I Feel Bad About My Neck Read Free Page B

New York Times Cookbook, and Michael Field’s Cooking School had become the holy trinity of cookbooks. At this point I was working as a newspaper reporter at the New York Post and living in the Village. If I was home alone at night, I cooked myself an entire meal from one of these cookbooks. Then I sat down in front of the television set and ate it. I felt very brave and plucky as I ate my perfect dinner. Okay, I didn’t have a date, but at least I wasn’t one of those lonely women who sat home with a pathetic container of yogurt. Eating an entire meal for four that I had cooked for myself was probably equally pathetic, but that never crossed my mind.
    I cooked every single recipe in Michael Field’s book and at least half the recipes in the first Julia, and as I cooked, I had imaginary conversations with them both. Julia was nicer and more forgiving—she was by then on television and famous for dropping food, picking it up, and throwing it right back into the pan. Michael Field was sterner and more meticulous; in fact, he was almost fascistic. He was full of prejudice about things like the garlic press (he believed that using one made the garlic bitter), and I threw mine away for fear he would suddenly materialize in my kitchen and disapprove. His recipes were precise, and I followed them to the letter; I was young, and I believed that if you changed even a hair on a recipe’s head, it wouldn’t turn out right. When I had people to dinner, I loved to serve Michael’s complicated recipe for chicken curry, accompanied by condiments and pappadums—although I sometimes served instead a marginally simpler Craig Claiborne recipe for lamb curry that had appeared in Craig’s Sunday column in The New York Times Magazine. There were bananas in it, and heavy cream. I made it recently and it was horrible.
    Craig Claiborne worked at The New York Times not just as the chief food writer but also as the restaurant critic; he was enormously powerful and influential, and I developed something of an obsession with him. Craig—everyone called him Craig even if they’d never met the man—was famous for championing ethnic cuisine, and as his devoted acolyte, I learned to cook things like moussaka and tabbouleh. Everyone lived for his Sunday recipes; it was the first page I turned to in the Sunday Times. Everyone knew he had a Techbuilt house on the bay in East Hampton, that he’d added a new kitchen to it, that he usually cooked with the French chef Pierre Franey, and that he despised iceberg lettuce. You can’t really discuss the history of lettuce in the last forty years without mentioning Craig; he played a seminal role. I have always had a weakness for iceberg lettuce with Roquefort dressing, and that’s one of the things I used to have imaginary arguments with Craig about.
    For a long time, I hoped that Craig and I would meet and become friends. I gave a lot of thought to this eventuality, most of it concerning what I would cook if he came to my house for dinner. I was confused about whether to serve him something from one of his cookbooks or something from someone else’s cookbook. Perhaps there was a protocol for such things; if so, I didn’t know what it was. It occurred to me that I ought to serve him something that was “my” recipe, but I didn’t have any recipes that were truly mine—with the possible exception of my mother’s barbecue sauce, which mostly consisted of Heinz ketchup. But I desperately wanted him to come over. I’d read somewhere that people were afraid to invite him to dinner. I wasn’t; I just didn’t know the man. I must confess that my fantasy included the hope that after he came to dinner, he would write an article about me and of course include my recipes; but as I said, I didn’t have any.
    Meanwhile, we all began to cook in a wildly neurotic and competitive way. We were looking for applause, we were constantly performing, we were desperate to be all things to all people. Was this the