Easy Targets

One of the great autumnal pleasures— other than raking leaves, which comes later in the season— is staying up late to make tomato sauce. I'm now on my third batch. Two weeks ago, as batch #2 simmered happily away, I suddenly realized that time had escaped my grasp: it was 2:30 in the morning. And on a work night! My mind must have been wandering.

What snapped me to attention— and what directed this attention, in turn, to the lateness of the hour— was the cavalcade of sirens wailing down the street outside. One of the houses nearby was on fire. The house had been an 1870s miracle, a Queen Anne stone mansion whose fate now hangs on the scales of the insurance companies.

My sauce, however, bubbled along contentedly, even as I padded barefoot over to the next street, straining to determine which house was burning. The cause of the fire, it turns out, was an electrical malfunction. But it could just as easily have been a kitchen fire— an unwatched stove, say, left burning too far into the night. So I rushed home to turn off my own stove, lest those flames get any wild ideas.

My hope tonight— needless to say— is that the new batch of tomato sauce will bring no such drama, and that the pleasure of late-night sauce-making will be unmarred by disaster or tragedy.

One might even say that the entire home cooking industry shares my hope, or at least bases its marketing upon it. What is a cookbook, after all, other than a bulwark against failure? Why resort to trial and error when a trial can be so trying, and when an error— in a situation wherein high heat, sharp instruments, and perishable foodstuffs are involved— can be dangerous as well as unsatisfying.

So, too, does the technology of the home cook serve a prophylactic function. Whether against waste, or strain, or lost time, or ineptitude, these instruments line our counters and cabinets like enamel soldiers primed for battle. Just look at the young lady on the cover of the Hamilton Beach food mixer cookbook, above; notice how keenly her face radiates pride, and how staunchly her unmarred apron testifies to the machine's efficiency.

Books like this are easy targets; indeed, it's far too easy to snicker at such a portrait of the 1940s domestic goddess, brandishing her cake like a toddler beaming after a successful trip to the potty.

Nor is it any real fun to marvel at the mixer's place in the tableau: how it quietly dominates the scene, a magician soliciting applause for his tireless and lovely assistant. The mixer takes its bow, too; the domestic goddess has distracted us just long enough for the mixer to pull off its sleight-of-hand.

Again, all this is simply too easy. The real pleasure here lies in following these protestations of joy as they change over time. I recently came across a number of such pamphlet-sized cookbooks (or cookbooks-cum-instruction manuals) at a local antique store, shortly after the night of the fire. They were all remarkably cheap, which is why I bought them. And they are remarkable documents. But documents of what?

Of gender, certainly. The calm, smiling grandmother of the 1930s gives way to the eager hausfrau of the 1940s and 1950s, suggesting slight alterations, but no major ones, in the picture of domesticity they present. The womenfolk help the machines cook all that food, and the experts at Syracuse University safely test the recipes.

One cookbook (to the right) offers a slightly different spectacle, depicting a curious hybrid of grandmother and infant, grinning girlishly out at us over her bifocals. She seems to have leapt over adult sexuality altogether. The book is dedicated to "carefree cooking," suggesting that the recipes are simple enough for our quaint little humunculus to prepare the dishes herself— no need for technology here! She holds the cookbook upside down, of course.

Again: easy targets. But there's something more to these little books than their ham-fisted identifications with the pre-war status quo. For other titles are more straightforwardly hortatory, appealing to their readers to "Be Original" or to "Cook with Cheese." Here we have a paean to the aesthetic sensibility that home kitchen products— whether instruments, implements, or condiments— can introduce into our lives. Technology offers more than just efficiency; it can fulfill cooking's appeal to pleasure.

Here, to the left, is a book that became an immediate favorite of mine, a pamphlet put out by the makers of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce sometime during the 1970s. A real marketing gambit, for certain: the versatility of a condiment made from fermented anchovies, raisins, garlic, molasses, and tamarind may not seem immediately apparent. But this obscure condiment, the book claims, can become a vehicle for unfettered creativity.

And I can imagine no vehicle more perfect— and certainly no more original!— than a meat loaf train. Chugging along on its carrot-disk wheels across a landscape of mashed potatoes, it bears a salutary cargo of vegetables to the good little boys and girls around the table.

"Just the dish to enchant the youngsters at any party," the recipe claims.

The dish enchants because it offers us, rather than the perfect dish, an incarnation of the perfect train. Its cargo notwithstanding, the train delivers because it was designed to careen off the tracks, to break into bits, to disappear. Railway accident— normally the stuff of tragedy— becomes a raison d'être, and, in doing so, becomes the stuff of pure entertainment. The meat loaf train, which serves 8-10, titillates the youngsters with its spectacle of immanent consumption, who tear into it like a roomfull of pre-teen de Quinceys running to gape at a fire.

Perhaps this, rather than the more pastoral pleasures of late-night sauce, represents the epitome of home cooking technology: disaster is not so much avoided as embraced, transformed into the very purpose of cooking itself.