The Clock on the Stove

When I was in fourth grade, some weasel of a boy told me the following joke:

Why don't women need to wear watches? Because there's a clock on the stove.

I remember that what mortified me was not the blatant sexism of the joke told by this twelve-year-old-twit, but rather that I didn't get it. In my world, stoves didn't have clocks. My mother's stove was a gas range, and gas ranges don't have clocks because the heat from the fire burners is far too strong for electronics.

Kind of like a woman in the kitchen.

New York Magazine recently ran a feature called "A Woman's Place" about the difficulties of being a professional woman chef in New York City. It was in the form of a group-style interview with seven of the city's most prominent female chefs: "April Bloomfield (The Spotted Pig), Rebecca Charles (Pearl Oyster Bar), Alex Guarnaschelli (Butter), Sara Jenkins (formerly of 50 Carmine), Anita Lo (Annisa), Jody Williams (Morandi), and Patricia Yeo (formerly of Monkey Bar and Sapa)."

I've had the pleasure of tasting the savory warmth of gnudi at Spotted Pig melt on my tongue and of indulging in the buttery toastiness of the Lobster roll at Pearl... So brava, ladies, brava.

Like the article says, historically women have been the rulers of kitchen in the domestic sphere. And then -- like any good export of the the sexism capital of the Western world -- France showed that great chefs, male, were fit to cook for the king.

Female chefs in recent history tend to carry the weight of domesticity: Julia Child, Martha Stewart, TV chefs like Giada DeLaurentiis and Ina Garten, even Alice Walker might be considered more of a domestic than, say, Ferrán Adria (who is certainly more of a chemist than anything else...test tubes... really...). The sex appeal of these women is that they make food that reminds you of home, that somehow appeals to Oedipal mother-love. Giada and Nigella Lawson are babes, and (or because?) they cook and look great doing it. "How to be a Domestic Goddess," anyone?

I find these women brave, and I truly admire the less conspicuous chefs who command the hot strips of New York's most competitive kitchens. Perhaps the professional restaurant kitchen is one of the last openly sexist places of work, where testosterone-laden competition makes it difficult -- if not impossible -- for a woman to truly succeed in the restaurant world.

This is ironic, considering that the role reverses in the domestic sphere. If ever my father tried to cross my mother in Her Kitchen, it was tantamount offense to a Yankee crossing the Mason-Dixon line. It just wasn't done, and the consequences were dire. I witnessed explosions throughout my years at home when we crossed the line to assist with a meal. Timing was everything, and if we ever challenged the "rate-limiting factor" of a dish, we were toast, broiled, boiled over and put back on the spit for another go-around in the fire. I'd like to see Gordon Ramsay take my mother on, because I know that my mother commands Her Kitchen so well that even Ramsay would shy away, muttering defeated curses under his hushed and humiliated breath.

So for a woman to succeed in a kitchen, she's got to be a fireball. Sexy, powerful, unafraid of getting burned or cut or splattered by fat frying in a pan. And then she must also be able to fight the other fires of competition with the ultimate Alpha Male: He Who Cooks and is Still a Man's Man. The male chef has the ultimate sex-appeal. So no matter how you slice it, men once again get the one up on women... or do they?

I have daily dreams of abandoning all of my financial responsibilities and becoming a sous-chef to sweat it out under the guidance of an older, wiser Chef de Cuisine. I do the private, at-home-chef thing for the Nanny Family, and that's a cakewalk. I've done dinner parties, wine tastings, Italian family holidays, cooking one-on-one for my father when my mother was away. This doesn't really constitute a resume, but let's look at the details a moment:

Thanksgiving, 2005. Paris. First Thanksgiving on my own. Galley kitchen, 4ft by 6ft with a narrow walking space. 1.5ft by 2ft working space. The menu: Turkey roulade with wild mushrooms, pinenuts herbs and cheese (I can't remember what kind of cheese), peppers and zucchini stuffed with roasted winter vegetables and homemade breadcrumbs, honey-glazed carrots with mint, more vegetables I can't remember, plus amuse bouches galore and roasted peaches for dessert. Served for 21 people, prepared from scratch, in seven-straight hours of sweaty, back-breaking work (see photo above). I wanted fresh ingredients from the market, so in my ambition, I prepared the meal in one, single day. By the end of that night (3am), I was more possessed than Lady Macbeth -- and I couldn't eat a damn thing I made. I lost my appetite completely. But everyone said it was great.

Yet that was at home, in my domestic little French kitchen. I wasn't on the line, I wasn't handling multiple requests for multiple diners with multiplicitous tastes. It was my menu for my guests and they were having the menu that I created myself. So perhaps my first Thanksgiving wasn't that impressive after all -- perhaps it doesn't qualify me for a job in a professional kitchen.

