Year of the Cow (30 page)

Summer watches me fumble and smirks. “First Passover?”

“Is it obvious? On to the four questions…” Wait, what? “There's a quiz?” I ask. This is unexpected. I read further in the Haggadah. I have no context from which to answer these questions. I know vaguely what they're about, but that's it. At a loss, I improvise. “Dec … should you be nice to people?”

“Yes!”

“You sure?”

“Yes!”

“Super sure?”

“Yes!”

“Is this the fourth question?”

A pause, as he counts on his fingers. “Yes!”

“Correct. Quiz passed.” Cheering ensues. Once more I check my seder instructions:
Find the matzo.
“Okay, Tiny Man … I hid matzo somewhere in the living room. Go!”

Summer laughs.

“What's matzo?” Declan asks.

“It's like a cracker. There's a cracker hidden somewhere over there. Go!”

“That room is filthy,” Summer says. “He can't eat the matzo…”

“Why can't I eat it?” Dec asks.

“I took care of it,” I insist. “Dec. Cracker. Go!”

Declan hops down from his seat and rushes into the living room. He looks all around for the matzo. “I don't see it, Daddy…”

“Maybe a dust bunny ate it,” Summer opines.

“Hush, you.” I turn back to Declan. “Try the coffee table.”

He looks for a moment, pawing around under the coffee table. Then his eyes light up. “I found it!” He pulls out a single sheet of matzo, sealed in a Ziploc bag. “Daddy, I found it!”

“Nice work, buddy. Bring that over here.”

Summer sees the matzo, wrapped in a plastic Baggie like drugs in a cop show, and starts laughing. After a moment, so do I.

Dec digs into the matzo as I check my seder instructions. It says something about slouching; free people are allowed to slouch at the table, whereas slaves—as the Jews were in Egypt—had to stand. So slouching at seders is a thing. I like slouching. “Let's jump straight to the slouching,” I suggest, pouring a little water for everyone and raising a glass. “Here's to bad posture. And to making time to eat together.”

“L'chaim,”
Summer says.

“Cheers!” Dec enthuses.

We each take a sip, savoring the moment and the experience of taking the time to share a meal in one another's company. I serve up fat piles of mashed potatoes, heavy with dairy and onion. Crossed with roasted spears of asparagus and draped with slices of incredibly tender brisket. It's delicious. I'm glad I hewed closely to Ellen's recipe—any added liquid would have wrecked it.

My family and I share a delightful, homey meal made with love. An opportunity to spend a cool spring evening with those closest to me. A moment to count my blessings. We didn't get any of the details of the seder right—or even close to right, really. I'm pretty sure that mixing dairy and meat violated some Jewish dietary laws—but we did our best. And our evening was all the richer for it.

“Daddy, I don't think this cracker is any good,” Dec says, his face contorted with disgust.

I laugh. “It tastes funny because it's unleavened. When the Israelites fled Egypt, they didn't have any time to make real bread.”

“And that's one of the four questions,” Summer notes. “‘Why are we eating only matzo?' Good work, Stone.”

I check my Haggadah. She's right. The guy leading the seder is supposed to ask the kids present four questions—this is one of them. I've inadvertently stumbled into some semblance of accuracy.

“What's unleavened?” Declan asks.

I explain yeast and how it works. Declan listens, learning a little about the food he eats. A process I'm still continuing myself. We may have missed some of the four questions, but we're getting more answers every day.

*   *   *

It's about three in the afternoon. I'm standing in the hallway of the UCLA Medical Center; bright sunlight streams in through hallway windows. I haven't slept much. I look down at my son, holding my hand. “You ready, buddy?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Okay. She's super excited to meet you.”

“Really?” he asks, raising his eyes to mine. He's clutching a brand-new little girl's backpack, full of blankets, toys, and stuffed animals. A gift.

“Really.” I nod. “Let's go in.”

We slowly crack open the door to a hospital room. The curtains are drawn, and in the dim light I can see Summer sitting on a couch by the window. Declan and I creep into the room. “Is she asleep?” I ask.

