A little free cooking advice

Here is a found poem just for fun. I really like the idea of found poems. Some can be very powerful with just a little revision, a few clever line breaks. Annie Dillard (I think it is her) is a master of the found poem. I'll have to check my book shelves and let you know.

Careful what you wish for. A direct quote from my son, just this minute.

Freezing “Holdovers” – A Found Poem from Betty Crocker’s Dinner In a Dish, c. 1965

What a lovely feeling
of security to open the freezer
to a selection of your family’s
favorite home-
cooked dinners in a dish,

each ready to heat
and serve at the end
of a rushed day
or when unexpected
guests appear. To arrive

at this secure state, double up
when preparing recipes
in this book—serve one
recipe for dinner,
freeze the other.

Below
are guides
for packaging,
freezing,
thawing,

and reheating
casseroles
and other meals
in
a
dish.

On the Day the Wife Gave Up Cooking

On the Day the Wife Gave Up Cooking

There are four basic principles that should not be overlooked in cooking any dish—proper and accurate measurements; proper cooking temperature, proper length of cooking time and proper time of serving.
-Duncan Hines from Adventures in Good Cooking and the Art of Carving in the Home (c. 1939)


Food is all mathematics, Betty Crocker and her kind
tell me, an artist at heart. Still, I stray from the stove
one minute too long, boil the two-thirds cup milk over,
follow a flash of ruby wings outside the kitchen window
add three cups flour, harden a reputedly moist red velvet cake.

If you can read, you can cook, my mother tells me,
stroking my poet’s soul. Pare, blanch, fold in, try out.
The words take me on a journey far from my milky mess.
Strain, sieve, sift, simmer. I truly believe a watched pot
never boils. I do not watch. I do not watch.

Pears, peaches, plums, potatoes. I bake a poet’s potluck
no-one dares touch. It’s all so simple with a head for numbers.
Twenty-two wafers equals one cup crumbs. Sugar.
Brown, light or dark. Teaspoon, tablespoon. Squash, strawberries,
split green peas. Dessert even the neighbor’s dog will not eat.

The fly in the rice is this: I want to cook like I live.
I want to curry with abandon. Salt and pepper to taste,
to taste. Stand for hours under the scrub pine, palms full
of chokeberries, waiting for the chickadees, all the while
breathing in the forbidden curl of burning roast turkey.

I want to flirt with the young butcher.
While away the hours batting my eyes, asking
How big the roast? How fat the pan? How sharp is that knife?
Pay him to bone two pieces of meat, roll and tie them together.
Stroll home with his meat under my arm, and serve salad from a bag.

Truth is, if I were a bird, a robin or cardinal, I would not have to measure
my food, no cups, no quarts, no gallons, no liters. If I were a poem,
another master would measure my words, weigh my meter, scan
my rhyme. So on this day, in this kitchen, I will peel away my layers,
remove my core, hang my skin from a hook in the ceiling to dry.