The week before Christmas is traditionally a time of recovery and relaxation, but not for me. I’m worked up. I cooked a cathedral roast and some satsuma-glazed beef back ribs in New Orleans for Christmas, and now I’m all nervous energy and restless plans of action. And one such plan has a special claim on me. I am making my new year’s resolution.
I don’t know about you, but I take my new year’s resolution seriously. Not in the sense of actually sticking with it, or accomplishing it, or even thinking about it. But at the time, I mean it, or at least I try to mean it. And it seems to me that if you try to mean it, than you have have at least the shadow of moral urge - a spectre that will haunt your idle moments and hamburger binges, and orient you, however faintly, toward your best intentions. My best intention, this year, is to cook better for my wife.
Danit doesn’t ask much of me. She hardly eats at all, and when she does, she is happy to have the same thing over and over again, which is how I like to cook. (I also say the same things over and over again, and she endures that as well.) Over the past 12 months, I’ve spent an unconscionable amount of time eating out and travelling. Some of these memories are precious to me - cooking fried chicken with Sean Brock at Husk, eating spit roasted lamb fat sandwiches on focaccia bread in Uruguay with Francis Mallman, presiding over Meatopia’s glories. But none of these frolics in any way speak to my most fulfilling duty: that of cooking for my wife.
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You can see that it was not always so. Over the course of my first year writing this column, I ardently and eloquently chronicled my struggles cooking for my wife. I often screwed things up; but I was always trying. But over the last year that sacred duty became an afterthought. A ten-pound bag of Lafrieda ground beef could be made into a great meat sauce, or, with a little less effort, a very good meat sauce. The meat was so sweet and its fat so aromatic, that tossing in a couple of cans of crushed tomatoes and a few chiles was enough to make it rich and savory; later, when reheating it, I found I could add in garlic and aromatics, giving it the depth and flavor in its revenant phase that I had denied it in its creation. Anyway, with all the oil and pecorino and hot pepper and pasta starch, it could hardly be any better. Or so I pretended to myself. In reality, I fooled nobody but me. It was a copout, plain and simple, and Danit ate it because she was hungry and it was in fact pretty goddamn good.
But you don’t get to feel you’ve done your best for your wife, by making “good enough” meat sauce. Or “good enough” grilled cheese. Or by bringing a half-eaten portion of afterthought brisket home with you from dinner, to feed an elegant aesthete who won’t even eat chicken skin, much less blobby deckle fat. I forgave myself for not making anything but meat sauce because I was working so hard to make it well, burning as I was with a hard, gem-like flame of obsessive-compulsiveness. But to phone in the same sauce every week? I know I can do better.
So: in 2012, I am going to make Danit new sauces, and more intelligent pastas. I ate a three-year old rice scented only with some bay and butter at Husk; maybe I can make something like that. Maybe I can try to recreate the hummus from Israel, instead of the lamb fat from Uruguay: something she actually likes, rather than something I do. The point of cooking for your wife is to feed her the things that will make her feel good, not what you think she should like if only she had a less-perverted taste. It still bothers me that she doesn’t like chicken skin, but maybe I can make that happen in the new year too. We all want to be better people, or at least that’s what we tell ourselves at this time of year.