Learning to Cook Alone

"Any oyster stew is made quickly, about as fast as the hand can follow the mind or the mind the eye. Oyster soup takes longer, can cost much or little, and pleases some people even more than it bores others." – Fisher, from "Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup"





What you might gain by cooking for one is the simple rerouting of the signals of hunger directly to what results on the plate. What you lose is nothing less than the reverse – as you cook for others, your own hunger is set aside and refashioned somewhere in the food imagination where you do your damndest to picture how so and so might enjoy the dish you are preparting. One satisfied the vanity of the individual taste, the other, if done well, satisfies the tastes of a variety of mouths. In a perfect cooking world, of course, these two seemingly stray phenomenon merge and the restauranteur, for example, or the good home cook, as another example, prepares simultaneously for just what he or she would love to eat, and only the praiseworthy eyes of the other eaters will tell the tale. This might all sound a little overly philosophical they are ideas that come to mind as so many of us home cooks lose a few mouths due to one reason or another.

Last evening I had decided on scallops and a cream corn concoction – a very simple recipe really, essentially a surf and vegetable combination that didn't need much flare, but it was a recipe that I had chosen for myself because it looked tempting in the magazine and I could just about taste the perfectly browned and cooked scallop, a fine art onto itself as most of us who tried cooking the scallop can attest. It's also a meal that might have been predominantly pushed aside on the plate in the past as three daughters, without any doubt, would have poked, prodded, and smelled the scallops for a few moments, surrounded by a cream corn which advertised bits of red onion and even clips of basil, another potent aroma not always craved by youth.

Even for myself, I wanted to take the essence of the ingredients and cook it all in the way that I would like to eat it. I would pull out a few past tricks for the scallops first – not exactly a revelation for anyone who has dropped a scallop on an overly hot pan, not properly oiled, and proceeded to watch the most sensitive skin stick so severely to the bottom that the scallop becomes, before you know it, half its original size. I decided to use my cast iron this time around, not copper, which is notorious for fast hot heat and needs the most attention of any pan type that I own. The cast iron heat is a fascinating one – it is deep and long, and the many little bumps of its surface can serve as a way to avoid the sticking properties of smoother metal. Pat away all the moisture of scallop, drop them down onto a medium heat and give them a swirl before the initial sticking. I flicked pinches of southwestern spice over the tops and let the first side go long enough to picture a browning along the bottom without blackening and an invisible heat to rise up through the bottom half.

For the corn, I used frozen corn instead of cutting away kernels from the cob. First, diced red onion to sautee in another pan, then the frozen corn, and enough evaporated milk to cover. I wanted to picture how much time it might take for the milk to tighten the corn; then a few cut vine ripened tomatoes, plus salt and pepper. I realized then that I had a fine base that I could easily transfer over the scallops into to finish out any cooking that was necessary. No need for basil, parsely, or anything else. I began to see it all as a sort of stew. That was not what the recipe was called, but how I began to see how I might like it. My scallops came up clean off the pan. I gave them a gentle prod in their middles – nobody likes a scallop that has the beatiful venner of a perfectly cooked bi valve, but then is cool in the middle. These are some of the cooking zones that probably persuade some eaters against the scallop – rubbery potential, lost skin due to too high of initial heat, uncooked middle. In the end, I wanted to test to see whether any other cooking method could beat grilling on aluminum foil, a technique that is very hard to mess up and so one of the more common.

Scallop essence commingled with a strengthening taste coming out of the corn, onion, milk combination, which began to boil up, congeal, and I knew that the scallops by this point were likely cooked through from the moist heat. I quickly dished. A touch of salt, a scratch of pepper, a wonderful compliment. I can't claim chemical expertise with anything that I cook but I will always vouge for the common eye to stomach test. This time it told me that the textures of the soft muscle of the scallop and the semi-sweet crispness of corn kernels, draped by a milk base, might hold well. I'm not one to over indulge on scallops – they usually find a place on the table once every three months, but I was easily able to eat four large, the corn underneath a nice stew. I told myself that I was satisfied the self responded back that that was it had intended from earlier in the morning when the recipe first flashed on the page. Another part of me wondered if anyone else would have eaten such a thing.