Man with a Pan

[Bev Vincent]

Steve has a four-page essay plus a recipe in the new book Man With a Pan. Here's the Amazon page (http://www.amazon.com/Man-Pan-John-Donohue/dp/1565129857). Light, fun reading.

[mae]

Thanks! The Amazon "Look Inside" feature lets you read most of King's piece (no first page :() and the recipe.

[jhanic]

I ordered a hardcover.

John

[herbertwest]

it's not a new recipe, is it?

[Bev Vincent]

According to the TOC it's for "Pretty Good Cake"

[Patrick]

I ordered a hardcover.

John

Hope you receive a 1st/1st, John!

Let us know what you think of his opening essay, "On Cooking." I love the play on his former book title.

[mae]

You can all read it via Amazon's "Look Inside" feature. You can read the recipe and three quarters of the essay, as the first page is unavailable, so the piece starts mid-sentence.

[Ari_Racing]

The hardcover edition is not available at amazon.com, is it?

[Bev Vincent]

You can all read it via Amazon's "Look Inside" feature. You can read the recipe and three quarters of the essay, as the first page is unavailable, so the piece starts mid-sentence.

I wonder if it works differently for different users -- I can read the whole essay but not the recipe.

[jhanic]

http://www.amazon.com/Man-His-Pan-Boswell/dp/0836278542/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1307473456&sr=1-1

John

[mae]

You can all read it via Amazon's "Look Inside" feature. You can read the recipe and three quarters of the essay, as the first page is unavailable, so the piece starts mid-sentence.

I wonder if it works differently for different users -- I can read the whole essay but not the recipe.


You're right. I have two Amazon accounts, and the second one allowed me to read the missing first page. Now I have the whole piece (I saved the pages as images).

[Bev Vincent]

That's not the same book, I'm afraid. Man With a Pan vs. A Man And His Pan

[Randall Flagg]

That's not the same book, I'm afraid. Man With a Pan vs. A Man And His Pan
Oh oh.

[Ari_Racing]

According to the publisher, there are no hardcover edition of the book.

[herbertwest]

I managed to grab all of King's pages from amazon... except the 57, which is Steve's last page. it is not by King
Anyone got it?

[mae]

http://www.vancouversun.com/Patience+ingredient+cooking+also+life/5063393/story.html

The writer Stephen King has never cared much for cooking. His wife, novelist Tabitha King, is a better cook and, for a long time, she did nearly all of it: his major contributions were breakfast for the kids and washing dishes, as he observes in his contribution to an entertaining new collection of essays and stories by men who cook for their families.

Some years ago, though, she began to lose her sense of taste and smell, King recounts in the suitably titled Man with a Pan (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), and as they diminished, so did her interest in cooking and eating. Which left him holding the pan, as it were.

He learned, he tells us, that it's entirely possible to cook food that people love to eat -even if you don't love to cook. He has only a single secret to impart about how to do it: be gentle.

"Turning down the heat is always a wonderful idea, I think. Whether I'm frying hamburgers, making breakfast omelettes, or doing pancakes for a pickup supper, the best rule is to be gentle," he writes.

Anyone with the urge to turn a stovetop burner higher than a little beyond medium would do well to suppress that urge, King suggests. "The grease splatters; the smoke billows; the smoke detectors go off. No, no, no. Show a little patience."

I'd extend the metaphor beyond the kitchen, to the bedroom or the front hall, the classroom, the boardroom -or anywhere. Turning the heat up too high, when you think of it, is like coming on too strong at a meeting, or losing your temper when surely you would have done better to hold onto it.

I remember a project we took on in the tiny vestibule of the house we used to live in: removing the layers of old paint from the wainscotting. The walls had been exposed to huge fluctuations in temperature over the years and the paint had grown brittle and chipped: underneath, you could see, was beautiful hardwood. Using small paring knives to chip at the paint seemed the most efficient way to go.

In some places it came off in large, satisfying, chips but, mostly, the work was painstaking and slow. My beloved, who is as methodical and focused as I am haphazard when it comes to most things, made the knife tip his friend, advancing steadily. I, on the other hand, wielded my knife as a weapon, gouging my way impatiently along the wall, looking for chips and cracks in the paint that might admit its tip easily. I'll leave you to figure out whose contribution looked better.

This principle of gentle holds for everything cooked on the stovetop, according to King. An omelette cooked gently won't even brown, which he says is as it should be: when the eggs start to get a little solid around the edges, lift an edge with your spatula "and tip the frying pan so the liquid egg runs underneath." Once a few blisterlike bubbles appear, use your spatula to fold over the most solid part of the omelette. Flip it and "you're either an acrobat or an idiot."

Fathers spend more time than ever before at the stove, editor John Donohue observes in the introduction to Man with a Pan: as much as one third of the time the family spends cooking -up from just five per cent in 1965. That leaves women with two-thirds of the work, of course: I'm wondering whether a book on women who cook for their families would fly, but I digress.

Men learning to cook often start at the barbecue grill, writer Jim Harrison observes in his essay, one of a few that mention grilling, "perhaps because they have been roasting meat over fire for a couple of hundred thousand years. Of course women do it equally well, but then they must think, Let the dickhead go at it, I'm tired of doing all the cooking." Seriously, Harrison believes there is no better insurance for a long marriage than for couples to cook together -or for men to prepare meals a few times a week to "release their beloved from the monotony."

What you choose to eat directly reflects the quality of your life, he says. "Your meals in life are numbered and the number is diminishing."

So get at it -and remember: be gentle.