COOKING DISASTERS
The worst meals I ever ate, I cooked myself, because I had to. My mother cranked out food reluctantly and ineptly when I was a child, and in boarding school, college and the Army, meals were also laid on. They were all swill, but there was plenty of it, and I wasn’t picky. But after I got out of the Army it was learn to cook or go hungry. I married an actress who didn’t know any more about cooking than I did, and made it very clear that she didn’t want to learn. Her mother was a traditional Italian-American, widowed too early, who managed to run a photo-finishing business, raise three kids, and spend hours cooking ambrosial meals for them, and Louise wasn’t about to do that. We didn’t have enough money to eat out every evening, or even to subsist on Chinese take-out, so I bought a copy of The Joy of Cooking and started learning by trial and mostly error. I made some messes, but I found I enjoyed trying to make something at least minimally edible out of stuff that in its basic state generally wasn’t.
But after I’d mastered things like tuna casserole and mac-and-cheese, I got cocky and tried more complicated recipes. Some of them actually worked out, but others were fiascos. My greatest disaster was an attempt at Poulet à l’Orange. Louise and I were both up for important auditions, so I bought the chicken and the rest of the ingredients in advance, along with a bottle of champagne, figuring that if either of us found work, I’d celebrate by cooking us one of the pièces de résistance of classic French cuisine, and if we didn’t, the dinner would be a consolation prize.
But on the big day both of us woke up with flu. Adrenalin, aspirin and codeine-laced cough syrup got us through our auditions, and perhaps the fevers we were running added additional fervor to our readings, because we got jobs. Exhausted and on the verge of delirium, we came home and started to collapse. Neither of us were very hungry, but I knew we had to eat, so I broke out the champagne (big mistake) and after a glass I got out Joy and tried to cook. But the champagne on top of fever and codeine rendered me witless. I’d stowed the chicken in the freezer, and of course it was still hard as a rock. Woozily, I stuck it in the sink and ran hot water over it for awhile, but finally I just threw it into a big pot along with everything else (I’m not even sure I peeled the oranges), added water, dumped in the rest of the champagne because what the hell, and turned the gas burner to high. Then I collapsed into bed next to Louise, huddling under the blankets with chills and fever, until I smelled smoke. I managed to turn the burner off before it set the apartment on fire, scraped the charred but still half-raw chicken glop out of it, and served it with a salad I made by throwing a head of iceberg lettuce on a plate, cutting it in half, and splattering it with mayonnaise. Louise gamely tried a bite or so of the awful mess, and sensibly retreated to the bathroom to throw up. I persevered- hey, it was Poulet à l’Orange, dammit! But eventually I took my turn kneeling to worship the porcelain god, and the next morning I scraped the wreckage into the garbage can. I also had to throw away the pot.
The audition had been for stage work at all the major regional theaters in the country, arranged by an outfit called the Theater Communications Group, which brought directors once a year to New York to try out actors for their forthcoming seasons. Louise had caught on with the Hartford (CT) Stage Company, and I’d landed a season at the Meadowbrook Theater in Michigan. But Louise’s agent had also sent her to a soap opera audition a day or so before, and she nailed the part. She turned down Hartford’s offer and began a long career as a major star on various daytime tv shows. So I took my season of meaty roles for chump change in faraway Michigan, Louise started her first soap job in New York, and the marriage evaporated. I often wonder whether it might have lasted a little longer if that celebratory meal hadn’t been quite as horrible. It represented everything that was wrong with our marriage: initial enthusiasm based on ignorance, and no follow-through.
I wound up doing two seasons at Meadowbrook, and I had to go on cooking. The theater put its actors up in trailers, but they had tiny kitchens, and after I realized I’d probably die before I hit thirty if I went on eating nothing but frozen pizza and Tex-Mex, I learned a few basic tricks, like at least thawing a frozen chicken before you try to do anything else to the poor bird. But my marriage was kaput, and the theater was already going bust during my second season. The thought of returning to New York, finding an apartment, and starting all over again, was unappealing. I had also begun smoking a lot of reefer, and of course if you have the marijuana munchies bad enough, you’ll devour anything with no discrimination whatsoever. So my fledgling cooking skills deteriorated.
