I don’t think I ever told you in so many words that I’m a mad cook. This is a fact of my soul, my necessity, my personality, my essence—I gotta feed people or sink into the ground. This thing made itself felt on my trip to Portugal because, even though literally every other Lisbon business is a restaurant, a bakery, an ice cream shop, or a coffee house, Theresa and I would hoof it down the cobblestone hills a couple of miles from our place to the Pingo Doce, ubiquitous little supermarkets that dot Portugal, and we would buy stuff so I could cook. We snooped around the aisles, translating labels, searching out the strongest (15!) coffee pods, the most succulent cherry tomatoes since 1952, the three or four kinds of specialized kales and cabbages, conferring with other customers over the delectable and blessedly cheap and almost invariably delicious bottles of vinho verde (fizzy green wine), Douro reds and whites, the redolent sausages. People complain about the price of food there, but I knew I was going to have sticker shock when I got back here, and I sure do. (At Pingo Doce, two three-packs of bone-in chicken thighs cost a bit over five dollars.) Then we’d hoof it back up the hill with our way-too-heavy totes.
I made dinner for our host out of that bargain. FIrst, the chicken got sauteed till nicely browned in olive oil and butter, then I coaxed a little sauce out of some reconstituted dried ceps I found in Miguel’s cupboard, garlic, onions, capers, lemon juice, some of the Douro white wine, till it thickened up a bit, and finally it all got popped into the hot oven with thick slices of caramelized lemon atop each thigh. Miguel never tasted anything like it. One of my favorite ways to make potatoes is also from Portugal: Big cubes boiled till tender, drained and doused with always-spectacular olive oil from the Alentejo, salt and pepper—and just look out. I made those for him too. You’re welcome, if you make this…
This cooking penchant emerged on the long flight home via this poem:
I have to cook so I can be sure of something. / In anticipation of an old friend, a stove, anybody’s stove, / Swinging through the aisles of the nearest loja / In quest of umami, the umami hook, looking for the max the max— / Fought out to the last desperate inch—/ At a good price because you know I can feed a family of fifteen / On the price of breakfast at the hotel café… / Looking, and there is the fado playing note-for-note in my head, / And what’s going to up that savor profile… / No pest can pester me from it…I’m laughing now, plucking from the shelves… / I pay, the fado plays, I bring it back to the kitchen, anybody’s kitchen, and get cracking. / I find the pans, I find the matches, I dig out the salt, unpack the loot, / Put on Amalia, / Still sweating from the lugging of satchels full to splitting / Back up the mountain to the house from / Pingo Doce (or Purity), pulling out the cumin, the chilis, the olives, / Raiding the next-door neighbor’s rosemary, plucking parsley from the backyard, / Proofing the yeast, coating the meat with garlic, olive oil, lemon peel, / Letting it rest, but not me, / Going at it with the mincing, thinking about timing, who’s arriving, what’s the topic; / I have to cook because it is love, because it has to do with loving, / With loving you. / It is love in Deed. I max the tang; I max the Sturm und Drang; I max the jangly, mangly bang of it / I max the zing, I max the fling, I max the mingle-y, jingle-y sting of it / I risk extremes: the too-hot, the too-not, the too muchly finesse of it. / I risk. I cook. / Because I need to make sense and somebody needs to eat. /
Because because I need I need to make dinner from something something / And give it to you. Eat, you you—com, tu tu—my gramma’s / Persistent refrain: I love you; / Eat, you you, / I love you with this food./ I cook because my gramma knew the song / And I am up to it, too. / The infinite Will to Make. / I cook with fado inside my breakthroughs.
And I cook and I cook and the fado plays every tragic recreation. / No end to it. No end to love. No end. I cook. I make up for something. / I cook and it makes sense, it is sure. / Love needs to be cleared up here: this is it: / I cook. Really.
