Friday, November 28, 2003
Cookin’ with Gas
Now, I know plenty of us are still regretfully clutching our swollen bellies from yesterday’s stuffing-fest, but that was just the warm-up, folks. There’s a good few weeks of overeating ahead of us, and it’s time to talk equipment.
This year, along with many other foodies, when we roast our holiday chestnuts, we’ll be firing up not just any old oven, but a 6-burnered gas-powered doozy of a machine. This is the age of the vanity stove, and gleaming chrome Viking Ranges and snobby red-knobbed Wolf stoves are all the rage with people who have money to burn in fancy gas flames.
We ... do not. But, we’ve had the amazing luck to have been given a 6-burner gas range by friends who moved from a house to a big city apartment, and couldn’t take their beloved stove with them. It ain’t no glamour stove, either - we’re now the proud owners of a restaurant-grade Southbend gas range, made by the venerable local company founded in 1898. Our black and silver machine is decorated with the streamlined Southbend oven logo that looks like the trademark Studebaker “S,” if it were hyped up on that new performance-enhancing drug that’s currently plaguing the athletic world. That “S” is cool - and the oven is as hot as a well-chromed mid-century hotrod. In fact, it looks a lot like the boxy rump of a 1950 Studebaker Champion has been parked in our little cottage kitchen.
I wasn’t always a stove snob. I grew up with a 1960’s aqua Jetson’s-style electric range, and it worked fine for the pans of Salisbury steak and condensed-soup sauces I learned to cook as a teenager. But during college I worked in a restaurant with a serious stove and serious cooks, and I came to understand fully the phrase, “Now, you’re cookin’ with gas.” I loved the primal thrill of cooking over fire, and I learned to eyeball just the right sized flame for strong-arming a huge whisk-ful of flour and butter into a crowd-sized roux, or gently reducing a sauce to amber. I relished the frenzy of the lunch rush, another cook and myself hovering over the hell-hot range, slamming pots down over erupting burners, as if we were playing a diabolical game of Whac-a-Mole.
Though the Southbend range company has relocated to North Carolina, you can still buy the stoves at Atlas Restaurant Supply on 933, just north of South Bend. The place is a culinary fantasy-land - a warehouse stripped of pretense, and stocked with everything you’ve ever fetishized at a restaurant, from cunning little creamers to Paul Bunyan-sized spatulas. On my recent visit there, I watched two grizzled, bandana’d chefs (more Anthony Bourdin than Wolfgang Puck) testing the edges of knife blades with rawhide thumbs. They cook with gas.
That’s the industry’s side of gas ranges - they’re machines made to work, and plenty of chef-sweat has sizzled on their surfaces. However, in the glamour world of pricey designer gas stoves, food critic Molly O’Neill found that there’s often an inverse relationship between how much people spend on a stove and how much they actually cook. Whether posh or industrial, these big stoves make apparent that cooking for ourselves can be a blast, and we shouldn’t do it alone. (It’s why the “Jacques and Julia” cooking show episodes are more fun than Jacques Pepin sauteing on his own, or even jolly Julia Child sloshing wine into a buttered pan without a partner in mischief.) Writer Laurie Colwin said that “A person cooking is a person giving,” and we’re lucky that dear friends have driven two states North to hang out and cook with us this Thanksgiving weekend (we’re having Colwin’s chopped cranberry tart for breakfast today). For days, the kitchen has been engulfed in scented steam, while too many cooks - which is exactly the right number of cooks - juggle pot lids and spoons. Our kids are right in the action, too: The child who helps saute the green beans is more likely to eat them than the kid who, having just been torn away, screaming, from a Bionicles bash session, meets the green things for the first time cooling on his plate.
Of course, framing our tale of gastronomic plenty is a community with depleted food banks. These same young cooks and their friends recently took up Colwin’s idea of giving with food by helping to arrange a canned goods drive. We delivered the collection a few days ago, in a box with a child’s crayon-printed sign with a sweet first-grade letter reversal: “Foob box.” Let me tell you, those shelves still need a lot more foob.
So, in the spirit of the season, here’s to cooking with friends, for friends...and even, perhaps especially, for hungry strangers. Then, in another sense, a civic sense, we’ll really be cookin’ with gas.