Musings: Guilt is not an Ingredient

The most widely used ingredient in North America is guilt. There’s hardly a dish cooked without it. Pepper… salt…thyme — they’re the standards, maybe a little curry powder or, for them as likes things hot, a couple of good pinches of cayenne. We go through the recipes like astronauts at countdown, checking and double checking, how many teaspoons in half a millilitre, how medium is an onion and is a cup still a cup even if it’s made of glass?

These are all the small guilts, the little worries that are as basic to all kitchens as the kitchen sink. Butter is a medium guilt, along with the extra-virgin olive oil (“ours just says Virgin, will that be okay? “) and “room temperature” — how do you take the temperature of a room, with a thermometer tucked under the carpet?

Finally we get to the really big guilts, like garlic, because somehow we know that nobody eats it, despite the indisputable fact of 3000 tons being sold in B.C. last year. So we sneak it in to our cooking, with our eyes closed, as though it were an accident (“my hand slipped”).

Wine is a big guilt (” will they know it had a screwtop?”) and from then on things get worse and worse and guilts of all shapes and sizes accumulate like odd socks in the laundry basket. The china’s wrong, the salt isn’t sea salt, the peppercorns don’t come from Madagascar but from Kitchener, Ontario, and the pastry, the bread, the steak and even the tomatoes just don’t look like they should. Neither do we, we look in the mirror, none of us is centrefold material and we feel guilty about it, every minute until the guests go home.

Pretty soon it becomes a habit, something to put on, like an apron, every time we go into the kitchen, and we look for ways to reinforce it, to starch it stiff, this terrible guilt. One of the easiest, and least recognized of guilts is the kitchen work ethic, which simply says that if you haven’t worked yourself stupid, spent hours worrying about the shopping for dinner and even more hours peeling, chopping, rolling, dicing, icing, stuffing, shaping and peering into the oven, then dinner will be worthless, and our friends and families, those world renowned gourmets with palates more delicate than nightingales and tastebuds as sensitive as the latest radar detectors, they will know and they will tell, so that we will permanently be branded as uncaring, incompetent and socially unacceptable cooks.

The basic truth is that most guests are simply grateful. They get a free dinner, no dishes to wash and the chance to go through your bathroom cupboard. They have a mild case of guilt, about things they don’t think they should eat (like the aforementioned garlic) but just so long as you don’t tell them they can live with it. That’s what foreign names are all about — nobody wants to eat snails, but everybody loves escargots. Liver is almost universally unpopular, but call it foie gras and you’ll get rave reviews. Meat loaf is not acceptable, but the same ingredients called pate — that’s a matter for compliments.

Musings: Leftovers

Saving money is a habit as difficult to start as smoking is difficult to stop. The real problem is other people, who manage their lives with such efficiency that virtue, like halogen headlights, shines out of their ears. “Just do it”, they say, “it’s easy. Self-control. That’s all there is to it”.

They will show you how if you stop chewing gum (or smoking, or skiing or eating carrots) and if you start walking to work (or save aluminum foil, or eating carrots) that you will save a large number of dollars every year, with which you can go to Mexico every Christmas.

“And…”, they go on, “if you don’t go to Mexico, just put it into mutual funds….”. Suddenly they’ll have your whole life planned: early retirement, marital bliss, live to ninety and die very rich, with all your own teeth. If you give them the slightest encouragement they’ll have you eating parsley sandwiches, making your own shoes from recycled newspapers and sleeping on used construction plywood (“it builds character”). Most reformers want you to suffer. If you stop listening to them, and look at them instead, you invariably find that they live lives of self-indulgent chaos, that their roofs leak, they live on chocolate bars, can’t find their drivers licences and that debt collectors have a shift system going at their front doors. Their worst habit is knowing what’s good for you, and their sure knowledge that if you will just change your life then the world (their world) will be a better place.

I have been done good to in my time. My habits have been upgraded to vices, my pleasures reclassified to self-indulgences, and the satisfying mess of my life has been reconstructed by just about everybody who ever brushed up against it. Which makes me somewhat wary of advising others on the virtues of economy or frugality, and the resultant good time down the road. But there is undoubtedly a considerable pleasure in recycling dinner – or as we used to call it – leftovers.

I won’t mention the income tax man, who at this time of year lurks on all our street corners, and I will hold out no hope for you becoming rich by eating cold beans. But I will point out the joy of rediscovering a familiar flavour — it’s like a drink with old friends and a flip through the photo album — somehow better than the first time.

And then there’s the perversities, the odd tastes we had as children and were taught to abandon. A cold slab of macaroni cheese, gently fried in a little butter and sprinkled with lemon juice is so much better than the same slab, foil wrapped and micro-waved into a Xerox of yesterday, because the frypan gives it new dimensions, a little crunchiness on the outside, a crust of fried cheese slightly burned with bits of crisped-up onion sticking through. It’s different, another dish altogether

A Poem for Mulroney

This poem was the last thing James published before he passed away.

From thetyee.ca

Mr. Mulroney
said (with a groan) he
wasn’t a crook
and the money he took
was a private transaction
(without any tax on)
and certainly wasn’t anyone’s biz
but his.

It might have been to pay off a debt
or settle a bet
but anyway nothing but three hundred grand
which chaps like him regularly pass hand to hand
without clear explanations
or prompt tax declarations
or even (as no one was going to see)
that tedious business of GST
and if there was any explaining to do
it wouldn’t be simply to me and to you.

But to a royal commission
he might give permission
as with enough lawyers confusing the issues
no one could prove (irrefutably) misuse
and even with minimal legal endeavour
it could drag on for ever and ever
and he could be sure to emerge with his name
if not unsullied at least without blame.