At the end of my second season at Meadowbrook, my brother Mike wrote me to say that he and an old friend had decided to start a mini-commune, a tent-encampment in a patch of woods on Cape Cod. We’d work as housepainters. The three of us had spent part of the previous summer in Cambridge, MA, after my first season at Meadowbrook ended, as the worst housepainting team since houses and paint were invented, but Mike blithely assumed our disastrous two months of On-the-Job-Training the year before had made us masters. We’d dazzle our clients with our meticulous brushwork during the work-day, and in our off-hours we’d lounge around in the forest smoking dope and feeling like Mother Nature’s Sons. Sounded like a plan to me.
By the time I arrived, Mike and his friend Herkie had put up a canvas habitation in the clearing. Each of us had our own small sleeping tent, pitched well away from the main tent for privacy (all three of us hoped the news of a hippie Tent City in the woods would attract hot local babes), and even farther away from the toilet-tent, about which the less said, the better. The main structure was a roomy wall-tent, and Mike and Herkie had laid down a marine-plywood floor over two-by-fours to support actual furniture: a couple of old wicker chairs and an ancient sofa which smelled of mildew, but was comfy enough if you were stoned. I’d saved some money from my second season at Meadowbrook, and before I traveled to Tent City I bought a four-burner propane camp stove, a couple of pots and pans, and various cooking utensils. We did more dump-combing around the area (this was long before dumps became sanctimonious recycling centers and stopped being useful scrounging resources) and found a serviceable wooden kitchen table someone had tossed because one of its legs was a little wobbly. Nothing Elmer’s Glue and duct-tape couldn’t fix. We rigged a broad canvas fly from the door of the main tent to my ad-hoc kitchen so I could cook when it rained, and we figured we were in business.
But it took awhile before we began to make much money as housepainters. Well, we never did make much, understandably, since as dirty hippies, we were hardly any upscale Cape Cod summer resident’s first choice, and the native Cape Codders painted their own houses. But Mike, who had majored in mathematics and philosophy at Harvard, assured us that we’d get work simply by underbidding all the real housepainters in the area. He said that unlike the pros, we didn’t have houses or families to maintain, and our needs were few. He was right, to a point, and his underbidding strategy did get us jobs from pinch-penny people who were willing to ignore our horrible hippiedom because they thought we were suckers for working so cheap.
But what we were paid barely kept us in reefer, cheap plonk and beer, and really crappy food: baloney and mayo sandwiches on squishy white bread that tasted like Kleenex someone had already blown his nose in, canned spaghetti, Spam, and so on.
Fortunately for our collective health, Mike had already joined the Transcendental Meditation Movement, and its founder, the Beatles’ guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was all for the vegetarian, macrobiotic diet. So I discovered brown rice and lentils, boiling the rice until it stopped sticking in your teeth, and making a sort of thick soup out of the lentils to pour over it.
The result was Mudge. That’s what Herkie called it the first time I served it, and I had to admit the name fit. Herkie was strictly a meat-and-potatoes guy and had no use for macrobiotics, Eastern Wisdom or much of anything beyond dope, cheap booze and sex, when he could get it. But he shoveled down the stuff because we couldn’t afford anything better. I did my best to make it at least remotely palatable, investing some of our sparse cash in an array of spices like cumin, coriander, fenugreek, cardamom turmeric and lots of cayenne pepper. But it was still Mudge, not exactly the sort of dahl-and-rice served in India, because real lentil dahl requires clarified butter, and in camp we couldn’t keep butter for more than a day or so.
Mudge was certainly healthy, basic fuel, but even Mike got tired of it after awhile and began complaining. I lost my temper and told him the lentils and brown rice were his idea to begin with.
