'The Subtle Layerings of Spice and Tang'

For a non-singer, the best time to sing, because the body and mind are already occupied with familiar rhythms, is not in the shower but while cooking. Song eases the tedium of chopping and stirring. Cooking for this cook is not a reverie but a job. It’s not like in the commercials where cooks move like dancers on ecstasy. I took over most food preparation in the house at age twelve when my mother got her first job since she got married, and I'm still at it. 

Macaroni and cheese – frequently in rotation – begins with mincing an onion to sauté. Recently, I found myself chopping to the rhythm of the Mission Impossible theme. Danny Kaye’s “Wonderful Copenhagen” accompanied stirring the cheese sauce and I did the dishes, for no reason I can think of, to the Stones’ “Dead Flowers.” None of this was programmed in advance. Songs bubble to the surface as in a nice thick roux. Everyone knows that work and song go together. In the Autumn 2021 issue of The Hudson Review, David Livewell published “Cooking with Ella”:

 

“She cooks to Ella’s soaring, playful voice.

The bright, three-minute songs have changed and lifted

her mood. The speakers rattle the kitchen cabinets.

She whisks the eggs to ‘Paper Moon.’ She measures

a snowy cup of flour while the singer drops

a yellow basket. ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ is crammed

in a thrown pinch of salt. When the singer scats,

the chef delights and hums, all language flung

away like scraps in garbage bags. Who needs

mere words when voice becomes another horn

with swells and climbs and trills and tightrope walks,

taking a solo to peaks so few have scaled?

She slaps an unseen bass. Her slippers tap.

Her apron flutters like a red stage curtain.

She dips her spoon in all that stews and sizzles

between the notes and works into a sauce.

A savory aroma twirls and spins

with ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy.’ It’s a wonder a wineglass

doesn’t shatter from the high notes ringing out.

And ‘Lady Be Good’ transforms into a mantra

for the artistry inspiring her cuisine,

the subtle layerings of spice and tang,

balsamic glazes, reductions, splashes of wine.

She wields her blade, is dicing vegetables

to Ella’s comic ‘Mack the Knife’ with all

its spontaneity and laughs, the Satchmo

impersonations cutting through the steam

when the words get flubbed. No onion tears

will dampen this frivolity, this sound

of a big band crammed in the back of a house.

Her metal spoons lay drumrolls on the pans

like a high-hat ending the show with a flurry.”

I’ll add “The Man That Got Away” from A Star Is Born (1954), with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Ira Gershwin.