How to Cook Like a Man by Daniel Duane

the Great American Novel, and to become a responsible father before Hannah discovered that I was not one—precise amounts were unavailable. Clear instructions were unimaginable. Completion, in the two or three hours before Liz freaked out with hunger and rage and poured herself a fucking bowl of cereal right in front of my face, was utterly impossible. But right up to the very last of the pasta and salad recipes in
Vegetables
, all of the above satisfactions were palpably available, and precisely because, in deciding that my own palate was stupid, I’d cleared out other considerations like, say, whether or not Liz even felt like eating Pasta with Zucchini, Walnuts, and Pesto on a given night. She’d consistently said she didn’t care, during those vulnerable first months with a baby. By the time she did begin to care again, around months four and five, it was too late. I’d already developed a fierce emotional attachment to menu control, narrowing my job down to recipe completion and nothing more—as if I were building model airplanes that happened to be edible. I’d come to love that I could stop thinking and follow Alice’s orders, none of which included cleaning as I cooked. Trim and julienne a little “zucchini or other summer squashes,” boil noodles,
kablam
: checkmark next to the recipe’s title, in the book’s table of contents. Ditto with the next main-course category I tackled: pizza, even when I got flour allover my clothes and the countertops, and even when the crust came out soggy, puffy, and bready. Yeast in warm water, add flour, let rise, knead again. Then: “Preheat the oven to 375. Dice the onion and toss in a small ovenproof sauté pan with a pinch of salt and enough olive oil to coat lightly,” until, two and a half hours after I’d started, the kitchen ransacked and burned food be damned, I would absolutely have achieved something a reasonable person might describe as Pizza with Broccoli Raab, Roasted Onion, and Olives.
    I found yet another stripe of anti-recipe prejudice, which I will call the Lamentation of the Disappointed Cookbook Lover: “Like sex education and nuclear physics they are founded on an illusion,” writes Anthony Lane, the
New Yorker
’s movie critic, of his own love for cookbooks. “They bespeak order, but they end in tears.” Similar sentiment from Adam Gopnik, in the same magazine: “The anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved… . You start with a feeling of greed, find a list of rules, assemble a bunch of ingredients, and then you have something to be greedy about. In cooking you begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of the appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.” (Gopnik skipped adolescence—there’s no other way to explain a man’s thinking that eros begins with a specific object of desire, and not with an aimless ache.)
    Ruth Reichl leads the most visible counterattack against the Disappointed Cookbook Lovers, dismissing their pursuit of perfection and claiming to love, instead, the way no dish ever turns out the same twice, guaranteeing that Reichl’s cooking will always be an adventure. “I cook for other people, and to me, cooking is an act of giving,” Reichl continues. “When I leaf through cookbooks or magazines I am imagining all the people who willbe sitting around my table, and I am looking for food that will make them happy.” I liked the sound of this, back then; and I know that I wanted the emotional extra credit owed to anybody cooking in this spirit; but even I knew that I was cooking almost entirely for myself, hunting perfection in precisely Gopnik’s spirit, horrified by the idea of culinary adventures and of dishes turning out differently, night after night. So I knew what Lane and Gopnik were talking about: recipes