“I don't think so,” Summer answers, craning her neck to peek into a plastic crib in the center of the room. “I think she just woke up.”

Declan and I take a few more steps into the room. I lift him up into my arms, and we peer into the crib. There, blinking up at us with enormous blue eyes, is my new daughter. Nora.

“Hi, Nora. This is your big brother, Declan.” My son only stares, transfixed. I lean into his ear and whisper, “Dec, this is your sister, Nora.”

“Hi, Nora,” he whispers, his voice creaky. She coos and blinks. Slowly, Declan smiles.

I set Declan gently on the ground. “Would you like to hold her?”

He thinks a moment, then his whole face lights up. He nods.

*   *   *

Declan takes to Nora immediately. As soon as we bring her home, they're inseparable. He wants to hold her all the time, and he's incredibly gentle. He nudges our hundred-pound dog out of the way when she gets too close and keeps trying to offer her wildly inappropriate toys and joys that he likes—on the logic that if he likes them, she'll like them, too. “Nora, do you want to hold my lightsaber?” “Nora, I built a robot for you.” “Nora, look! I found Daddy's skateboard!”

Family floods into our Los Angeles home from far and farther away—Texas, Kansas, Georgia. We rarely get to see our parents; Summer and I are the sole outposts of our families on the West Coast. Our nearest relatives live two thousand miles away, so it's wonderful to have them darken our doorway to welcome the newest addition to our family.

To celebrate Nora's birth and the all-too-rare visits of far-flung relatives, we do what people always do to mark events and milestones. We cook. As the next few weeks blur together into a disjointed mental slide show of diapers and laughs and late-night feedings—we all cook together. And we eat like kings.

I braise a chuck roast as a welcome when Summer's mother, Tricia, comes to town.

And then Tricia does the same for us, when we're too tired to think straight or make consonant sounds with our mouths.

I grill rib eyes to mark the first time my parents have been able to visit the Left Coast in years.

And then I turn leftovers into a hash for us all to eat for breakfast; I haven't gone shopping in a couple of weeks, and we're down to eating sauerkraut and canned sardines.

It's easy to cook whole foods and glorious meals when time is cheap and there's nothing more pressing clamoring for attention. It's something else entirely with a houseful of guests and only a few hours of sleep a night, with a brand-new life in the world that needs what she needs when she needs it.

In those times, cooking becomes again what it always was, back before we forgot the value of preparing a meal. Before we became accustomed to food extruded and sprinkled with flavor dust and sold two for $1.99. Cooking is a solace. A little corner of the world where I store my peace of mind. While everything's blowing up and nothing's going right, and what is the dog into? And why is my daughter still crying, I just changed her! In the middle of all this calamity, I will have a pot roast. In my often futile daily rush to get ahead and get things done—this actually
is
done. This is finished. I can find something in the freezer and it will be nutritious and satisfying and wholesome, as long as I don't wreck it. And then we can sit down together, take a deep breath, and enjoy it. There will be dinner. We will not starve.

And it will be an event. A moment, probably timed for after the kids fall asleep, where we can sit. Exhale. And for just that fleeting moment—clean no floors. Change no diapers. Answer no e-mails. And be people again. An opportunity to tell a tale between bites of a meal hard fought for and toiled over. To relate an anecdote—something cute or terrifying that happened when everybody else was turned away or trying to prevent Armageddon from a different angle. To raise a glass and take a breath before our eyes slip shut into slumber and we do it all again, only another day older.

When people talk about the good life—what do they mean if not this?

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in
The Raw and the Cooked,
proposed cooking as one of the handful of delineators between humans and all the other beasts of the earth. He saw it as a physical example of human control over the natural world. In the act of cooking, he argued, we transform organic matter from a natural to a cultural object. Cooking, then, marks the very edge of what it is to be human.

