LouLife

There must be something about me (possibly some schoolteacherly kind of aura I give off) that causes customers in grocery stores to see me as some kind of authority figure. I can’t count how many times both men and women of widely varying ages have approached me in an aisle of a given supermarket to ask, "Can you tell me where they keep the capers?" or "What’s the difference between an arm chop and a shoulder blade chop?" Occasionally I’ve even been asked such questions with a clerk standing right next to me. My mother tells me it’s a quality I inherited from my dad, who was often mistaken, in old-fashioned department stores, for a "floor walker" — not to be confused with a streetwalker.

In any case, on a recent Sunday afternoon in a local grocery store, a guy wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses stopped me in the condiments aisle to ask, "Hey, you know which one of these peanut sauces is the best?" I told him none of them because a bottled sauce or dressing will always taste bottled, no matter how pricey it is or how exotic it claims to be. Right there on the spot I explained to him how to whip up a foolproof peanut sauce that I learned to make 20 years ago from my fri/files/storyimages/Liz, who first introduced me to the cookbooks of the incomparable Madhur Jaffrey. Most of Jaffrey’s cookbooks focus on the various regions of India, but her earliest one (published in 1981) is called Madhur Jaffrey’s World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking.

What happened back then was this: I met Liz at a dinner party. We hit it off like a couple of twins separated at birth. We had the same taste in movies, books, clothes, journalists, actors and actresses we loved, as well as in academics we couldn’t stand. The next day she called to invite me to her apartment for more of the same. I went. She served this month’s featured dish for lunch. The noodles were so good that the entire time we were eating them we forgot about all the other scintillating stuff we meant to talk about. We stayed focused on those noodles. I asked to see the cookbook. When I left, I went directly to the bookstore and bought it. In the next few weeks, a number of recipes from that book became part of my arsenal, so that even now, decades later, I whip up these dishes several times per month. (One of them is a Persian yogurt soup I wrote about last year that I drink the way other people drink milkshakes.) It’s a good thing I’ve memorized most of these recipes, too, because I’ve lent that cookbook to many friends who neglected to return it. I can’t tell you how many copies I’ve bought. As Stephen Colbert would say, "Cookbook thieves, you’re on notice!"

Kidding. I think of the disappearances as little gifts to the culinary world. Unless the banditos are not using the books, in which case I want the copies back. The good news is, World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking is still in print and still has its original cover, a cover that has what can only be called hippie appeal. While the book was published the first year Reagan was in office (in other words, at the very beginning of the yuppie-facilitated global gourmet food boom), it’s a production that clearly has its roots in the ’70s, with that decade’s exploration of eastern religions — Ram Dass, Alan Watts and all of that spirituality jazz. The same folks who kept The Moosewood Cookbook, The Joy of Sex and Our Bodies, Ourselves on their shelves were the intended demographic for World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking. But the last, I contend, has more staying power than any of those other relics of the Age of Aquarius.

Anyway, what Liz had done was combine two of Jaffrey’s recipes from that book into one, and this was what made the dish so super-tasty. One of the recipes was for sesame noodles with cucumber and scallions. The other was for spicy peanut sauce. In addition to experimenting with the spices in the peanut sauce, over the years I have also experimented with adding grilled chicken, shrimp or scallops, though I cont/files/storyimages/it’s still just as scrumptious as a vegetarian dish.

So, back to the guy in the store — I could kind of tell he really didn’t want to mess with having to dump stuff into his own food processor instead of out of a bottle, but he did go off in search of ingredients in other aisles of the store, so I think I may have made him a convert. I wish I had his number so I could phone him to ask him how it turned out, except a) that would make me some kind of stalker; and b) I already know the answer. This easy recipe is bound to bring about many other converts.