How I learned to eat

Dinner time. My mother had “slaved” in the kitchen and was hot and not pleased. Vegetables were steamed soft, meat overcooked in the pan or oven. She did not have the touch. However, we ate it. My father’s cooking wasn’t much better. I was about 30 years old before I learned that cooked liver could be deliciously tender and juicy.

Mom’s best dish was a tuna casserole that included a can or so of tuna, and mushroom soup out of a Campbell’s can, poured over alternating layers of Fritos; she gave me the recipe and I made it for myself when I was a working bachelor. Fritos were one of my favorite food groups. I could buy some new comics or science fiction magazines, get a cold Pepsi and a bag of Fritos and sit on the porch in an afternoon and have a grand time.

The college fraternity cooks were okay. I was usually hungry. Plus there were all the hamburgers and French fries and fried chickens and chicken-fried steaks in between. And late night in the dorm, the hamburger and milkshake guy would come through. He sold hamburgers made of some kind of ground meat, greasy in the bun, and frozen milkshakes.

The military cooks had the license to keep us fueled. It was fuel, you couldn’t care too much how it tasted. Could a car complain about Cities’ Service gasoline instead of Phillips? Was Gulf too rich, did (Conoco betray its dirty origins?

So--later in life--when I was assigned to a fancy series of books about food... I required extensive and rapid education.

My Souper Soup

Back in the Sixties, my wife and I worked for Time-Life Books. I was assigned to the Foods of the World series, a subject about which I knew nothing except which fork to use to eat. I was in charge of assigning photography for certain books.

In the text of one book, about French Provincial cooking, I read a phrase about “...a pot of soup kept on the back of the stove.” It made my mouth water.

I decided just before Christmas and New Year, that I would make a star-kissed bean soup. We bought bags of dry beans and one evening I added them one by one along with a ham bone and chicken stock, to a big pot and cooked them up into a great-smelling pot of super soup. 

And, after cooking to delicious perfection, I pushed the pot to the back of the stove. Of course, as I later realized, the text in the cookbook referred to country stoves, which always had a flame going. 

Next day, Penny’s parents were due in town from New Jersey and I wanted to feed them my great soup so they’d stop believing that I was an idiot.

I rushed in after work and pulled the pot to the front burner, turned on the flame and took off the lid to stir it. But before my wooden spoon entered... there was a burp within the soup; a bubble appeared.

“Hmm,” I said. No idiot I. I mentioned it to Penny, who also said, “Hmm,” and then added that she was going to call an expert, a woman we worked with who worked in the kitchen to test recipes for the books.

The woman, Fifi, was ill with flu and her husband shouted to her from the phone that our bean soup had bubbled before the fire could heat it.

Penny could hear Fifi shout back from her sickbed: “No STOP! IT’S PTOMAINE!”

I flushed the entire pot into the NYC sewer system. I hope I wasn’t responsible for poisoning the fish in the Hudson. Since then I’ve never attempted to cook anything more complex than scrambled eggs.