How to Cook Like a Man

Starred review from March 5, 2012
For rock-climbing, skateboarding, guitar-playing, surfer Duane, cooking from cookbooks is a passion, at least after the birth of his first child. Soon after he and his wife, Liz, bring home their daughter, Hannah, Duane suffers an identity crisis, anxiously wondering how he can contribute value to his new family. Realizing that three hours of waiting for the perfect wave every afternoon won’t work, he decides that he’ll become the family cook, putting hot meals on the table every night when Liz returns home tired from work. Yet Duane won’t be just any cook; in the same way that he obsessively waited for the perfect wave (in his book Caught Inside), he’s now going to cook perfect meals by following the recipes in Alice Waters’s cookbook, Chez Panisse Vegetables. In eight years of living obsessively, Duane cooks his way through all seven of Waters’s cookbooks, searching frantically for fresh ingredients in local farmers’ markets or taking off to Alaska to fish for fresh salmon. He throws lavish parties for groups of friends not only in order to try out new recipes but also to show off his newly acquired way with pots, pans, sauces, and wine reductions. In this hilarious, touching, if at times self-absorbed memoir, Duane leads us on the wild culinary roller coaster of his food-soaked and recipe-drenched mania until he finally stops and learns to integrate his passion for cooking into his daily life. Agent: Sam Stoloff.

March 1, 2012
Uneven but intimate look at the intersection of fatherhood and cooking. Men's Journal contributing editor Duane (A Mouth Like Yours, 2005, etc.) chronicles his newfound fixation on providing for his budding family through cooking. Early on the author relates how, after his daughter was born, he wanted to contribute to the household in a meaningful way. He deduced that the most valuable contribution he could make was "seeing to it that [his] little family ha[d] a delicious, wholesome meal on the table, every single night, forever and ever." Building on this simple declaration, Duane turned it into an eight-year experiment. As he cooked and learned more about nearly every aspect of the cooking process, his family grew and experienced setbacks and tragedies. Some of Duane's memoir is self-indulgent; he was obviously searching for something--approval, the meaning of fatherhood, a sense of purpose and self--through his cooking. Though he and his wife had financial issues, Duane insisted on making extravagant, uncompromising meals that no one really wanted to eat. However, the author's prose is mostly smooth and occasionally beautiful; despite unnecessarily long sentences in certain sections, he effectively immerses readers in his thoughts and feelings. Duane produces a mostly coherent narrative thread, but he does meander into adventures in eating rather than cooking. This tendency may frustrate some readers but should appeal to die-hard foodies looking for their next read. A flawed memoir, but one that would make a good gift for a father-to-be searching for a sense of self in the midst of life-changing events.

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April 1, 2012
Duane's title is nicely tongue-in-cheek. Facing fatherhood, the climber (El Capitan, 2000) and surfer (Caught Inside, 1996) decides that his contribution to the family will be as cookmake that chef. Beginning with Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Vegetables (1996), he obsessively makes every recipe in that cookbook before moving on to other books and other chefs, transforming himself from a guy who rotates two different dinner recipes (Even Nights Stir Fry and Odd Nights Pasta) to someone who makes his own veal stock. Unable to do anything halfway, he lays waste to kitchens, keeps hungry guests waiting, and even sickens his wife and friends by serving a surfeit of truffles. Eventually, of course, he learns the value of preparing simple food that his family can actually enjoy. Though this is structurally somewhat unevenDuane's coming epiphany is so apparent that the second half seems a foregone conclusionDuane is an intelligent and highly engaging writer, and his entertaining insights into male foodie culture will resonate strongly with both men who cook and the women who put up with them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)