Cassoulet, ready for the long haul in the pot, with pepper but no salt. (Maybe later.)

Sara Dickerman, writing at Slate, asks the age-old question, “Why salt and pepper?”

I’ve pondered this myself, if not seriously questioned it. They certainly look good together (except in my beard, a rather recent development), but they seem to complement each other, too, enough to have somehow lasted.

Dickerman talks of pepper’s “musky prickle,” and I do like that. Salt, for all it offers, doesn’t offer that. Chagall once said of those little floating characters he’d put aloft in his pictures, “I can’t imagine a painting without one. It would be like a meal without salt and pepper.” The New York cook Kenny Shopsin puts his salt and pepper in a plastic bottle because, as he explains it, when do you need salt that you don’t also need pepper?

I prefer to sprinkle mine separately, to see the flecks light upon the flank of meat in a kind of detached tandem. That way I can see where I’m going. For, as I’ve learned the hard way, there is a subtlety to salt and pepper that must be honored.

Anyway, back to why? Dickerman blames it on Rome. Fair—and certainly easy—enough.

Breckle’s brown ale, from the good folks at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco.

Very little about winter charms me anymore, but rich ale is one of them. Been all over this brown from Anchor lately, Brekle’s. It’s named in honor of Gottlieb Brekle, who went to San Francisco in 1871 and set up shop on Russian Hill.

I’m a fan of most of the Anchor line—especially the Liberty and the porter—but this’n might be my fave. I imagine Newcastle to be this good in, you know, Newcastle. Brekle’s freshness makes all the diff. I’m having a glass tonight with a crusty meat pie.

San Fran-based drinks writer Barnaby Conrad III offered to introduce me to Fritz Maytag, heir apparent to the appliance giant and mastermind of the Anchor revival in the early 1990s. “He’s 75 and in great shape,” said Conrad. “Beefy, not obese, you know? He looks like he might have played quarterback at Cal-Berkeley back in the day.”

We were drinking gin in the bar of his club and the northern coast, where Maytag resides, seemed a long way away with so much city to explore. Anchor gin, Junipero, for the record.

Claudia Roden’s The Food of Spain (Ecco, 2011). I love the cover, the salt-baked fish, the size. That’s Spain shadowing the King James Bible.

My mind has been running to Spain lately. The subject, the fact, of it creeps into things culinary. It’s in the olive oil I buy by the five-liter jug from my mate Jorge P. Stover, whose family runs the Crismona fields of Andalucia, where olive groves roll all the way to the sea. Spain is in the salt I sprinkle onto eggs, meat, shrimp and more, also from Jorge. It’s in the garnacha I drink, the grape we know (from the French) as grenache. It’s in olives, sherry vinegar, cured pig, myriad cheese.

When my friend Linda said she was thinking of going to Spain, I told her I’d tell her all I knew, which isn’t much. But, it was enough to fill several pages, and most of my mind.

Lately, and mostly, Spain is in Claudia Roden’s latest (and 11th, in her life) book on food, The Food of Spain. A profile of Roden in the New Yorker linked her with two other English women of cookbook authorage, one I knew and one not. From the profile, I’ve come to regard Roden as a kind of caretaker, a wandering soul with her heart in the Mediterranean and her feet in London. She reminds me a bit of MFK Fisher—compact, discerning, curious, relentless.

For such a petit woman, Roden’s compiled quite a book. Kelly got me Spain for my birthday, but we had to send the first copy back because the binding unraveled in shipment. Understandable. It’s bearing the weight of the Spanish table, after all.

Last spring, Steve Jeffery was running production at LaFarge, the French cement firm with a plant in northeast Tulsa. Jeffery is not a “rock licker,” as he calls those truly passionate about geological formations, but he knows enough to have clued me in on the Lipe Mound. “It’s a geologic anomaly,” he said. “It should not exist out there. But it does.”

Out there is at the edge of the dam at Lake Oologah. It, the mound, is a volcanic upthrust in a sea of limestone. As Jeffery said, it simply should not be, but it is.

When I walked into The Spudder last month with Matt Leach and Sterlin Harjo to shoot some This Land video, the last guy I expected to meet us at the door was Steve Jeffery, who’d quit LaFarge and bought The Spudder, one of the oldest, quirkiest, tastiest steak joints in Tulsa history.

