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.
And as we cooked together, he became a little less worried and a little more confident about living in the woods. But me, I became downright messianic. It had occurred to me, as we messed around between stove and countertop, that I had discovered the secret of life—or at least the secret of parenthood. You are going to become an adult, I wanted to say. Not in any two-week bonding experience, though that may have some value, but over the next few years, you are going to become a grown-up. And what does it mean to be a grown-up? It means being able to take care of yourself. You have to be able to support yourself, to provide the basic necessities of life, like food and shelter. You have to be able to scramble your own eggs in the morning, sew on the button that just fell off, create for yourself the kind of home in which you want to live.
That’s it. Pure and simple. If you can’t do those things, you aren’t a grown-up, and if you can, you’re there.
I had never known that was my message. In fact, I had never known I had a message at all. Orlando is my oldest child, and it is over his poor defenseless head that I generally lob my maternal trial balloons. At his every age and stage, the surprises of parenthood have emerged from the great multicolored cloud of human experience to bite me in the leg. You want your child to know who he is. You want him to turn out to be someone worth knowing. You want him to have tastes and opinions, and to know what they are—and, of course, deep down, you want him to have tastes and opinions you understand. But mostly you want him, as my grandmother used to say, to be a person. Your job is to help him along.
Cooking together consolidated all this for me. Because cooking is about understanding what you want, what you crave, what moves you deeply, and then having the skill to call that something forth from the raw ingredients. Cooking is knowing who you are and then doing something practical—and delicious—with that knowledge.
So off Orlando went into the woods. He cooked macaroni and cheese, chicken and vegetable stir-fries, burgers. He made many grilled tomato and cheese sandwiches over the open fire, and he also got a little bit fancy, grilling garlic bread to go with that doctored tomato sauce. His squad ate well, and he didn’t have to dig latrines or chop wood—or at least no more than his minimum share.
And, of course, he did lots of other things. He bathed in the icy lake and climbed the high ropes. He volunteered to “solo,” to spend a night alone in the woods in his sleeping bag, during which time he happily read a 700-page fantasy novel by flashlight, feeling that he had finally achieved a certain nirvana, able to read blearily into the dawn without a parent checking for light under the door and giving lectures about school tomorrow and needing to be well rested.
And then he came home and, yes, he seemed more adult. And, yes, the ninth grade was forged into a stronger group. But above all, I now had a son who could cook. He took over the special mashed potatoes we make at Thanksgiving, and he got very good at making an Armenian pomegranate dip. He acquired a George Foreman grill and became a specialist in grilled panini. He could, in a pinch, turn out an old family favorite of dubious ethnic integrity that we call spaghetti pastramara.
It started as a kind of trick: We’ll teach you to cook and you’ll use it to get out of splitting kindling. But it’s not a trick, it’s a real message about what it means to grow up and go out on your own. Know how to make the things you like and need. Take care of yourself properly, and you will also be able to take care of other people.
And that’s the meaning of parenthood. Because, after all, the subtext is always about getting a child ready to go away and grow away, about equipping him for a journey that must leave you behind. But it is somehow a comfort to know that as your child takes that journey, when the moment comes—as it often does—for spaghetti, he will know how to make the sauce.