A Man in the Kitchen.(father's cooking and his marriage)

When I was a boy, it was said in my family that my mother, an otherwise respectable cook, had prepared for my father, during the first days of their marriage, a very bad dish. The dish was a hot tuna-andmayonnaise casserole with potato chips as a decorative garnish. It was this tuna casserole that had, as it were, driven my father to teach himself to cook. Over time, the story of the tuna casserole took on the status and weight of Received History; it became my father's explanation and alibi--"Baked mayonnaise! I had to take action!"--for his dominion over our kitchen. Looking back, I can see that the story also functioned as an origin narrative; it united us--my mother, my father, my sister, and me--in lighthearted understanding of the triumph of bluegrass gentility over whatever in our natures could be seen as vulgar and Appalachian. (My father's people were from Virginia, my mother's from East Tennessee.)

By the late nineteen-sixties, when we were living on a farm outside Charlottesville, cooking had almost become my father's second occupation, after teaching literature at the University of Virginia. On weekday afternoons, he left his campus office and, before coming home, drove his rounds between markets and shops. On Saturdays, an all-day shopping trip might take place. After we moved to Miami, in 1970, my sister began to accompany him on grocery missions that took them from one district to another: fish and meat were in Coral Gables; wine was in Coconut Grove; and then it was off to South Miami for olive oil, tomatoes, and chocolate for a mousse. My father was an early adopter of the Cuisinart, and an early convert to homemade pasta; the backs of chairs in our house could often be found draped with waxed paper and drying fettuccine.

In the evening, while working in the kitchen, my father drank Martinis. On weekdays at around seven, my mother would return from her job teaching fashion history and costume design at Miami-Dade Community College; her first actions were always to light a cigarette and pick up the bourbon bottle that sat on the kitchen counter. The brief spells of tranquillity that followed the first swallows of her first drink gave way, most nights, to frightening tirades. The fights were often triggered by some aspect of dinner itself, frequently its presentation--something that my father, a student of the magazine Gourmet, with its high-gloss ...