We ate the works—cheese-stuffed mushrooms, chicken livers, potato soup (not The Spudder’s namesake, but delicious enough to be; a spudder, in fact, is an oil rig), salad and rib chops the size of a face. I was about to order a Mendoza malbec when Jeffery stopped me. Soon after, a bottle of Barry Switzer’s new Napa cab appeared.

As we got up to leave, Jeffery pointed out Joe Washington, sitting at a table with two suits. Little Joe Washington of Sooner football fame. After the Barry cab and the bloody meat, it made for a very Big Red night, indeed.

La Fee Bohemian, on the way down.

Now that the initial buzz has worn off, I’ve gone back into my absinthe file. Interviewed Paul Nathan yesterday, co-author of The Little Green Book of Absinthe and the only person ever arrested on American soil for selling absinthe—obviously, in the days prior to its newfound legal legitimacy.

Nathan’s forgotten more absinthe than I’ver ever drunk and one of his faves is George Rowley’s La Fee Parisienne. Rowley, an M.D., was the first to introduce absinthe back into France after the 1915 ban was lifted in 1998. I have a bottle of La Fee tucked away at home, but not the French style.

My La Fee Bohemian came from a buddy, John Phillips, who was killing time in a duty-free shop. It is the most unlikely shade of green you can imagine. Like, joke green, as if somebody heard the term “la fee verte”—French for green fairy, which you’re alleged to witness after heavy imbibing—and concocted the potion through a bad set of Foster Grants.

In fact, says Nathan, Rowley’s Bohemian is true to form, inspired from the early days of the absinthe revival, which began in the Czech Republic (I’m not even sure Havel’s revolution had occurred, so it may have been Czechoslovakia still). With no proper recipe to draw upon, distillers (if they can be called that) made recipes up as they went, which was usually fast and furious. That Scope-colored green is their green—the calling card of the Bohemian style.

I was going to hit the remainder of my bottle of La Fee (about half-full, nae, empty) but then Nathan told me that it’s no so much binging that does the trick, but saturation. “You’ll see fairies,” he warns, little sparkles dancing in the corners of the eyes. This effect trickles in after three or four drinks for four or five days.

“When I drink it,” Nathan told me, “I tend to get a nice buzz after a drink and a half, as opposed to three. So that tight rope becomes a nice wide path. I’m happily buzzed versus ruinously drunk. I’m an adult, that’s where I want to be.”

With Barnaby Conrad III in San Francisco. Photo by Cynthia Masterson (probably).

It’s been a year since my whirlwind tour to San Francisco to drink, think and write about martinis and Maurice Kanbar. The source of my inspiration—Barnaby Conrad III.

I wrote a couple of stories about it, but saved one for future musings. The story posted today at the This Land site covers a few stars and bars that orbit around San Francisco drinking culture. And what a culture it is.

I’d chased Conrad down largely on the strength of two books—one on absinthe, the other on martinis. He plied me with food, drink, friends and a better understanding of Kanbar, the guy who invented Skyy vodka and later bought up most of downtown Tulsa.

What I did not expect from the whirlwind tour of the city of seven hills was art. But such is the nature of the renaissance man before you—a Yale grad with a writer father who instilled a strong love of bullfighting, fishing, painting and drinking. The girl over the bar is a Mark Stock original. Over glasses of Swiss and French absinthe from Conrad’s private stash, she became my muse. A story for a later date.

The first thing I ever read by Ian Frazier was his piece in The Atlantic on Minneapolis’ Mall of America. It arrived in a care package my sister-in-law brought over when she came to France to visit in the spring of ’02. By then, Frazier had already written Great Plains and On the Rez, his two books on the Sioux and other tragic aspects of the American West. He had yet to publish The Fish’s Eye, a collection of his essays on angling, which includes a story about catching his largest trout ever on a river that ran through a golf course, and another on a stream that ran in back of a place called Les Schwab Tires. Not your usual Isaak Walton stuff, to be sure.

Frazier was in town a couple of weeks ago, touring his latest, the very epic Travels in Siberia. This Land audio producer Abby Wendle interviewed him at the Ambassador Hotel and brought me along for lit fanboy cred. We arranged the furniture of the Patrick Hurley Library—a smallish, forgotten-looking space we had all to ourselves—and settled in for more than an hour’s chat. We talked a lot about Russia, where Abby has lived, which lit a fire in Frazier, and about Ohio, where they both grew up.

