50 OCTOBER 2017
She showed me further around the
animal, the wishbone and the wings and
the top of the neck and where you should
put everything, how you should tuck it
in together so it makes the smallest ball
it could. She used phrases like “pull
the skin” and “push the thighs.” Me, I
enjoyed euphemism. I preferred cuts of
meat that were called “hamburger” or
“steak” and that didn’t acknowledge the
living existence of the thing. We were
going to have one whole chicken and cut
the other into parts, but she saw that
talking about the chicken with such inti-
macy had caused me to break out into a
light layer of sweat. She looked at me
looking at the chicken.
She had always loved butchery, she
told me. She’d happened into all of this
cooking as an accident. Growing up in
Birmingham, England, she’d wanted to be
a policewoman, patrolling a community,
but she missed the deadline on some
forms and followed her sisters to cooking
school instead.
She took a look at me and told me the
chickens would go into the oven whole.
“We’ll take it easy,” she said, because she
is extraordinarily kind.e preheated the oven to 350°,
though sometimes if your
oven isn’t hot enough, you
have to heat it to 375°. I asked
her how I would know if the oven was hot
enough. She said I should buy a thermom-
eter. We seasoned the chickens with salt.
You could put lemons or garlic in there
too, she said. You can chop them up and
stick them right up the chicken’s ass
with bay leaf and fennel. Later, when
the chicken finished cooking, we would
extract these things and turn them into
sauce, so the chicken would be cooked in
a form of auto-cannibalism that I think is
what others just call “in its own juices.”
Our goal was to make an entire meal,
so we got to work cutting vegetables:
carrots and parsnips and fennel. We
shoved some into the chicken’s ass
(there’s probably a word for this, but I
didn’t think to ask), but only enough so
that the vegetables could breathe. Ide-
ally, everything would turn out maxi-
mally chicken-y; to do that, the vegeta-
bles had to have a real moment with the
chicken while we distilled the chicken to
its most essential chickeniness. April
loves chickeniness. Every time we tasted
something or smelled something,Godfather?” And after all that, after all
her years on Earth, it would have been
reasonable for her to just stream it one
day or watch any of the thousand times
per day it’s on cable. But now it was some-
thing like her brand that she had never
seen The Godfather, and so she continued
not to see it. This is not that. It is impor-
tant to me that you know that I was never
proud of not cooking.)
We were on the top floor of the Spotted
Pig, April’s restaurant in New York’s West
Village, in a room where they hold events.
I told her the story: my mother, and then
the people who told me that after you get
married you just magically learn to cook,
then my kids. Cooking just didn’t seem
rewarding to me. Look at the business I
was in, I told her. I dealt in words that
were put onto parchment that would exist
forever. Her business seemed ephemeral
to me: We would cook this, and it would
be gone, and we’d have nothing to show
for it. And then, just a little later, we’d be
hungry again. I couldn’t bear it.
She gave me a funny look and some
suggestions for why learning how to cook
wouldn’t be so bad, how it could become
permanent. “Well, you know, your kids
will grow up, and they’ll realize how hard
you work in the kitchen.”
“And what good will that do?”
She gave me another funny look. “You
really don’t know how to cook?” It would
be about 30 minutes and 17,000 of my
stupid questions before she realized I
wasn’t messing with her.
There were two dead chickens on the
counter, ready for us to season and roast.
They had been fed marigolds and bugs in
their life, which, she explained to me,
would help them make the best possible
chicken for us to eat.
We talked about tastes that went well
together: “You know, like onions and
sage, or anchovy and lamb, they’re all
kind of classic combinations.” I took notes
and nodded. How did you learn that? Just
from “eating and cooking, you know,”
she said. Same funny look.
We tied up the chicken, which we did
so that it wouldn’t look like a crime-scene
chicken, splayed out lasciviously. Then
she pointed out parts of the chicken. She
showed me the parson’s nose. The what’s
nose, I asked. “Maybe in America you
guys call it the pope’s nose?” she said.
Again I tried to explain to her that I was
not a candidate for knowing what a cer-
tain piece of chicken was called beyond
what you could specify in a bucket order.Now, I didn’t not cook well. I didn’t ever
transform foods from their state into
other states, or combine them, or pour
things on them, or heat them, or mash
them. I literally don’t even know what
other words to use to describe how you
treat food when you’re cooking it because
I don’t know how to cook. People would
say to me, “How do you get so much
done?” And I would say, “Because I don’t
cook.” People would laugh, thinking
surely I could cook something, but no.
I later learned from my exasperated
husband, who does cook (and cooks
everything) and says he doesn’t really
cook, that people who say they don’t cook
usually cook some stuff. They at least try.
Then a few things happened. I went on
a cruise to write a story about Paula Deen,
and she asked me what I cook for my chil-
dren. I told her I didn’t cook, and she said,
“Then how are your children going to
have any memories of you?” I went back
to my stateroom and cried. Then, several
weeks ago, my seven-year-old son came
home from school and asked if I knew
who Talya was and if I knew that Talya
had two mommies. “Sure,” I told him.
“I know both of them.” He said, “How do
they have dinner if there’s no daddy in the
house? Like, who makes it for them?”
My legend has carried far, and so on
occasion, people will cross-examine me
to ask if I really don’t cook or if I just don’t
cook anything to brag about. A nice edi-
tor at this magazine did the same, and
when I told him, he looked at me the way
the scientists looked at E.T. when they
first found him. He asked if he could set
me up with a cooking lesson, maybe with
a famous chef. I said I would consider it.
I told my husband what a sexist world we
live in where people hear that a woman
doesn’t cook and the first thing they do is
try to fix it. My husband was cooking
while I was telling him this, and he threw
down a spatula so that it made a great
clanking noise. He turned around to me.
“So someone is going to pay you to
learn how to cook from a famous chef,
and you are not going to do it?” People
have always told me I’m too literal.
called the editor back, and
here I was with April Bloom-
field, who did not know my
legend. (A note on my legend:
I have a friend who never saw The
Godfather, and she would tell people that,
and they would say, “You never saw The
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