Learning to Cook : Growing Up in the Kitchen

When we were 8 years old, long before La Brea Bakery’s Nancy Silverton introduced the world to her breads and desserts, she showed me how to make this mid-afternoon snack: She thin-sliced canned white potatoes, submerged them in three inches of bubbling melted butter and spiced them with so much paprika and garlic that they’d make you think of rusted doubloons. This was during a somewhat cautious phase in my eating habits--my diet consisted of McDonald’s cheeseburgers or noodles with butter and not much else. But you can imagine the impression it made on me to see that it was possible for someone my exact age to create, with deadly seriousness, a customized junk food appetizer.

Since then, things haven’t changed much. Dinner always turns out better when I cook with the telephone receiver cradled between my ear and my shoulder, as Nancy patiently talks me through each step.

For years, I’ve described Nancy’s paprika potatoes as if it were the blast-off point of her professional career. But this is not quite accurate. She recently informed me that before the potato incident, there was an earlier, more dizzying experience. She pan-fried thick slices of baloney until they curved up into the shape of rubbery bra cups. Having never seen anyone else make luncheon meat curl, Nancy assumed that she’d happened upon an important scientific discovery, something with which she would someday make a fortune. Of course, in one way, she was right. Someone who could be inspired by the thermal dynamics of a piece of baloney would have to possess limitless interest in the strange and unpredictable universe of heated wild yeast.

Still, I believe that classical technique and a finicky palate are acquired skills. Even talented chefs--just like the rest of us--must begin at Ground Zero.

Trumps chef-owner Michael Roberts experienced his first culinary victory at age 10 when he took frozen French fries and put them on a sheet pan. He then moved on to white sauce. At age 8, City Restaurant’s Susan Feniger slathered peanut butter, honey and bananas on toast--the same breakfast she tried to get on the kid’s menu at her restaurant.

As any chef will tell you, cooking is, at its most rudimentary, the organic chemistry of grasping what happens when you add this to that and in how much measure.

In “How to Cook a Wolf,” M.F.K. Fisher tells us we can pick this up by doing something as basic as doctoring packaged soups and figuring out what hits the spot. What stops some people along the way is their fear that cooking must be approached as fine art. Angeli’s Evan Kleiman starts her students with an easy pasta sauce made of ripe, unpeeled tomatoes and chopped fresh basil; it’s a calming device to, as she says, “make them feel as if they’re not responsible for sending the space shuttle to the moon.”

Learning to cook well requires patience, concentration and a certain amount of invention, but it also requires that one work within his or her limitations. My Uncle Abe has taken this concept to its most minimalist conclusion. He makes only one great dish, vegetable-barley soup, although it has been said he is currently fine-tuning his fish chowder.

Uncle Abe didn’t start cooking until he was 67, and even then, only because he had to. My Aunt Claire had developed lateral sclerosis, a degenerative disease that seemed to spread in agonizingly slow phases. First went her conspiratorially whispered wisecracks, then her easy laugh. When Uncle Abe began to cook soup, he was only hoping to find something nourishing to spoon-feed her.

Oddly enough, he adapted the hearty broth from a beef short ribs recipe in a Jewish cookbook called “Love and Knishes.” I’ve often wondered why he didn’t just look in the index under vegetable-barley soup. Was the appropriate chapter missing? Was he displaying a previously undetected streak of rebelliousness? I’ve never been able to wring the answer out of him.

His day-job kept him busy, so soup-making was reserved for the weekend. On Saturday morning, he’d drop two pounds of meaty ribs in a three-quart pot, boil them for an hour, then store them in the Frigidaire overnight. Day Two involved skimming off the white sheets of congealed fat, then adding vegetables--carrots, celery, green pepper, zucchini, brown onions and a russet potato--diced into the same careful quarter-inch units that he recalled seeing my grandmother make. He broke up ears of yellow sweet corn in three or four pieces and tossed them in too. According to Uncle Abe’s specifications, one must also include half a six-ounce juice glass of barley, which should first be rinsed in the strainer of a five-cup perk coffeepot.

Some of these guidelines may sound unusual, but they should not be taken lightly--like all good cooks, he doesn’t part with his trade secrets easily. To serve his soup correctly, you must first know that it’s patterned after Mexican cocido , which means in each person’s bowl you place one whole short rib and a piece of corn.

In the wintertime, there are people in Uncle Abe’s dusty hometown of Nogales, Ariz., who have answered their doorbells and found my uncle on their porch, holding a gift pot of soup. It’s been two years since we buried my aunt. When he learned to cook, it was out of sheer desperation. Now he tells me it is for his own amazement.