I mainly sat back in awe. Frazier is, in a literary age being turned on its ear, one of the greats. In person, he’s shorter than I expected but otherwise the guy in his author photos. He read for us, a passage from a story in his New Yorker collection, called “Out of Ohio,” and his voice ran as fluidly as one of his favorite trout streams. I knew he was once a famous drinker, but had stopped, so I asked him if he missed it. He said he did not, and that he now sleeps much better.

He also said he ate the fish he caught, which I imagined to be a lot of fish over the years, if Frazier is anywhere near as meticulous an angler as he is a writer.

Oh, the one place where he fishes and catches fish but does not eat them—the East River, the body that separates Manhattan from Brookyln.

Todd Zuniga’s Literary Death Match came to town and I was lucky to be among the four combatants. The rules of engagement: Two writers square off and read for seven minutes each, of which one advances to round two. Then, two more. I read in the second, versus ultimate winner Sloan Davis of Nimrod, the Tulsa-based lit journal. Don’t let the fact that I didn’t win annoy you — you know I love my fans, a most loyal and trustworthy lot — or that the winner of this particular face-off won by besting the Tulsa World’s Cary Aspinwall in a game of, yes, musical chairs.

Anyway, we packed B’Nai Emunah Synagogue and had a blast. Here’s the text I read, for what it’s worth.

JUNE 8, 1974

 

And the sky began to do what the TV said it would. The thunderhead came on strong, impregnating the humid afternoon, slipping in under the dusk. The big one that dropped out of it was a monster, with a tail and an evil breath.

 

The big one blew in on a Saturday—my parents’ bowling night. Sheridan Lanes, smoking Winstons and rolling for S&H Green stamps.

 

–

 

In our backyard that made do as a baseball diamond—with a hedgerow separating the first-base line from the Broken Arrow Expressway, and a deranged neighbor collie that slobbered on homerun balls—there was a cellar. A cylindrical, steel tank, 8 feet across and 10 feet deep. The lid was slightly domed and baby blue. We’d open it every now and then just to see if anything deadly had crawled in.

 

At first glance, you’d think a flying saucer had landed there and gotten stuck. And if you happened by when my dad had us in the backyard shaving our heads, you’d swear aliens had landed.

 

–

 

Ours was a happening little street that offered cheap thrills in the days prior to cable TV. Boys peddled Huffies, girls cartwheeled on Bermuda lawns, and parents strolled sidewalks just because. Everybody knew everybody. Like T.J., whose dad could get a Gremlin up on two wheels around a sharp turn. And Mr. Henry, who tried to drive home one unhappy hour from The Bounty, our corner bar, only to end up wrapping his Polara around a utility pole at the first curve.

 

Across this street lived John Rahilly. Rahilly claimed to be a direct descendant of Michael Joseph O’Rahilly—the great Irish Republican martyred in the Easter Rising of 1916—who HIMSELF claimed to be head o’ the clan, and changed his name to simply THE O’Rahilly to stake his claim.

 

In Rahilly’s own clan were two towering blondes named Bobbie and Michelle. Bobbie was the oldest and beyond me. I pictured her whenever I heard Janis Joplin sing “Me and Bobby McGee.”

 

Michelle, younger and fairer, had a high, greasy forehead and Marcia Brady hair. Her long, skinny legs were the color of peanut butter. I obsessed over them that summer, the way I’d obsessed in the summer of ’71 over the elusive Vida Blue rookie card. And in ’72 at the massacre of the Israelis at the Munich games.

 

When the McDonald’s opened at 21^st and Sheridan, just before the oil embargo, Bobbie drove me there in her blue convertible. Michelle rode shotgun. I took a backseat, sank deep into the white vinyl and watched all the blonde hair blow around. We drove through the drive-thru and drank Coca-Colas on crushed ice.

 

–

 

When the time came to go to the cellar, it was my father who called the shot. He lived with an exaggerated fear of cottonmouths, drug dealers and spring storms. But I feared the cellar more than the sky. Spiders hid there, spinning webs in the shadows.

 

“Get in,” my dad said, lifting the lid. “I’m gonna go get Rahilly.”

