Alan S. Oser

I am no cook. But I love cooking as a retirement activity. I recommend it to other non-cooks who are ripe in years.

Retirement is a good time for taking up new activities. Unfortunately, it also comes at a time in life when it is hard to learn new things. Accordingly, it is best to go back to those skills one had in childhood but perhaps rarely used as an adult. Although these skills have rusted, it will be easier to revive them than to start from scratch.

Cooking requires no childhood experience. On the other hand, card playing usually does. I played bridge day after day for hours one summer at the age of 16, all the while feeling guiltily that I was wasting my time. (I was a very serious kid.) In retrospect, it was time well spent.

We were on a 10,000-mile cross-country American Youth Hostel trip, 1,000 miles spent on a bicycle and the rest on a train. Across Canada our private passenger car was the caboose of a Canadian National Railways train. It was unhitched periodically for cycling side trips, including one on a road of hard gravel from Banff to Jasper in the Canadian Rockies. That adventure turned my legs to rods of steel for a year.

While the train sped across the Canadian plains, we played bridge. We played from morning to night. When another train took us down the West Coast from Vancouver to Los Angeles, we played bridge. When it moved across the Southwest through Arizona and New Mexico to New Orleans, and then home to New York via Cincinnati, we played bridge. So I learned how to play bridge.

And never forgot. As an adult I have played very little, but now, when I meet those retired card sharks in competitive afternoon games in Florida, I can almost hold my own. At least I am not embarrassed to compete, even with little knowledge of the complex conventions that have come along since Charles Goren was the tutor in my bridge adolescence.

Cooking is different. It is not competitive. It is solitary. It requires courage and patience more than skill, and for a non-cook a palate that is not too sensitive. It should be done for a sympathetic spouse or companion, one who can be counted on to suppress criticism and focus on appreciation. In general I do not belittle expressions of appreciation as the years advance. For those with modest talent, appreciative words may be the only reward the experience engenders.

Nor is cooking a frivolous activity. One must eat. If living at home, one must normally eat at home. The quality of meals taken at home grows more important as the obligations of gainful employment subside or cease. If there is a spouse in the picture who has done cooking for a lifetime and wants to continue, cooking as a new avocation for the partner might make little sense. But if that is not the case, I say “Learn to cook.”

The beauty of it is that you do not need much experience to succeed, if success is defined as producing simple edible meals without much strain. Use recipes just for peeking, I say. The goal should be to whip things up with guidance but not absolute direction from a printed crutch, preferably while listening to Mozart on an acoustically superior radio. Cooking should not become a serious intellectual activity.

Adopting this approach has enabled me to produce many a simple meal successfully. I think of myself as a “peasant cook,” in the tradition my mother carried forward. She was masterful at utilizing leftovers, which she carefully retained in the refrigerator. Her creations were imaginative, delicious and never quite the same, making her a peasant cook of a high order. Run-of-the-mill peasant cooks, like me, expect praise merely for being peasant cooks, not for producing sensational food.

The peasant cook uses easily available ingredients and doesn’t take recipes too seriously. My dishes have included a concoction of cut-up eggplant and canned stewed tomatoes, mixed with spices approved for the tomato-eggplant combination in a threadbare 50-year-old copy of The Joy of Cooking. Sometimes I add mushrooms, just to show off.

I am also comfortable with chicken dishes. Anything seems to go well with chicken – mushrooms, tomato sauces, red wine, white wine, onions, green pepper, red pepper, anything. I make chicken salad too. I broil chicken and I roast it. I have stewed it too. To tell the truth, I am chickened out. I have turned my attention to fish. That is where my cooking future lies.

I used to think that fish is fish and if you knew one you knew them all. But this is not so. In my neighborhood an excellent fish store run by Koreans is embedded in a Western Beef supermarket. Arrayed before one’s eyes on a broad mattress of chopped ice lie at least 30 varieties of fish from the oceans, rivers and lakes of the world. They are neatly labeled, and now I know the difference between a sea bass and a snapper without even reading a label.

I know how they taste, too, and I know whether I should steam them or broil them. Some can be handled either way. Take salmon. I used to take the lazy way out and simply broil my salmon, using judicious amounts of butter, lemon juice and salt and pepper. This works well, provided the cook learns to take the fish out at exactly the right time.

But now I also have a steamer. I douse my salmon whole in simmering water spiked with certain cut-up vegetables and assorted spices as advised in instructions that came with the steamer. So long as I do not over-simmer or under-simmer, but rather simmer just right, I produce a steamed-salmon masterpiece worthy of any real cook.

Timing in cooking, even more than the precise ingredients used, is what makes for success. I consider myself a shrewd timer. To look at something in the oven without the aid of a thermometer and to pronounce it ready to eat, and to be right, is one of the deep satisfactions of cooking for me. Rather like making a smart play in bridge. But it is better to follow the recipe the first time.

Timing is exquisitely crucial in dealing with fish. I love bass and trout, whether from the lake or the sea, but not if they are dry and overdone. Undercooked won’t do either. If raw, the fish is inedible and cannot be separated from the bone. Getting it just right in the broiler is an art worth mastering.

A word must be said for pasta. It comes in so many shapes! I buy them all, but I prefer penne to rotini, and rotini to bows. I boil my pasta till it is halfway between chewy and soft, stir in olive oil so the pieces won’t cohere, drain it, and then mix in an assortment of ingredients, trying hard to use whatever is left over in the refrigerator. One version might be based on cut-up pieces of ham and cheddar cheese, blended with black olives in a mayonnaise dressing. Another might focus on pieces of cooked chicken or ham, mixed with peppers or capers or sundried tomatoes, or all three.

Cooking is not all fun, because it is not all cooking and eating. Later comes the cleaning up. Sometimes the cleaning up comes long after the eating, which can cause marital distress. The cleanup can be formidable, because the mess created by the amateur cook is formidable.

The main pleasure is in the preparation, solitary, creative work enhanced by background music. There are few rules, although one important one is not to leave the kitchen while the burners are on. Pleasing the partner should be the goal of the cooking process. Burned food ensures defeat.