The Pittsburgh Press (January 7, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico – The greater portion of my time and energy during those recent three months of non-columning was taken up with my housework.
I carry today upon my person all the honorable badges of my profession. I have dishpan hands housemaid’s knee, and that Monday-morning look. I will be a disappointed man if Time Magazine doesn’t pick me as America’s Typical Mother of 1941.
But industry and diligence have their compensations, and in those three months of menial toll I developed into one of the finest all-around domestics in America.
A Vanderbilt would be proud to have me in his kitchen. The only trouble with me is that I’m slow. I can wash the breakfast dishes in an hour and a quarter, where anybody else could do them in 10 minutes. I’m thorough to a fault, efficiency is my destruction. I cleaned our little house so meticulously and so often this fall that I almost cleaned it out of existence. If I were to keep this up all winter we’d have to buy new furniture in the spring, and possibly a new floor.
But any moron can scrub and sweep. My cooking is what I wish to dwell upon.
There are a lot of men in this country who go around bragging about what wonderful cooks they are, when actually all they can do is fry an egg. But I can make pudding; I can roast fowl to a turn; I can baste and stew and skewer. Give me another month and I could fix you up some pate de fois gras meuniere a la mode that would make tears come to your eyes.
No, my cooking is not of that meager type indulged in by eccentric old hermits. My cooking is elite and many-faceted. It contains all the subtleties and surprises that the gourmet lives for. My cooking is classical.
Dinner for six, please, Ernie
Why, one night I served a full-course dinner for six people. The banquet was outstandingly successful. At least I assume it was, for that was Six weeks ago and nobody has filed suit yet.
I have learned that there is a lot of balderdash about cooking. It doesn’t require a mystic gift or “touch.” All it requires is a good stop-watch. Give me a cookbook and a watch and I can produce as tasty a morsel as any of your Vermont grandmothers.
The main thing in producing a meal, I’ve found, is simply to develop the ability to remain calm.
If you could have stood outside my kitchen window the first night I got a full meal, you would have thought somebody was thrashing wheat inside. You never heard such a commotion. Chicken grease was popping, kettles were hissing, asparagus was boiling over, skillet lids were sliding off, the oven door was whanging open and shut like a drop forge, pieces of chicken were falling on the floor, sugar was flying through the air, and I, covered with flour, was leaping from refrigerator to sink to stove to table in a grim frenzy. Panicky and glassy-eyed, I resembled nothing so much as a hysterical trap-drummer fighting a mongoose.
But experience has taught me to keep my head. Let me give you an example. One night I had invited five guests, and had the meal all ready to serve, when it dawned upon me that the potatoes had three-quarters of an hour yet to bake. But did I lose my head? I did not.
I simply walked into the living room, lit a cigarette, and announced in a quiet voice that there would be a slight delay on account of the delivery boy having fallen off his bicycle on the way over and broken his leg.
Dinner recipe No. 38
This upset the guests so that they didn’t realize the food was all cold when they finally got it. In fact the ruse wound up by the guests making up a pot of $3.65 to buy the delivery boy some flowers. Since there wasn’t any delivery boy. I took the money and bought whisky with it the next day. This is known as Dinner Recipe No. 38, but shouldn’t be used except in a crisis.
Yes, I am a cook of renown and agility. Yet in spite of this admitted prowess with the skillet and the roaster, I am not agog over cooking. In fact, if pinned down, I would say to hell with cooking. I say let somebody else do the cooking if at all possible.
To me the preparation of food is a curse, and I declaim that the human species cannot call itself civilized until everything comes in capsules and the word “kitchen” is stricken from the dictionary.
I’m proud of my cooking simply in an academic way, as one might be proud of developing a certain grace and finesse in the taking of castor oil. I wouldn’t cook for a living if you put me out in the snow.
Furthermore, I lost five pounds eating my own grub. What I need most in my career as a housekeeper is a good restaurant.