How to Cook Like a Man
A Memoir of Cookbook Obsession
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Daniel Duane was a good guy, but he wasn't what you might call domestic. Yet when he became a father, this avid outdoorsman was increasingly stuck at home, trying to do his part in the growing household. Inept at so many tasks associated with an infant daughter, he decided to take on dinner duty. He had a few tricks: pasta, soy-sauce-heavy stir-fry... actually, those were his only two tricks. So he cracked open one of Alice Waters's cookbooks, and started diligently cooking his way through it. When he was done with that, there were seven more Waters cookbooks, plus those by Tom Colicchio, Richard Olney, Thomas Keller... and then he was butchering whole animals in his cluttered kitchen.How to Cook Like a Man might be understood as the male version of Julia and Julia. But more than chronicling a commitment to a gimmick, it charts an organic journey and full-on obsession, exploring just what it means to be a provider and a father. Duane doesn't just learn how to cook like a man; he learns how to be one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For rock-climbing, skateboarding, guitar-playing, surfer Duane, cooking from cookbooks is a passion, at least after the birth of his first child. Soon after he and his wife, Liz, bring home their daughter, Hannah, Duane suffers an identity crisis, anxiously wondering how he can contribute value to his new family. Realizing that three hours of waiting for the perfect wave every afternoon won't work, he decides that he'll become the family cook, putting hot meals on the table every night when Liz returns home tired from work. Yet Duane won't be just any cook; in the same way that he obsessively waited for the perfect wave (in his book Caught Inside), he's now going to cook perfect meals by following the recipes in Alice Waters's cookbook, Chez Panisse Vegetables. In eight years of living obsessively, Duane cooks his way through all seven of Waters's cookbooks, searching frantically for fresh ingredients in local farmers' markets or taking off to Alaska to fish for fresh salmon. He throws lavish parties for groups of friends not only in order to try out new recipes but also to show off his newly acquired way with pots, pans, sauces, and wine reductions. In this hilarious, touching, if at times self-absorbed memoir, Duane leads us on the wild culinary roller coaster of his food-soaked and recipe-drenched mania until he finally stops and learns to integrate his passion for cooking into his daily life.
