The Egg, The Onion, and How to Become a Good Cook

I've loved to cook since I was a kid. I think it was the first thing I was able to do that "only adults" could. I felt grown up. 

Last weekend, I made another attempt at making my mom's spaghetti and meatballs.  That's just what we call it, but when we say spaghetti and meatballs, it's really about the sauce, or as my Mom insists on calling since The Sopranos aired, "gravy". Even if we use another pasta, it's still spaghetti and meatballs to me. 

It's also a day-long process to make. 

The thing is, there is no recipe. 

Recipes are fantastic. They're invaluable. Of course, I use them all the time. But the meals with the best reputations in my family, the most memorable ones, like my mom's spaghetti and meatballs, my dad's linguine and clams, and my wife's fried pork chops, they don't have recipes.

If you really want to blossom as a cook, treat recipes as guidelines, not bible. Go off script.

Like my mom, my wife is a fantastic cook. She also has a signature approach to cooking and discovering new things to cook.  

She starts by following a recipe to the letter. I mean, to the letter. She does not change a single thing, even when her instincts suggest she should. 

She does this once. She makes it, eats it, and most importantly tastes it. She's not pretentious about it. She's not a sommelier swirling wine across her palate. She's much more casual about it. But something innate is going on where she's calculating how it can be made better. 

If she doesn't like it, she abandons it. If she likes it? Well, then she rolls out the canvas and creates.

But I digress. Let's get back to my mom's meatballs, which I've been on a lifelong quest to replicate. The first time I tried to make it on my own was not long after I moved out onto my own.

"Mom, can you send me your recipe for spaghetti and meatballs?"

"I don't have a recipe. What I do is..." and she spoke for a half hour while I tried to scribble down what she said, and interrupted her with lots of clarifying questions.

I've watched her make it dozens of times. My sister and I filmed her making it. And took pictures along the way at key points. I begged and pleaded for my mom to write it down herself. She eventually acquiesced.

These are some of items from the list of ingredients:

Italian sausage, casings removed (I use 4-6)

1 LARGE onion

 DOP Whole Tomatoes - which I first blend slightly so they're still chunky (I use 8-10 large cans)

Italian seasoning (use generously)

Use generously?  I mean, that's quite a subjective amount. And what's up with the large onion, with all caps and and an underline included?  I found myself in the produce aisle scanning the onions with a sense of urgency and mild stress to locate the one that somehow told me it was large, all caps, underscore.

"Hey mom -- do you use a white onion or a yellow onion?"

I was looking for one of those two words for an answer. Instead, I got a "Well...you can just use what you have, but..."

I won't continue here. There are a LOT of factors that can go into choosing the right onion.

Her meatball mixture calls for Italian breadcrumbs. It literally has no amount. I've seen her pour it directly from the container with seemingly no rhyme or reason. I called her again.

"Hey mom -- how do I know how much breadcrumbs to add?"

"Well, you have to get the texture right. You can add a little water.."  Wait, water? How did I miss that? It's not written down anywhere - my stuff, her stuff.... She continues, "You want it to not stick to your hands, and the mixture will start to smell right." Awkward pregnant pause. "I go by smell, Michael.”

Smell? WTF!!

That brings me back to the title of this piece. If you've stuck with me this far. The egg. The onion. How to become a good cook.

We have a tendency to look at recipes as bible. They must be followed to the letter. But any recipe that calls for an onion (or crikey, a "half" onion), is implicit in the construct that there is no perfect amount. 

Every ingredient in a recipe could be preceded by the qualifier "about."

Eggs. Yes, most of the eggs in a dozen are quite similar in size. But the reality is they vary, sometimes my as much as a third of an ounce. Not a lot, no. But it's not like there's an absolute value to "one egg".

A lot of science can go into cooking. But it's the art of cooking that will make you fall in love with it. It's a form of creative expression.

And we haven't even talked about technique.

Eggs can be plopped into a recipe whole. Or, they can be separated. Some recipes call for the whites. Others the yolk. Whisk the whole egg and you get a scramble. Whisk the whites you get something cloud-like and billowy, with peaks. Maybe soft, maybe stiff, depending on how long you whisk for.

I finished my attempt at my Mom's recipe after a full day in the kitchen, four hours of which was the whole thing simmering on the stove while I sipped beer and stirred it once in a while. (It’s a great recipe for more reason than one.)

My spaghetti and meatballs tasted little like my Mom's, but it wasn’t hers. I didn't get the smell right or wasn't generous enough with the seasonings, or who knows what.  It was good, but it wasn't hers.

The recipe makes a huge batch. My mom even gifted our family an enormous pot for Christmas one year just for this purpose. Even the size of the pot makes a difference.

The recipe I made last weekend was mine, not hers. It couldn't be any other way. And I haven't perfected mine yet. It's good. Maybe really good. My family loves it. But it's not my mom's. Maybe it can't be. Maybe it'll never be. But I'll keep trying.

Here's the kicker. It makes such a large batch, we have to freeze some of it, and always give some of it away. A friend of the family stopped by to pick up his daughter, and we sent them home with some. The next day I got this text, followed by the two hands praying and then the fist bump emojis:

"These are the best meatballs I’ve ever had. For reals." 

It was a nice compliment. I appreciated it. But the unspoken response that lingered in my head was, "but you haven't had my mom's."