My son was nervous. It was the summer before he entered high school—a school with the time-honored tradition of beginning the year by busing all ninth-graders up to the wilds of New Hampshire, where they would camp out in tents for two weeks. The children were expected to bathe in the cold lake, chop their own firewood, and dig the latrines, the idea being that they would come back individually more grown-up, more mature, and collectively bonded into a class. And everybody had to go: no excuses, no doctor’s notes, no chickening out.
One evening not long before the day of departure, I ran into one of his teachers at the movies. “Is Orlando anxious?” she asked. Well, I admitted, maybe a little. He’s not exactly an outdoorsman. “Then teach him to cook,” she said. “A boy who knows how to cook is king. Some of those all-male squads go the whole two weeks without anything edible because most of them don’t realize you have to cook spaghetti before you put the sauce on it. If Orlando can cook, he’ll never have to split kindling or dig latrines. Plus he’ll be an instant success socially.”
So we concentrated on cooking. Orlando already had command of certain basics—mixing in the chocolate chips, or dolloping the dough onto the cookie sheet—and as a child he had a very particular pièce de résistance, frozen bananoids, a recipe out of a cookbook for children that involved dipping bananas in melted chocolate, rolling them in nuts, and freezing them.
But man does not live by bananoids alone, especially in the backwoods of New Hampshire. Many of the things he liked to eat either couldn’t be cooked over a bonfire or involved ingredients unlikely to be included in the school’s provisions—pasta with pancetta and fresh mozzarella, say, or that spicy beef with watercress dish they make at his favorite restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown.
Still, there was plenty to learn. The art of the grilled cheese sandwich and the importance of a slice of tomato. Eggs and how to scramble them so they come out with the desired texture, and how to add other things—chopped onions or red peppers or bits of cheese or ham—to make the scramble more interesting. Omelets and their mysteries. How to fry bacon—essential, surely, for that North Woods lumberjack breakfast experience. Beef stew, the basics of the one-pot dinner, baked potatoes.
He learned to cook spaghetti and to tell when it’s done, scalding his fingers over and over as he handled noodles plucked from the boiling water. His father demonstrated how to make a basic tomato sauce, and Orlando watched intently, fascinated by the simple alchemy of sautéing onions in olive oil. He learned to play with seasonings, and he stood over the simmering pot, our newly tall son, adding oregano and basil, but also a pinch of sugar, a shake of cinnamon. Tasting, absorbing, and tasting again. And we attempted to draw wise parental lessons: If you can do that, we told him, you can certainly doctor tomato sauce out of a jar.
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