Cooking was the last best high for BY DOUGLAS CRUICKSHANK "by the time middle age began crawling into view," Dana told me one afternoon while he ground bay leaves with the handle of a screwdriver on a board he balanced across his knees, "I'd tried every filthy, disgusting, depraved, illegal thing I could think of. Taking up cooking was the Final Frontier for me. All my loadie friends thought it was avant-garde, man." He pronounced "avant" so it rhymed with "pant" instead of "taunt." Dana is now in the kitchen on the other side of the mirror and I miss him because (among other things) he was the world champion free-ranging, off-kilter conversationalist and a hell of a cook, and I was often the dual beneficiary. He was also a hell of a drinker, which is why he's gone. Even I couldn't keep up with him, and I have a liver made of hand-polished Carrara marble. I met him after he eased out of drugs and into cocktails, mainly, so he said, to accommodate his passion for cooking. "When I'm cartooned on rhino powder," he explained to me, "I cook slop. And when I cook slop, I disappoint my guests, and then they don't come back and then I don't have anybody to talk to and I love to talk. So I stopped dope and started vodka. I can drink half the day and still turn out a respectable meal. Besides," he said, "there's nothing more seductive than giving a person something wonderful to put in their mouth." He was a funny, fey, brilliant soul. Dana was also the most obsessive character I've ever known. In addition to being a doper and a drunk, he'd been a professional violinist, a scientific illustrator and enough of an expert on butterflies and moths that he was occasionally called on to consult at natural history museums. He gravitated toward vocations that demanded exactitude. He was very neat and utterly meticulous in the way that former junkies often are; addicted, you could say, to existing in direct opposition to the past. He'd also been around the world via the oddest of routes several times. But he possessed a bad mix of fragility and bravado, an evil combo from which he sought frequent chemical relief. As for cooking, he'd do one dish for weeks on end -- coq au vin, say -- and then another for a few weeks -- perhaps leg of lamb or sweetbreads. Always inviting friends to partake, always paying for everything. Somewhere along the line he'd made himself a minor fortune, but you never would have known it by looking at him. He seemed to live from pillar to post; he lived on cooking and words. Cooking, he told me, kept him anchored to life. Feeding his friends was the elemental act that would nourish him even more than them. "It's the only religion I can wrap my brain around," he claimed. He'd make minute changes in his recipes -- with the lamb, it was more garlic (always), less rosemary, a bit of brown sugar rubbed in with the pepper and salt, also tarragon, lemon juice, honey and balsamic vinegar painted on with a fat, round brush. He'd refine his formulas to a fare-thee-well. Then he'd move on. When he knew he was headed for heaven, he began making soups -- grand, elegant soups that you had to eat several bowls of with chunks of bread he cut on a 45-degree angle using a rock maple miter box he'd bought for that purpose. "Pick up some good bread on the way over," he'd tell me when he called most days at 3:30 to invite me for dinner, "but be sure it will fit the miter box." And I'd arrive by 5:30 and he'd check the bread's width right away. "I'm going to heaven," he'd say as he stirred the pozole, "in a little rowboat on an ocean of soup." He loved pozole or pozzole or posole, but he always pronounced it "pazool" no matter how many times I corrected him. He'd found a white ceramic soup tureen in the shape of a boar's head and that's what the soup came to the table in. Years before, he'd had a girlfriend in Jalisco. He often rhapsodized about the pozole she used to make and how they'd eat it with Sangre de Toro, blue corn tortillas, and mescaline for dessert. Dana had a boxful of the little black plastic bulls from the necks of the Sangre de Toro bottles, some dating back to the Jalisco days. "I had my fun," he liked to say. He was refreshingly unrepentant to the end. "I hate it how everybody's recovering from everything and disavowing their pasts. It's so chickenshit. What a bunch of crybabies, dontcha think?" "I dunno," I'd say. "What do you mean exactly?" But he'd ignore my question and sink the ladle deep into the pozole pot. "Hatched a Cecropia moth the other night right here in the living room," he'd say as he sipped from the ladle. "Gorgeous big beast of a thing. When it flew off it looked like a damn falcon!" "This is the soup of the gods -- pazool!" he'd exclaim, loudly slurping a mouthful. "They serve this in heaven to fortify all those winged buckaroos for that trail ride across the prairie of hope." He liked to speak in long, looping sentences that were cinematic and goofy. "I don't perform on the stage or on the page," he told me late one night, "I perform at table on your laminated place mat in the soul of your bowl." Dana took two approaches to pozole. Sometimes he'd make it in the most common way, using pig head meat and pig elbow, chopped pork and huajillo chilies, and other times he'd defer to my campaign for lower cholesterol and make it with chicken and pinto beans. In either case he'd use loads of oregano and garlic and soak the hominy overnight beforehand ("nixtamal" he called it in a Jalisco drawl) even though you can buy it in a can. He'd use a big ceramic bread-making bowl and as we talked on the eve of a pazool feast, he'd drink Stoli or Sangre de Toro and swish the hominy kernels around in the milky water. "It's as good as digging through pebbles at the beach without the hassle of driving to the ocean. I'm always hoping I'll find a sand dollar. Never have, though. Never have. Maybe I should start using the canned stuff; it's packed in salt water ..." On the last call I got from him he was preternaturally buoyant, given the grim outlook. "Hey," he told me, "I had my fun. I'm going to miss cooking, though, which reminds me, got a pencil?" I found one and a piece of paper. "Now the secret to barbecuing shark and keeping it tender," Dana whispered as if he were telling me where he'd stashed the kilos of Michoacan, "is to soak it in milk, that is, three parts milk to one part good, unblended scotch like Cardhu." And he said it again in a mock Scottish brogue so he could chew on that magic name one last time, "Cardhu ... Yeah, soak it for at least three hours. Then save the milk mixture, sauté a diced onion in butter and put it all in a saucepan, add some shredded crab meat and heat it slowly. Makes a wicked good soup to go with the barbecued shark. Almost as wicked good as pazool." I told him I'd try it the next time I barbecued shark. Then he changed the subject to coffins. "Now if I'd planned this whole thing better," he said, "I would have allowed myself enough time to order one of those stupendous Ghanaian caskets. You know the ones I'm talking about?" I didn't, but he didn't give me time to tell him so. "They're kind of theme coffins. Like if you're a carpenter they make you a big hammer or a saw to be buried in. If you're a fisherman, you might get buried in a giant bass or a crawfish or something like that. They're made out of wood and painted so they look good enough to eat -- beautiful things." If I were to have a Ghanaian coffin made for me, Dana asked, what would I want it to be? "I don't know, I guess it would have to be a computer keyboard," I said. "That seems to be the object I've been most intimate with in recent years." "Or how about they just put you in a big 'Delete' key?" he suggested. "What about you, maybe a 6-foot replica of your boar's head soup tureen?"
"No, no," he said right away. "I got a better idea. Lay me out inside a big black bull with a ribbon tied at its shoulder, just like the ones attached to the Sangre de Toro bottles, and put a sand dollar in each of my hands." And we did.
Douglas Cruickshank is a writer who lives in Lagunitas, Calif. His last piece for Salon was "Do They Serve Oat Muffins on Doilies in Hell?". |