So what's the alternative for women who aspire to cook professionally? A pastry chef? Ovens are hot (I've a scars to prove it), but they cook slowly. It's not like a gas, full-range stove with all six burners going at once and pans flying everywhere. Go to Casa Mono and sit at the bar while you have your tapas and Rioja -- you'll see what I mean. Fire is sexy. So ladies, keep cooking with fire. And move. Quickly.

Eggplant Stacks with Wild Boar Ragú

My father was one of five children -- two girls, three hungry boys. Like every good Italian family, meals were served at table from large plates that were passed from person to person. I assume there must have been some sort of passing hierarchy, because my father always tells stories of anxiously waiting for the plate to reach him -- the second-to-last child -- at which point the good parts of the dish had been taken. Because the men in the family had such great appetites, there was always a sense of immediacy to the meal: eat quickly, or be left hungry.

I am sure that the threat of not having enough dinner was part of what made my father love food so much. It wasn't that food was scarce for his family, but rather that my father's voracious, teenage appetite couldn't easily be sated around a table of a family of seven, plus guests. Fortunately, he and my mother bore two girls, which means that my father always gets the lion's share of the meal.

For my father's birthday last month, my mother and I gave him the gift of a culinary weekend: three magnificent dinners and a delicious brunch. The following recipe, Eggplant Stacks with Wild Boar Ragú, is one of the dishes my mother and I prepared for him. My mother has a knack for finding all sorts of wild game meat to put into her dishes. She buys the D'Artagnan brand boar products. My father, ever the wine connoisseur, recommends this dish with a sturdy Barolo.


EGGPLANT STACKS WITH WILD BOAR RAGU

Serves 4

1 large Vidalia onion, chopped
5 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound boneless wild boar meat, cut into medium-sized cubes
1 pound chopped tomatoes
3 bay leaves
Fresh or dried oregano
Fresh basil
1 cup red wine
1 large eggplant, cut into1/4-inch slices
Fontina cheese (or another similar cheese that melts well, like Istara)
Fettucine pasta, or another spaghetti-like variety
Salt and pepper, to taste


In a large cast-iron pot, sauté the onion in olive oil until translucent. Add garlic. Add the boar meat and cook until seared and brown.

De-glaze the pan with a splash of wine, letting the boar absorb some of the wine, about thirty seconds. Add the tomatoes and the bay leaves and oregano. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Let ragù simmer on low on the stovetop. leaving the lid of the pot slightly ajar. Keep stirring occasionally for at least two hours. The longer the ragù is left to simmer, the more tender the meat will become.

Brush the eggplant rounds with olive oil, sprinkling with salt and pepper. Grill both sides of the eggplant until cooked. Remove from grill, and set aside on a dish for assembly.

Boil a large pot of water for pasta. Add salt once water has begun to boil. Add pasta, cook until al dente, and strain water thoroughly.

The ragù iwill be ready to eat when the meat falls apart from the cubes and has absorbed most of the liquid.

To assemble eggplant stacks, begin first layer on plate with eggplant. Add a layer of fontina cheese, a spoonful of ragù, followed by a full basil leaf. Repeat until desired height is reached, about three layers. Top with a generous spoonful of ragù, cheese, and chiffonade pieces of basil. In another corner of the dish, twist pasta into a nest, spooning ragù into the center. Sprinkle with cheese, and enjoy with a glass of Barolo.

Buon apetito!

Desfile Mariano

Every Saturday, the Upper West Side becomes quiet. Shops are closed, restaurants are slow, and the streets are empty except for the steady stream of families, young couples, and groups of young people on foot, who stroll the sidewalks in observance of weekly Shabbat. But yesterday afternoon, the lazy calm of the afternoon was interrupted when Amsterdam Avenue was suddenly flooded with music, color, and the Virgin Mary.

I jumped up to look outside the window, and I was stunned by the array of colors and the sheer volume of people on the street, wearing traditional garb and joining in dance and song. Most shocking of all were the floats: huge, crepe paper displays of the Virgin Mother, crucifixes of Christ, enormous rosary beads carried by children up the avenue.

Catholic Hispanics of New York were parading to celebrate the tenth annual Desfile Mariano, a parade of floats in honor of the faith of the entire Hispanic world. Sponsored by the Office for Hispanic Subjects of the Arquidiocesis of New York, people representing twenty-four Hispanic countries gathered on the street to honor the different representations of the Virgin Mary in these cultures.

Everyone in the neighborhood was speechless and stunned by the beauty of the commotion. Jewish families observing Shabbat stopped walking to gather on corners and watch the parade go by. People danced, clapped, and joined in song; some shouted from the sidelines when their country's representatives passed by.

The beauty of that hour on the street was in the seeming spontaneity of the whole parade: no police guarded the street, no streets were blocked off. It was up to the passers-by (and one lone priest) to stop cars from chopping across the Amsterdam parade. Everyone of every culture and socio-economic class was fascinated by the display of Hispanic pride and Catholic faith, and everyone stopped to savor the moment. The Mariano Parade was, to me, a cultural feast.

Desfile Mariano Photo Album