“Yes, but you don’t know how to cook them.”
“Then you take over the goddamn cooking!”
“I will when you take over lining us up painting jobs!”
“Yeah, let’s talk about that – how come you wound up divvying up what we get paid? How much do your TM classes in Falmouth cost? And why doesn’t the big doody Maharishi offer them for nothing? Isn’t TM supposed to raise everyone to a higher plane of existence where money doesn’t count?”
I guess Mike hadn’t quite yet reached that exalted level of consciousness, because we got into a physical fight. Neither of us were very good at fighting, but Herkie had been a middle-weight wrestler in college. His real name was Seldon, but we called him Herkie, short for Hercules, because he was very strong He’d gone a little to fat since college, but he was still stronger than both of us put together. Herkie got bored with our hapless grappling and wild punches, and stepped into the melee, hauling us apart easily.
“C’mon, guys, peace and love, right? It is what it is. Go with the flow. Whatever happens, happens. Wherever you are, there you are. Like it’s a completely whatever situation, you know? I mean, you’re the Tompko Brothers, you have to love one another or die, right?”
Justly reproved, Mike and I apologized and embraced with something approaching brotherly love, and our sojourn in Tent City went on without much more discord. Mike began practicing a bit more transparency with our finances, which made Herkie’s and my shares minimally larger. I kept on making Mudge, as our staple, but Herkie and I pooled our resources so I could do a few burgers or dogs on the side for the two of us. Mike stuck gamely with the Mudge, and even told me it was getting better. I never let on to him that I’d begun adding chicken bouillon cubes to the Mudge-water.
Tent City was struck at the end of the summer, and we disbanded. I went back to New York and tried to resurrect my acting career. I was living with Patsy, and once again my mate and I had little money. So Mudge it was, for quite awhile. I fiddled and fussed with it, making clarified butter for the lentils to turn them into something approaching real dahl, for example, and adding slivered almonds to the rice and sautéing them briefly in a dab more butter before adding the water, which made a sort of half-assed pilau. I won’t say Mudge was ever really good, but over time it became less like lumpy sludge and more like an inoffensive side dish at an Indian restaurant outside India. And even in Indian restaurants, dahl and rice are served with serious food – curries involving chicken and/or vegetables. Mudge on its own may keep the body together, but the mind begins to boggle.
Patsy finally got a job at an art gallery, I scored a couple of commercials and other acting jobs, and our finances improved. By then I’d gotten at least half serious about cooking, Patsy and I had married, and since she was as uninterested in cooking as Louise had been, I started turning out less Spartan meals. I’ve kept on experimenting over the years, and although I will never be a chef, I can rustle up decent grub in a variety of styles by now. I’ve learned new tricks, and I’ve also discovered my limitations, so I never try to get too fancy. So far I haven’t made anyone sick. Well, that’s not strictly true. A wonderful, simple shrimp-and-lemon spaghetti sauce I’d made many times before backfired on Patsy and me not long ago, but it wasn’t entirely my fault. The sleazy seafood manager at my local NY supermarket had fudged the use-date labels on the packages of shrimp. But the Revenge of the Shrimp was at least partly my fault, because I didn’t think they smelled that bad, and used them anyway.
So cooking disasters still happen to me from time to time, because I don’t regard food as a religious discipline. I don’t have the time, patience or presumption to become a “foodie.” But recently I’ve been thinking about having another go at Poulet à l’Orange, preferably when I don’t have the flu. And it might be interesting to revive Mudge, using some of the gimmicks I’ve learned over the years since Tent City. My second marriage has survived for over three decades, despite the occasional disaster, because Patsy and I are always tinkering with it, trying to keep it healthy but not boring. Perhaps I’ll figure out a way to make Mudge à l’Orange. Or perhaps not: citrus fruit and Mudge do not get along with one another. Patsy just read over this essay and reminded me that back in our poverty days, I’d thrown half a grapefruit into a batch of Mudge, and the result was unspeakable.