 

I followed my little brother down the spiral steps of the cellar. The first drops of rain began to splat. The sky was heavy and hot, and felt lower and closer than it had ever been. Closer than the clothes on my back.

 

“Squeeze in,” he said. “It’s gonna be a full house.”

 

A sell-out, in fact. My pal Alan’s family from down the street joined us—all six of them—to make 10. We crammed in there like pencils in a cup and waited for my dad to bring back Rahilly and company, which’d make 14.

 

Earlier in the day, my dad had said to Rahilly, “If it gets rough, y’all come on over and get in that cellar.” Rahilly was clipping his grass and sipping brown liquor from a sweaty highball balanced on a porch rail. “Me and Jack’ll be all right,” Rahilly said, raising his glass in the afternoon haze.

 

My dad said, “Yeah, well, if it starts to blow, you get your ass over there—and I don’t mean maybe. And leave Jack here. We’re kind of tight already.”

 

Like a snare drum. In lieu of a seat on the short bench, I slid in under the stairs for a view. Thunder groaned in the spongy sky. When my dad climbed in minus Rahilly, I saw swells.

 

–

 

They talk about the sound, and predictably so. But nobody ever rhapsodizes the light. I got only a brief glimpse of it but that was plenty. It was a bilious green—vomit green—like the contents of Linda Blair’s lunchbox. A swollen kind of light about to combust, as if a light bulb could grow too hot and explode its wattage into a trillion shards of paper-thin glassy skin. And it smelled—the electric smell of the leaden earth about to be upturned.

 

My dad took his seat atop the stairs and reached heavenward.

 

“What about Rahilly?” I asked.

 

“He’s on his own!” he said, pulling down the lid.

 

Now shut out, I pictured Rahilly lounging in his cheap lawnchair, sipping whiskey and admiring the freshly clipped fruits of his labor. I imagined the mimosa that adorned the lawn now bent and crippled in the wind, and the lawnchair twisted in knots. And I listened for Rahilly and his bottle blowing to the seven winds.

 

–

 

The pressure was building inside the tank, an exhaustion of air and anxiety. It occurred to me that we might be stuck in there awhile, and that we should have brought pillows and board games, Chicken-in-a-Biskit and Shasta pop.

 

This was the mother of them, all right. Bodies and splinters lay in her wake. She’d eaten Drumright for lunch, and the dinner hour was nigh. The cellar was dank with sweat and silence and from its floor we all looked up at my dad, wondering NOW what.

 

Then the lid began to pogo up and down. From a mad gust or a Poltergeist, who could say. “She’s here!” yelled my dad, holding fast to the metal door barely tethered to the fury.

 

His biceps bulged like eggs in a boa’s belly. He let got with one hand just long enough to shove his glasses back up on his nose. Then he buckled down, throwing his weight into it. And again, a violent heaving on the door that threatened to rip it from its rusty hinges. My god, the inconvenience of it all!

 

Rain slapped and thunder boomed. Lightning began to lash and stars of static friction crackled all around. In the pause that separated them came a voice screaming scattershot in the squall:

 

“I SAID …” it said. “OPEN THAT GAW-DAMN DOOR!!!”

 

My dad pushed up on the handle and there stood Rahilly, wet with bourbon and rain and tears of vengeance. His thinning red hair clung to his forehead and raindrops ran down the inside of his eyeglasses. Two hard nipples poked through a threadbare V-neck. Soggy mats of chest hair peaked through. He looked dug up, a zombie of the waterlogged earth.

 

My dad threw open the door. Rain cascaded, baptizing us in the last-gasp hiss that preceded the unhinged flood. Rahilly all but leapt into our midst, his family in tow. I looked up to see a summer sky gone from gill-green to matt-black, like a bruise flowering under a blouse.

 

–

 

Safe and fairly sound, Rahilly let forth his wrath, damning the rain and skewering the meteorologist. Michelle had moved in under the stairs next to me—a telltale gift from the gods. Her racing-stripe windbreaker clung to her arms like shrink-wrap on a pork tender. We huddled close, close enough for me to smell her and think to myself—but not aloud!—that Michelle rhymed with smell.

 

I wrapped her two LLs around my tongue, closed my eyes, and licked the rain off my lips. Then, a head-sucking rush, of the air vaporizing and the anvil clanging. And right on time, the bitch appeared.