Others have taken the primacy of cooking even further—anthropologist Richard Wrangham, in his book
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human,
posits that beyond being a marker for humanity, the act of cooking actually enabled the human species. By cooking food, and specifically meat, our hominid forebears could extract more energy from that food. Per this cooking hypothesis, the ability to cook food meant that we could, in essence, begin the digestive process outside the body, rather than performing that task solely in the gastrointestinal tract as the other apes do. This ability changed us irrevocably; we could afford to have smaller molars, adapted to softer cooked foods. Shorter intestinal length, as those intestines didn't have to do as much work. The caloric surplus that ensued allowed early hominids to develop larger brains and to use those larger brains to fully master fire, come down from the trees, and take the first tentative steps toward
Homo sapiens.

In any case, without cooking, we'd be something other than human. We'd likely be less aware. Less capable of wonder. Less able to react to the demands of our circumstance—to revel in our triumphs and mourn our inevitable defeats. We'd be on the other side of the nature/culture divide, instead of the glorious, ridiculous, exasperating, beautiful, petty, anomalous hairless apes we've somehow managed to become.

These meals are magic.

Slumped in a hard-backed chair, surrounded by people I love, the remains of a steak and salad splayed across the table in front of me as my children slumber peacefully in their rooms, I smile. I lay a hand on the back of my wife's neck and squeeze it right where I know she always carries her tension.

If anyone wants to know why cooking is important to me, this is why.

*   *   *

A couple of weeks later, the in-laws are gone. The kids are sleeping. The house is clean and the phones are silent. The sun has set long ago.

I slip into the kitchen, where I've thawed two slim ovals of beef from the tenderloin. Filet mignons. Dinner for two.

Filet is the most tender cut on the entire animal, with a silken texture and almost no connective tissue. Cooking hot and fast is key—and no more than medium rare. They won't take long to cook, which I appreciate today. Summer and I haven't slept a whole lot lately, and we've been entertaining visitors to boot. The hubbub is a treat, but so is the respite after.

In my ancient mortar and pestle, I crush some peppercorns. Just fine enough that we won't eat gravel, but not wholly into dust. There are easier ways to do this, but I like my mortar and pestle. I can control the process as precisely as I'd like and know that I crushed the peppercorns exactly as I wanted. With my own two hands and a chunk of rock. One Step Back once more, I suppose. No electrical intermediaries. No extra gewgaws to wash. There's something of a meditative quality to it. I turn the crushed peppercorns out onto a plate and press both steaks into the rubble, coating both sides, then turn my attention elsewhere.

Butter into a hot pan with a splash of olive oil, to heat just until the drama bubbles and fades. Gently, I lay the steaks into the pan. They announce their arrival with a satisfying hiss. A couple of minutes on each side for a hard mahogany sear, then I set them aside under foil.

Quickly, I kill the heat and add a little brandy to the pan. The alcohol vaporizes immediately. I slip a lit match into the open air above the liquid, and a pyramid of blue fire erupts from the pan. Had I been able to do this for my Christmas dessert, I would have been ecstatic. I couldn't figure it out then, but it's easy now. I swirl the liquid until the fire goes out, then bring back the heat to deglaze the pan.

When the burned-on fond is dissolved from the bottom of the pan, I pour in heavy cream. Aromas of pepper and liquor and seared meat flood the room, drawing my wife to the kitchen.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Cooking.” I hand her a glass of red wine I had waiting.

In minutes, some of the water has boiled out of the liquid in the pan, and the cream looks very much like a sauce. I splash in another touch of brandy and a pinch of salt. Then kill the heat. Nestle the steaks back into the pan and cover them with the cream sauce. Finally, when they're just warm, I place each steak in the center of a plate, pour over the sauce, and sit down to dinner with my wife.

We sit for a long, languid moment, silently eating our meals. Candles light the scene, and Duke Ellington wafts in from another room. We're tired. But happy. And, for me, at least, feeling disproportionately blessed.

Summer's the first to speak. “This is really, really good.”

“Yeah,” I say. “It really is.”

“Was it hard to make?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “Not especially.”

“Thanks for making it,” she says.

I consider. The steak is perfect. But I know full well that any technique I brought to the cooking process was just window dressing. The meat is the star here. I didn't do anything special. I just shut up, kept my head down, and let a really good thing be really good.