Cooking and Dating: From the Guys point of view

COOKING GUYS are different from Young Women...

This is a much remarked-upon phenomenon, the Mars-Venus stuff, and one which causes considerable difficulty for Guys, and probably also for Young Women. But what until now has not been fully understood, by this ME, anyway, is how this concept applies to a particularly, and unexpectedly, treacherous area: cuisine.

There are Guys who have reached a state of evolution, at which they are real foodies. We are talking guys who have more knives than the Turkish army, and sharper; keeping the Larousse Gastronomique at hand to check references; settling down in the easy chair of an evening to browse through "The New Professional Chef," the cookbook of the Culinary Institute of America, and owning pots and pans in the exact size and composition for each task (cast iron, enamel-clad cast iron, copper-lined with a combination of zinc and tin, Calphalon, and so on).

Such Guys view food as a celebration of life, an art form, an expression of warm feelings, a precious gift and offering. A fully objective analysis would also disclose what the military calls collateral effect: this could impress babes. Some Young Women, it seems, view food as a hostile entity whose sole intent is to produce fat on their thighs.

What we have here is a hidden discontinuity.

In large part, this is due to the fact that Guys approach food as they do most things. Like, for example, sports. When a Guy starts cooking, he wants to be the Joe Montana of mousse, the Michael Jordan of julienne, the Cal Ripken Jr. of roasting. I mean, this is serious stuff.

Consider the following.

I am having dinner with a Young Woman, nice place. She is suspiciously poking a fork at the goo on her pan-roasted free-range chicken with garlic and rosemary. What he is not noticing is that she is herding it into concealment under a radicchio leaf.

"It's not bad for something based on a roux," I note. "Personally, I would prefer to do it as a reduction sauce."

Reduction, what, the Young Woman is thinking. The gravy is on sale?

So, now having craftily insinuated that he can cook, I am very pleased when the Young Woman innocently suggests that perhaps, sometime, I might like to make dinner for her. I am saying to myself, "Heh, heh." Indeed, as the great M. F. K. Fisher noted of bachelors, in "An Alphabet for Gourmets," "The wonderful dinners they pull out of their cupboards with such dining room aplomb and kitchen chaos" demonstrate that "their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual."

YES SEXUAL! Cooking is a lot more than what we are cooking, and or eating, it is about the expeiance, who we are cooking for, and eating with, we as guys love the one night stand but hell the chance to do it over and over again, bring it on!

Making a dinner for that Young Woman, going to the market with her, is like fore play. "What's that?" the Young Woman asks in alarm. "That thing is ugly."

"Celery root, what the French call celeriac," I say, while grabbing a bunch of containers of heavy cream and a brick of unsalted butter.

I am cooking duck, and you hear her mind churn, and shrills "F-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-T," It was truly amazing, I would reflect later, how many syllables could fit into a three-letter word, particularly when spread over six octaves.

The duck is working. I deglaze the pan with the cassis vinegar and then throws in berries. A big glob of butter into a frying pan with the fresh rosemary to finish a 1-minute, 37-second boil. O.K., the celeriac, in the food processor. Celery root, some turnip, touch of mustard, big pour of cream for the texture. Yeah, cream; throw in some more.
"What are you doing?" the Young Woman asks.
Dimly, somewhere back in the far reaches of my brain, there is a tingling. These are the old synapses, the innate instincts that over the eons have warned Guys of the approach of saber-toothed tigers, bosses and ex-girlfriends. Danger lurks.

"Celery, this is celery," I explain. "Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, that's all they eat, celery."

"Not like that," the Young Woman replies, with considerable accuracy.

So, O.K. I get obsessive. But be fair; there are two sides to this.

The other side is the ambivalence with which the modern Young Woman views food. Above all, there is the question of appearances, and we're not just talking about thighs. There are actual documented cases in which Young Women have delicately picked at a perfectly good meal in public, then sneaked home to gorge on junk food. This ambiguity almost always manifests itself when a Young Woman tells me that her favorite foods come from something called "The Moosewood Cookbook," which strangely appeals to many admirable women. This is not a book about food. It is about vegetables.

Mentioning "Moosewood" is the culinary equivalent of a Young Woman giving Me the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel "A Hundred Years of Solitude" so that I can really get in touch with my emotions. Again, a well-meaning gesture, but one that is fundamentally misinformed. If Guys were truly in touch with their emotions, particularly those whose nature is to be nasty, brutish and short, they would go around punching people out. It has taken centuries of being repressed to get this far. Don't mess with something when it's just starting to work. I really have nothing against vegetables. Vegetables have their place. It is right next to the meat. So there is a dilemma, I am a cooking man, and she is a young woman, what are these mars and venus to do when dealing with the dilemma....?

There is a way out of this dilemma, expressed in an old Irish proverb: Call out for Chinese.