The office of Cooper Chockley, where the kids distract themselves on iPads and the parents drink espresso and bottled water. Portraits of all the success stories smile back at you from elegantly framed photos. “See?” they seem to say. “It is so worth it.”

The office is a country cottage kind of place, in a secluded park it shares with dentists, Realtors and other elegant professionals. It’s just east of Vensel Creek, near All Saints Anglican Church and Calvary Cemetery.

A student of the Tulsa Race Riot swears there are bodies buried back in behind here, past Calvary and across the creek. It used to be easier to go in there and walk the banks, where he would study the earth for signs of mass graves. But now the only access is through Tanglewood, a new community with well-postured trees glowing with autumn foliage and a median sales price of just over $700K.

“Look!” my kid yelled from the backseat a mile back. “It’s the Shakespeare theater.”

He was spotting the tree-lined wing of a three-story manse painted white and studded with dark timbers. A club owner lived there in the ’90s, a girl I was hanging out with at the time told me, and he may still. It did look a bit like the south London Globe, but I’ve no idea how he knew that. No matter. I took it as a good sign. Better than him peppering me with questions about his mouth that I could only answer, “Well, when I got braces …”

Inside, after he made me swear that we had not parked in a space with a wheelchair on it, Lucas poked around on a computer screen, where all patients young and old check themselves in. A woman answers phones and keeps the people with drinks in the drinks zone, but otherwise it’s a streamlined environment and you’re on you own.

The four Cooper Chockley values, framed to a wall in the coffee bar, are Quality, Guest Experience, Guest Education and Time Management, in that order. The message at Cooper Chockley oozes from every piece of soft furniture and aroma of breakfast blend: Take care of us and we’ll take care of you. You can’t walk five feet without some component of it being emitted, whether through a smiley-mouthed testimonial or a new piece of Apple hardware.

The theme, if there is one, screams to me Urban Zoological. The staff, doctors included, all dress in neck-to-ankle black, like club bouncers or the wait staff at a hip restaurant known for sourcing locally. Everybody moves about in a choreography that appears honed and sharpened for efficiency and safety. Animal prints offer an ironic motif: a hippo showing off his tonsils and molars like giant marshmallows, a giraffe pokes his tongue out to a leaf, an elephant’s trunk partially obscures an exaggeratedly long tusk.

Or maybe it’s just all the enamel and gum showing in framed mouths, mouths that appear about to chomp, in spite of the pain you can feel for the subject being forced to pose there with their teeth on parade.

“He’s cute,” said Reta, about to jam her fingers in my son’s mouth. And I began to wonder for how long. Would he still be cute and 7 when the hour was up? I distracted myself by looking out the picture window, where the creek meandered through a stand of golden-leafed oaks. I said something about the scenery.

“Yeah,” said Jennifer, all smiles and blue Latex gloves. “It’s beautiful when it snows.”

Reta took the vacant swivel stool next to where my son lie outstretched and I saw his head turn, acknowledging the presence of reinforcements.

Jennifer: “She’s going to help me out a bit.”

Reta: “We will get along just fine.”

Jennifer: “Can you open up real wide? Good.”

In the procedure room, there’s a Queen Anne bench upholstered in animal prints where the parents can sit. From it, I studied my boy, the thin lines of dried mud stuck in the tread of his New Balance, his hands lying limply on his sweat-shirted chest, his mouth agape, all pink and white and held open by a plastic kind of device that reminded me of those cones they collar dogs with to keep them from biting themselves.

Before I’d even gotten situated, they were deep into the session. Reta and Jennifer dabbed and dabbled at his teeth to set the stage for Cooper, who would apply the cement and brackets. Jennifer would then insert the band that runs with curvature of his lower jaw. (We’re saving the top row for a later date, at Cooper Chockley’s suggestion.)

“You’re doin’ awesome, Lucas!”

They have Wi-Fi, of course, so I checked some e-mail while they suctioned his mouth. An intense purple-blue light—ye olde “blacklight”—lit up his gums. The scene reminded me of lounging on my bed listening to Yes albums in the dark and staring at the Roger Dean felt posters thumbtacked to my ceiling.

“Good to see you, buddy,” said Dr. Cooper, straddling a stool on wheels. It was about to hit the fan.

“He’s doing awesome,” Jennifer said.

