Remembering the First Really Good Cook I Ever Knew

Fort Leonard Wood Missouri, 1958. Lunch time in the mess hall. Steak day.

--How would you like your steak?

--Oh, any way…

[The cook throws a raw steak on the metal messtray. An awkward pause.]

--Um

--Well, you SAID ANY WAY!

This was the first really good cook I ever knew. I had worked in restaurants in my teens, and knew some cooks who could put good food on the table, or at least adequate food, no poison and no surprises. But this was the first really good cook I ever knew.

Also ornery. If you showed indifference, he’d throw a raw steak on your plate. If you screwed up in the kitchen, the chances are he’d hit you across the side of the head with a skillet. All pride of craft. He wanted to do things right, and he wanted to be recognized for doing things right.

The amazing thing is, I do not have any recollection of his name—amazing because he made a huge impression; I think of him almost every day. He looked like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, so call him “Clarence” (and I know what you are thinking but no, the timing is wrong). Clarence worked hard; he had pride of craft; and he wasn’t going to apologize to anybody. I remembered him a few years later when I first read Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, and got to know Lucas Beauchamp, the old man in the overcoat with the gold toothpick who almost gets himself hanged for his insolence.

I knew Clarence was a good cook because I ate his food, and because I worked in his kitchen; I didn’t learn to cook there, but I learned not to be afraid of a kitchen, or at least not as afraid of a kitchen as I was of Clarence.

I knew Clarence was a good cook also because I spent some time in those days traveling from company to company, eating meals in different messhalls, the same menu, different cooks. I learned—to my profit—that the recipe matters but the cook matters more, and you can make something out of almost anything if you have a flair, and if you take pains.

This was 1958. Clarence had joined the Army about 1940, from Georgia. Three more years and he would have put in his 20; he’d have his pension and he could go where he wanted to go.

“The Army taught me to read and write,” Clarence liked to say. “The Army taught me a trade. I got no beef with the Army.”

First really good cook I ever knew.