Yamabushi Mon Amour

Some time last fall, I found a Dutch oven in a free box. It was heavy cast iron and all but new. Despite the fact that in three years I’ve never had a need to unpack the cast iron pans I already own, I picked it up. I’m one of those people whose faith in the value of cast iron cookware remains undiminished, even in the face of experience.

As it happened, however, the score was a lucky one because not long after I found a recipe at (of course) the New York Times for no-knead bread. It’s a simple and fool-proof method for making excellent loaves, and you bake them in a Dutch oven. Alas, the recipe sits on my desktop, still untried.

Nonetheless, I persisted in my effort to make my find useful. I searched the web for methods of seasoning cast iron, and stumbled upon an extraordinary array of Dutch oven related sites. One of them, Byron’s Dutch Oven Cooking Page, was alarmingly extensive. He described his site as an “internet gateway to Dutch oven cooking” and shared some of his Dutch-oven-as-a-metaphor-for-life wisdom, such as “You get out of your Dutch oven what you put into it.”

Indeed you do, Byron. Indeed you do.

The site also had, quite naturally, a large collection of recipes. I passed on the Piña Colada Cake (voted the number one desert at the World Championship Dutch Oven cook-off, 1999), as well as the Festival Berry Crumb Pie (from the 1997 Payson Onion Days cook-off). But the nothing-special Pineapple Upside Down Cake got me all nostalgic for a desert from childhood, and I had to have it.

No surprise, but the pineapple upside down cake has still never been attempted. In fact, I have probably saved hundreds of recipes over the years, and very few of them have been used. It reminds me of the decorative cake tin that my mother stored cut-out recipes in by the dozen, adding to the pile even after the lid could no longer close from the excess of paper. (Good to know that I’m turning into my mother.)

And so, where is all this going, John?

Well, I was reading this article in the New York Times Magazine called “File of Dreams,” which suggested that rather than being what you want to eat, recipes actually reveal what you want to be. A quick look at recent additions to my own collection brought the Dutch oven preoccupation to light, and it made me wonder what was up with that.

I guess I could get all philosophical and stuff. I could ask “What does the Dutch oven represent” and similarly “deep” questions, but I’ll spare you. What I will say is that to me, cast iron is basic, sturdy, practical, eternal, and those are the kinds of foods you cook in it. I mean, bread? What’s more basic? What’s more eternal?

And the Pineapple upside down cake? It’s definitely a matter of nostalgia there. And similarly, cast iron pans seem like a connection to something from the past, an imaginary golden age of self-sufficiency and lasting values.

Maybe that’s what I’m wishing for, and I guess that’s not such a bad thing to want to be. I feel a lot of pressure as a gay guy to be “fabulous,” but it’s just not me. I’m pretty earthy, and it seems like I’m okay with that — for the most part.

Except

Except that basic, salt-of-the-earth types, which is what it sounds like I’m going for, are often really boring people. I am accutely aware of the fact that I cannot chain someone to me “til death do us part” by means of legal marriage, and so if I actually did develop the Dutch oven of human personailities, would I end up alone forever? Or would I end up with somebody who, God forbid, was the lidded caserole version of myself?

The author of the piece warns about essentially the same thing. Be careful what you wish for, she cautioned, since the person she wanted so much to emulate ended up a lonely alcoholic.

Forewarned is forearmed.

At YMA MLP: Read the article The Way We Eat: File of Dreams.