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In the market parking lot, a guy I sort of knew waved me over. He carried a big bag of groceries and was with his two roommates. They were all in their mid-20s with shoulder-length hair. They said they were headed home to cook a big dinner.

Also Today Matt Gurney's cider soup A recipe that promises to seduce, whether the cook is man or woman. By Maria Dolan

"Hey," asked the acquaintance, "are you hungry?"

I went home to get my new roommate -- my old friend Julie. She had moved west to be outdoors and was living, I believe, on energy bars and fresh mountain air. We walked the few blocks to the address the guys had given me. It was late summer and everyone was out on their porches, drinking in the last sips of light. We came upon a driveway littered with motorcycles and climbed the steps of a white rental house. We stood on the sagging porch and wondered whether pizza or burritos awaited us beyond the threshold.

The door opened to a man with a knife and the sweet scent of sautéing onions.

Our host took us directly to the kitchen and introduced us to his friends. They turned out to be a group of cooks and waiters, plying their trade on their day off. We watched as they performed a sort of modern dance upon a stage set with vegetables and electric appliances. One man squinted at a recipe, then sprinkled a saucepan with an unmeasured squirt of olive oil, a palm full of flour, a flutter of pepper flakes. He poured milk from the carton, unmeasured. Another shook and scraped a skillet vigorously, tasted its contents with his finger, then stroked a hand over his goatee.

They waved to us with spatulas and forks and flour-dusted hands, then sent us to the living room to relax with the pet boa, Zeppelin.

The dishes we ate that night -- most memorably an apple cider soup with cheddar -- were astonishingly good. I wondered what, if anything, the fact that these cooks were men had to do with their culinary success. Perhaps, I think now, we daughters were too busy trying to show how far we could go. We would have thought that learning the rules of the kitchen meant giving in. These men, whose fathers probably hadn’t known a saucepan from a sauce bernaise, could think of the kitchen not as a place to fulfill the expectations of their past, but as a new frontier, a place to explore and to play.

Whatever the reasons for their success, Julie and I feasted on the late-summer offerings of these capable men -- the fresh bread and soup, the greens, the pie -- as if we had not eaten a real dinner for years.

And perhaps we hadn't.
salon.com | Jan. 4, 2000

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