COLUMN: Wisks, wasabi and the cult of home cookery

From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99 From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99As I write this I am eating cold pizza. Pretty normal for a college student. Still, I have neglected some details. I am eating not just cold pizza, but frozen Tombstone pizza. I warmed it in an oven, as per the instructions, ate half, then refrigerated the leftover in tupperware. Now I am eating it cold, out of the tupperware container, at 7 a.m. "Why can't you cook, fool? You aren't a callow, fresh-out-of-high-school, party-hopping stumblebum anymore; you're a 24-year-old 'adult' about to enter the job market. You have a studio apartment with a sizable kitchenette and plenty of shelf space. You even bought a spice rack. What gives?" Good question. It's 1999, after all, and cooking is a form of domestic literacy for women and men alike. Yet I still feel like the poor sap in the New Yorker cartoon who holds an electric drill and power saw over the kitchen counter while explaining to his flustered wife, "?because I'm more comfortable using my own tools, that's why. Now -- how much longer do you want me to sand the cake batter?" My ignorance of cooking runs deeper than mere unfamiliarity with whisks and wasabi. In fact, I don't know how to begin to cook -- and my kitchenette reflects it. One of my many unused cookbooks, Cooking for Dummies, calls the kitchen "both the emergency room and chapel of the home," at once a comforting antidote to late-night cravings and a time capsule brimming with the aromas of childhood. But I've lived in my apartment for almost a year now and my kitchenette reminds me of a miniature 7-Eleven -- a convenient, rather bland antidote to late-night cravings and a space brimming with the air of urban anonymity. Still, I can live with this. To lure me to the stove, Dear Reader, you'll have to do more than just invoke home and hearth. "Well, cooking is supposed to be a babe magnet." I've heard this one before. In fact, this is the theme of another of my unused cookbooks, Eating In: The Official Single Man's Cookbook.This gastrointestinal gem is filled with double entendres so bad they're good. Chapter titles include "Getting off on the joy of Eating In," "Popping the Cork," "A Little on the Side," "Perfect Measurements" and "Quicky Clean-Up Tips." It's not even a bad cookbook. For all its ironic riffing on the cooking-as-seduction theme, Eating In is essentially a self-improvement manual for bachelor-slobs who aspire to be bachelor-gentlemen. Besides, the food-seduction theory is not implausible. A quick, less-than-scientific study of several female friends indicates that cooking for your honey is indeed a turn-on, that sautZeing sea scallops proven_al for your significant other is not just the refuge of the arty and swishy anymore. In other words, I needn't fear that cooking will undermine my oh-so-notorious Manly Man image. Seducing with food even works for geeks and loners, apparently. Two decades ago J.D. Salinger, who is nothing if not a geeky loner, seduced a college-age nymphet named Joyce Maynard with -- that's right -- cooking. As Maynard relates in her memoir of the affair, America's mysterious man of letters would smoke his own salmon and even brought her squash and tamari sauce in bed. This cooking-for-babes argument is tempting. But, you know, there are less labor-intensive ways to get women. "But what about the simplest and most authentic motivation to cook," you ask, "a love of good food?" Actually, I'm not even sure what good food is anymore. Perhaps my palette has been dulled by years of stale, soul-less Methodist fare -- by one-too-many servings of overcooked vegetables, roast potatoes and overdone lamb roast. Maybe I'm just destined to follow in the footsteps of my mom, a self-styled anti-cook. "I was born not liking to cook," my mom told me with glee. "It's partly just sort of a genetic thing. Maybe because my mother never liked to cook. She never complained about it but she was never enthusiastic about it. "On the other hand, I do like to bake. I enjoy making pies and stuff. Baking is more exact. With cooking you just throw things in and that doesn't suit my personality." An acquaintance of mine in Washington, D.C., once feared cooking for just this reason -- lack of control. Then one morning she woke up and discovered she "loved to cook -- rich, lavish meals." "I became fanatical about food, possessed by food," she wrote of her conversion. "I pursued the art of cooking with all the humorless abandon the Washington woman generally reserves for the art of networking." I fear that, were I ever converted to the culinary cult, this is exactly how I'd cook. It'd be fanatical and possessive, the chief of my kitchen (err, kitchenette). That attitude may not help me win women or evoke the aroma of childhood, but right now it's more appealing than another slice of twice-thawed Tombstone.