Cooking `miracle' turns sour

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

After The Miracle, I envisioned myself a cook. For days when I looked into the mirror, I saw Julia Child. I dreamed about scallions and leeks. I pored over the food section in the papers. I cut out recipes. I actually thought about subscribing to Gourmet magazine. I believed I was a changed woman.

The Miracle had convinced me. I'd had a dinner party, and it had been a success. The smoke alarm hadn't gone off. No one left the table with stomach cramps. I didn't have to serve Tums for after-dinner mints. I'd done the impossible: I'd cooked a meal people had actually swallowed and enjoyed.

Granted, I'd worked on it for days. Three nights to D-day, I made soup from real vegetables, which I cut up and boiled and pureed. The soup was great. The soup was incredible! And it hadn't even come out of a can!

The next night I boned chicken and pounded it and sauteed it; then sliced mushrooms and sauteed them in a different pan with butter and Marsala wine. Every two minutes I called Debbie Nigro or Lynn Gross to ask how big I should cut the chicken pieces, if I had to bread them, how you could tell when they were cooked, if a bottle of Marsala was enough, if three packages of mushrooms were too much.

You're doing fine, they said. The next night I made bread with flour and yeast - not Bread du Jour, but the real thing. I was on a roll. (No pun intended.)

The bread didn't turn out exactly right. It was flat and doughy, but by then I was so proud of my success with the soup, which was getting tastier by the day, and the chicken, which smelled as if it had been cooked at a restaurant, that a loaf of flat, doughy bread was a tiny set-back. I went on to twice-baked potatoes, my culinary dreams secure.

A few hours before the dinner party, I popped an apple crisp into the oven - my first ever. It was Caryn McLean's recipe, and it was easy. You didn't even have to peel the apples. This cooking thing was fun!

Then the guests arrived, and The Miracle happened. Everyone sat down. Everyone ate. And everyone asked for seconds.

"Don't let it go to your head," my kids told me days later when I was still talking about The Dinner. "It was a fluke. After all, the bad meals you've cooked in your life, you were due for a good one."

What if they were right? What if that singular success were an aberration? I made the apple crisp again to see if I still had the touch. I did. It was a legitimate miracle.

That's when I started clipping recipes for things like Autumn Vegetable Bisque and Butternut Mushroom Farm Liver Pate and pasting them on notecards and dreaming.

That's when I began thinking, wouldn't it be nice to have another dinner party?

That was three months ago. Since then, I've slipped back into my old ways. One night, Greek salads from the D&E deli. The next night, something smothered in spaghetti sauce from A Taste of Italy. Hamburgers I make at home, and chili - I can do that - and tuna fish sandwiches and omelettes. But that's about it.

Even Christmas was pre-cooked - pre-cooked ham, pre-cooked turkey.

Sunday I said, "That's it. I'm going to cook again. I'm going to make pasta and sauce." My daughters groaned.

"We'll make our own sandwiches, thank you," they said.

They were smart.

The sauce was a disaster. I called a friend for a recipe. Actually, recipe is the wrong word. Recipe sounds difficult. This was easy. But I messed up big time.

Two hours later, after three tries, my husband and I sat down to a bowl of spaghetti with a glob of butter on it.

Which brings me to my point. Women, all the time, when told that a meal was delicious, say, "It was nothing," or "It was easy," or "Anyone can cook." And they mean it. They believe this is true.

But it isn't. The ability to cook food that is more than edible, that people actually anticipate and enjoy, is a skill, a gift, an art form. Just anyone cannot cook. I can't. Even with connect-the-dots instructions, I generally fail. The one good meal I've cooked in a lifetime took me four days.

The Miracle is that it didn't take eight, and that it happened in my kitchen at all.