Barbecue

July 4th. Independence Day. Fireworks, Family, and cooking outside. For years after I moved to the city I longed for a place where I could Grill. My family ate outside often during the summer, partly because we had no air conditioning, but more so I think because Mom loved to cook on the grill. It was cooler, simpler, and clean up was much easier. Scrape off the grill, toss the paper plates, and drop the silverware in the dishwasher.

If that were it, though, we would have eaten more hamburgers than we did. Sue searched all the women's magazines and clipped recipes like a demon. I have never met anyone who could read a recipe and know it worked the way she could. She also could read all the versions of the current fad recipe (Pork Sate is the example that springs to mind) and distill them into the best version of all. As a result we would have legendary barbecue meals. A whole head of cauliflower coated in a paste of ginger and Indian spices, grilled, then separated into chunks. Marinated, pressed tofu grilled like steak. New potatoes thinly sliced and layered with onions, parsley, paprika and butter, wrapped in foil and cooked until perfectly caramelized. I'm making myself hungry.

My point here is, I think we cook outside because it challenges us, and it brings us closer to the hearth. No matter how hot it is, there we are, standing around the grill, holding a beer, watching Mark poke the burgers with a (two-pronged metal) stick. It's basic human instinct to slap a slab of something on the fire and char it. I think it helps keep us real. While Mom explored the exotic, it sill usually came down to coleslaw, baked beans, and something charred. This is not elitist food.

There's a communal quality to cooking outside that is often missing from an ordinary family meal. Things have to be carried; coals have to be started; one person makes the ambrosia while the other makes the hamburger patties; "Oh, and I forgot the ketchup, could you grab it on your way outside?" Cooking a hamburger on a grill seems to have a macho image the way frying an egg does not. It's cool for everyone.

I was never planning on sharing recipes here, there are plenty of places for that on the web, but it's so on topic I thought I had to include this. For years Mom cooked up the Hallmark Baked Beans from the box, but they stopped making them. Never admitting defeat, Sue came up with this recipe, I think it's even better.

Jazzed-Up Baked Beans

1 large can baked beans - the really big one!
1/2 lb. bulk sausage
1/4 cup chopped onion
1/4 cup ketchup
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 T. molasses
1 T. prepared mustard
1 T. Worcestershire sauce

Break up the sausage while browning it in a skillet, drain.
Add the onion and cook until softened.
Drain the beans briefly.
Combine all the ingredients in the skillet and then pour into greased casserole.
Bake covered at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.
Uncover and bake 20 minutes longer or until bubbling and browning a bit.


Do you like to cook outside? Why do you think we still persist in this?

Happy Independence Day everyone! May you eat in someone's backyard at least once this summer.

Why DO we cook?

I love food. I love the taste, feel and scent of it. I'm not alone in this. I also think about it a lot, not just from a consuming point of view - though it does consume me - but from a...cultural? philosophical? ideological? perspective. I am fascinated by the why of food. We human animals have taken the three things we have to do to survive as a species and have turned two of them into Art with a capital A.

The other is Eating.

Cooking started out as a way of making the inedible edible. Good start. I wonder when it changed to making the edible a pleasure?

There is so much attached to food for us - family, culture, religion. Perhaps the last thing we lose as the descendants of immigrants is the food of our culture. My family has been here for at least four generations, more in some cases, and yet I still make springerle at Christmas. Most people don't really like them, but you should hear my brothers complain if I don't make "the bathroom tiles" as one of them calls them. (It took much experimentation in technique and quantity to get them approaching edible. I had some epic failures as a teenager!) Why am I so attached? Partly it's the memories of those failures, partly it's the memory of my Mother, who dragged me through it and changed proportions and was totally honest when it came to those failures, but also it means I'm still German. And English, and Scottish, and totally American, but still Greman too. My Mother made springerle, her mother made them, and probably her mother made them - I never asked if Mom knew, and now I regret it.

People live through recipes. Mom died over two years ago, but her notes on her recipes mean that she still can talk to me; remind me that the oven on Albany Ave ran 25 degrees hot, so every temperature in the Mirro cookie press book has been changed to reflect this. There are moments reflected from times before I was born that bring me closer to her, such as my grandmother's oatmeal cookie recipe that has a note on the back telling Mom that "Doug (my father) would eat them any way you made them because he always bragged about your cooking." This gives me a faded, grease stained, dog-eared snapshot of my Mother and Father as newlyweds, before the children, before the divorce, as a couple. I never knew them this way. Remembrance of things past that I don't remember.

I cook because I love. I cook for family and friends to show them my most basic form of attachment. It sounds a bit womanly and a bit simplistic, but while it's not the only reason, it's the main reason. If I invite you for a meal, I am expressing that I wish to be part of your life, and want you to be part of mine. If you are my guest, you are my family. The hearth is the center of the home and the fruit of the hearth joins us together.

Why do you cook?