“Awesome, dude.”

Then Cooper said something technical, and that he was “worried about it,” and I zoned out. Let the professionals mastermind the nitty-gritty, I say, be it orthodontics or stock portfolios. Yes, the polished wood floors, faux-finished walls painted in earth tones and all the tech gear make me wary, suspicious, even. Until they start in, and then I realize that Cooper is a god, his assistants trained disciples, and I am mammon. I praise the near-heavens for steady hands and that somebody is helping pay for at least part of this upgrade. Like god and minion, we never even actually say hi.

“Open,” said Jennifer to Lucas.

“Eeeaaaeeek …” went Cooper, straining for space in the small mouth. “Bring that tongue back. Back-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-back.”

Lucas reclined there motionless, his mouth lit up, near tears glistening in his still-sleepy eyes. He wasn’t crying, just kind of welling in the backlash of keeping his jaw cranked open for half an hour, the struggle of not crying, of being prodded and sucked, and having his crooked teeth—little white tiles that came in askew not through any fault of his own—straightened out.

I wanted to tell him that he could lay all the blame at the feet of some old guy from North Carolina, perhaps Arkansas, perhaps Wales, whose long buried bones have since gone to dust but whose teeth, if dug up, would look like crooked shanks of Indian corn. But I left the family tree unpruned, for now.

It’s amazing how fast the time goes when it’s not you lying there taking it, when you can check mail and blog and stay busy.

“OK, go for it!” Cooper said, startling my son.

“Oh!” said Jennifer. “Your eyes got big.”

The good doctor studied the steel now firmly set. “Hey, I’m gonna live with that. That’s pretty good. I love it!”

Jennifer wired him up, clipped the excess, and let him sit up.

I asked him if I could take a peek and he let me.

Done in under an hour! I followed the wire that would yank and crank on the architecture of his mouth in order to right the leaning Pisa. Braces are better these days, they say—Cooper Chockley employs a trademarked technique called the Damon System—but it still looked to me as if a torture device had been installed in my son’s mouth for purposes of regulating his movement and chaining him to a post, if need be. But I know it’s all for the good, right, though I had a hard time convincing him of that when the “Food for Thought” list of what he could and couldn’t eat read like a yin and yang of a kid’s most basic dietary desires.

On the way out, I waited at the desk to see if there was anything I needed to sign or swipe. “No,” she said, “he’s on contract.” A terrifying ring to it, that, which is perhaps why, just to the left of reception, is a “Share Box,” where patients write down prayer requests for the doctors and staff.

A mate sent me this Florence Fabricant piece about the emergence of butcher shops in Gotham. A shiny, hoisted cleaver illustrates the story, unfortunately. Another example of food falling into the realm of fad and hip hijinks. It could be illustrating a story on slasher films, but then we’ve shown as a culture that we’ve more stomach for televised gore than edible guts.

If the butcher’s shop is back, we might do well to ask where it went. Growing up, I never experienced the craftsman’s hand at the butcher block. By the time I started buying meat on my own, it was all cellophane and styrofoam—the butcher hiding at a safe remove behind the curved, squeaky-clean glass of the counter. I had to move to France, which I did for a year in 2002, to see a butcher in action.

At our Thursday and Sunday market stalls, you could inspect a rabbit prior to purchase, its ribs flayed open to expose the intact innards. Proof of freshness that little grandmeres would poke before buying. It was the same in the shops. Under the tutelage of Monsieur et Madame Peyras, I learned to ask for veal breast instead of chops, discovered the best lamb for braising versus grilling, figured out that lard is what held the Midi together.

At Peyras’ shop, like others, the eggs were so fresh they were kept in a basket on the counter. The time it took to place and take an order was so great that chairs were installed near a window. You didn’t take a number, you took a seat. And it might take several minutes, for, when it was your turn, you got the treatment. Kind of like our post offices, which seem primed to go the way of the butcher shops.

I went in one day to ask for some lamb loin to grill. There wasn’t any at the counter, but Madame said, “Pas du probleme,” then disappeared into a locker. She emerged with an entire lamb carcass across her shoulder. Then she laid it across the block, nearly sacrificial in her tenderness and caretaking, and proceeded to shave off four glorious chops.

Hearing the knife slice, to me, was both proof and privilege.

Read more about my year in the Languedoc here.