lush from the inside out. The wet air is heavy is sits on my skin, my face. I am embraced by it, cloaked by the steam coming off the big pot on my stovetop.

Yes, yes, I see the Mighty Oz parallel. Very clever. Thanks for pointing it out.
But I am not some Kansas Huckster. I am one not of a thousand lying white haired men, suckled by my own propaganda. I am not Phlebas the Phoenecian. I am Phil.

I am staring into the boiling pot, watching as the cosmos rises and swells.
I am breathing. This air. This moment. I have no place to go. I am already here.
I am watching the water evaporate, dissipate, change before my eyes until I must deny its existence, though I know that it still surely does.
I am waiting no longer. For pots to boil. For Moons to charm. For the Sun to complete its sloppy, drunken, ellipse. This is only to say there is a kind of entropy in still water that frightens me.

I think always of that bit of water between Sicily and Italy, the Straits of Messina. The rocks on either shore are those huge craggy pieces of the broken hearts of giants who walked this round earth before. It was those same giants who stirred the Mediterranean until the water forever separated the low flat of Italy and the crazed volcanic mountains of Sicily, forever making each lovesick for the other, each incomplete and each penned in by the boiling water of that Aegean Sea. And in between, on the rocks in the straits, are mermaids.

The mermaids are neither Italian nor Sicilian. Neither God nor Man. Neither Giant or Mortal. Neither Fish nor Fowl. They are simply mermaids, caught in between the worlds that view the surf as either the beginning or the end.

It is the mermaid’s voice that tells you the pot will not boil. It is designed to wreck you on the shore, beach you broken and derelict. Counting off regret, sounding off for a deaf deity.

Or you can stand there. Right there. Breath that moment that is magic, that is electric. That is to say, each moment, each grinding undulation of the boiling pot of water.


Because it will. And it does.

Dependability

Dependability floats. It rides the currents of the sea untethered.
It is not so thick, so dumb, as a rock - some bit of earth the ocean has forgiven, but not forgotten. Dependability floats. It is not the salty deep six, not its child the surf, not it’s prodigal bay. Dependability can sit the entire day in the sun, and never freckle.

I love it more than anything, dependability. I am sentimental about it; I recall my father being wistful when schooling me in mathematics. “Math,” he told my seven year old self, “never lies”. He would then stack multiplication tables, talking to himself about architecture. “A building! A building is a thing you can depend on.”

He loved it more than anything, the fixed arch. While everything would expand and contract around it, the fixed arch would make the best of compression. “In this world,” he would say, “you can count on compression”,

It is best to be resilient; my Mother taught me that. Just because the waves will never, never cease; it does not mean you will someday drown. Resolve was a matter of will, not a matter of debate. She came from the Roanoke Valley, in the foothills of the Virginia Appalachians; she could not depend on anything. She raised my brothers and I on a mythology she did not inherit but rather invented: hope. Hope is the thing that makes dependability float on broken sea. Hope is the thing you put in your rice and beans.

Hope is the steam the makes your kitchen damp, the salt that stays in the crease of your palm. Dependability is the wide hipped luxury of thickening beans in the pot. The bean asks for so little, and gives so much. Time after time, the bean is the guy who’s going to help you move your couch.

I turn to rice and beans when I need that kind of thing, when it seems lost or beyond my periphery. When the clean blue of a spring sky, cloudless and guiltless, is chilled cold by a thin, Northern Sun. When the light off the riven does not reflect, when the traffic circles in on itself, marches west to the horizon. Rice and Beans remind me: there is hope, and hope is dependable.

There is this thing we can all do, this great bit of sorcery, in cooking. In bestowing on an ingredient purpose, and bestowing on ourselves the gift of love. That is the future I see in the soup, as I stir the beans. That is the sound of rice slipping through your fingertips, raining is more like it. And that steam, it rises and meets your tears, the way the ocean meets the fog. Each taste, though, each testing of the spice, each invocation, steadies the maelstrom. Each bit of salt reminds you the lust of thirst, the thirst for life. And you are buoyant, no longer fighting the ocean but a part of it. Hocus, Pocus. This is the magic of dependability.

LASAGNA

No one talks about its elegance. They’ll talk about its simplicity. Oh, they’ll go on about its simplicity. And how pure it is. How unpretentious. How basic.
No one talks about its curving and Rubenesque flavors. No one talks about its lush cream, or the sauce with a history all of its own. They neglect the thing that happens to spinach, and how its leaves turn supple, like lingerie. The do not talk about the magic spell in every fennel seed. They forget that the salt in Parmesan comes directly from the palms of Italians, lined and creased w/ Tuscan soil.
No, they freeze it and call it an ”option”. But Lasagna is no Veronica’s Betty, no Ginger’s Maryanne.

Lasagna’s seven veils are not wispy but thick and drowsy. Each noodle is a love letter, rectangular and curled in a waving Cheshire smile. Each dollop of Ricotta is white and hopeful in the crimson sea of sauce. The spinach leaves are laid out, straight and orderly. Each one is placed carefully, each intentionally, like careful love. The spinach and ricotta stare at each other, yearning, awaiting completion, burlesque and bawdy, each. That is the thing about lasagna.

It’s straight laces, is comforting rectangular housing and easy geometric portioning, that is the great trick as lasagna is comforting, but not because of its neat packaging, its easily deconstructed layers.

Lasagna assembles, orchestrates, curates. It leads you around the dance floor, confident and strong. It does not buckle under. Rather it holds you there, just above your hips, and whispers in to your ear, just so.

Lasagna sings softly, but steady. More than a murmur, as Italian in a hushed, sexy voice often can seem. The heat in the kitchen is from more than the oven.

And it lingers, it draws it out. From the moment of firing the oven to when it finally presents itself supine for consumption there are a hundred small romances each more maddening than the last. Each taste of the sauce is a stolen kiss. The smell of the frying Italian Sausage, the sound of mad crackling grease, have the kind of electricity and immediacy of a copped feel. The garlic oil gets into your skin, slick and deep in its permeation.

In spite of all this madness lasagna remains elegant, long and complex. For each Amsterdam Red Light explosion of longing and yearning lasagna keeps a mystery hidden, tucked away, inside. This small thing, this small bit of immaculate brilliance, is love.

Love is what brings the milk to the milkmaid. Love is what grows the tomatoes. Love is what rains on the starved spinach crop. Love is the voice behind the song. Love is the secret spell inside of the fennel seed. Love is what assembles these bits into an orchestra.

That is what lasagna tastes like.

A Prayer for Stroganoff

There is a prayer in the way salt gets thrown
Into the Big Boiling Pot, sitting like Capone
In the corner of your stovetop
Water crests and foams, stream clings on my face

Dear God, please make something of these things
Left in the side drawers, these bits discarded forgotten
These leftovers from other recipes, from other Master Plans
Remnants, ink smudges, stroganoff

It is a last ditch effort, stroganoff.
That bit of beef that was insignificant, less than prime.
Wide egg noodles, thick hipped and lush
It’s sexy and it knows it, stroganoff.

There is comfort in the pepper grinder,
In its weight, in its imbalance. The sound
Is the same as shells crunching beneath my feet
Bare on volcanic sands, Mt. Etna at my back.

The cream and stock were meant to be together.
The cream’s decadence lingering in the roux
Brown, comfortable, dependable, brown
Flecks of yellow mustard sparkle, recessed like stars

And each time stroganoff is charming, soothing
Each ingredient proud but not dickish about it.
Like gypsy violin, or a proper kiss
Stroganoff