My Brother, The Chef

Some of us are born cooks. From the womb, we come slip-sliding into this world, dreaming of marinades and a mortar and pestle for grinding our own cumin seeds. The rest of us might enjoy eating like gourmands, but we find the thought of reading cookbooks for fun as troubling as the scent of garlic sticking to our fingers all day long. Doesn’t that stuff come in a jar?

I know this to be true, for though my little brother and I were raised on the exact same diet of Tuna Helper, Rice-a-Roni, and Spam, it is he who can perfectly replicate my grandmother’s biscuits and just as easily freestyle an entire dinner party based on a recipe in a Moosewood cookbook. I found his second-grade obsession with the Frugal Gourmet endearing, if a bit odd, but only really began to suspect something was up when he began experimenting with the limited ingredients in our mother’s kitchen. Before he was allowed to use the stove he’d eat bread slathered in butter with Cheerios pressed on top, mischievously humming as a dash of pepper gave it that certain je ne sais quoi. When he was feeling like something simpler, he’d pinch off pieces of Roman Meal and roll them between his fingers, producing an appetizer he called “Bread Pebbles.”

Fast forward a few years, as he follows my Dad in from the house, an earnest seventh-grader in his Catholic school uniform. I've beaten them home, having taken the bus from the county high school, and am eagerly soaking in the drama on Guiding Light. Suddenly starving, I wander into the kitchen only to find our supply of Breyer's Mint Chocolate Chip dangerously low. This is the ninth grade; belief in the power of Breyer's Mint Chocolate Chip is the only thing standing between me and hysteria most days as I navigate halls full of strangers. "EEEHHHHHHH!" I wail like a baby seal, my spine dissolving with sheer hopelessness. Hobbling over to my brother, arms flapping uselessly at my sides, I make a request: "You have! To make! Me a snack! NoooOOOOowwwwww!" Sighing with mild annoyance, he quietly closes his book and instructs me to go sit down. Twenty minutes later, Reva and Shane's passionate lovemaking is blocked by his latest coup-de-grace: a perfectly shaped, fluffy omelet containing onions, cheese...and are those....sliced grapes? Ravenous, I dive in, and have to admit that while a most unusual flavor combination, this omelet is actually good. “I just used what we had,” he says humbly, wandering off to log into his Tolkein message board. Filling aside, I still remember it as the single most aesthetically pleasing bit of food to ever be cooked in that kitchen. It was a perfect half-circle.

Despite his growing talents, he was as skinny as a rail and a notoriously picky eater. I now realize that his palate was simply too sophisticated to accept the 10,000 ground chuck and noodle combinations that, with a can of peas or creamed corn, constituted a square meal chez nous. “Come on, Leigh,” we would complain on road trips, tallow dripping down our chins, “why don’t you want to eat your previously-frozen-and-reheated hamburger patty with plasticy cheese and pleasant little dollop of rehydrated onion?” We’d stamp our feet and roll our eyes as my father loudly explained to yet another befuddled Mickey D’s employee that his son wanted a PLAIN HAMBURGER—JUST THE MEAT AND THE BUN, NO, HE DOES NOT WANT KETCHUP! “I can’t even get him to eat hot dogs sometimes,” my mother grumbled on the phone to her friend. “We may have to resort to junk food.”

In college, I’m not sure he had the time to devote to his hobby, what with Phi Beta Kappa and senior honors projects and all that, but while visiting my parents in grad school he began a slow campaign to re-introduce certain things into their kitchen. Like pots. Once Leigh left the nest, my parents abandoned even Crock-Pot cooking and began subsisting off of leftovers from church suppers and whatever could be warmed in the microwave. Things like sugar, flour, and pots and pans completely disappeared, so much dead weight to their new, exciting lifestyle. Mr. Milkweed and I began visiting from Ohio (having stopped first at the grocery store so we wouldn’t starve) to find stainless Revere Ware and bottles of olive oil in the cabinets. “What the--?” I would say, speechless, pulling out a jar of expensive loose-leaf tea from the cabinet. “Oh, your brother left that here,” my mother would say, shuffling through in her purple robe. “I can’t figure out how to drink it.”

My brother is 27 now, a happily married man nearly finished with his dissertation and married to a woman who enjoys cooking as much as he does. My parents’ kitchen is nearly stocked to his liking, and I’ll often hear about the “delicious potato soup” he’s prepared them on a visit home, or flaky biscuits that taste "like he's been baking bread his whole life." He recently made my mother a coconut birthday cake so exactly like the ones my Grandmother used to make while she was alive that there is now a professionally framed picture of it hanging in my parents' living room. My mother cried tears of joy when she saw it, she reported to me.

Though cooking is not yet a real hobby of mine and will never be one of my real talents, more and more I’m realizing the pleasures to be had of a few minutes’ peace and the satisfying attainability of a recipe. Someday, though I'm not so keen on making grape omelets, I'd love for Leigh to show me his secrets for a moistly delectable blackberry cobbler, or a perfectly seasoned pork shoulder. Because, quite frankly, I don’t want Eva to grow up thinking canned peas "is good eatin'.” LeSeur peas or not.