Children seem to have a primal need to prove that their father is better than anyone else’s father. Most of us can recall intense scenes enacted during grade school, playing rounds of that age-old game of Whose Dad is The Best.
My dad could beat up your dad. My dad has a bigger truck than your dad. My dad is smarter than your dad.
My Proof of Betterness was impossible to argue: my dad is taller than your dad. Said triumphantly, with shining eyes, and I had the good luck to always be right. I will never forget the day he came to pick me up early from class, and had to duck to get in the door. My young heart nearly burst with pride.
What I might have said, which would have been less impressive to the kindergarten set, but no less true, was this: my dad will eat anything.
My dad was a microbiologist back in the day, testing food samples for a large food processor. He regularly spoke of E. coli and Campylobacter at the dinner table. Whenever my mother opened up a can of beans or corn, she passed it to him for the sniff test; he could detect errant bacteria in a single whiff.
When he gave up his career in the microbial sciences and moved us out to the farm, he continued to tinker with bacteria. He made yogurt. He made cheese. He made pickles.
It seemed to us, his children, that there was nothing he wouldn’t eat. To mess with our heads, he ate spoonfuls of mayonnaise directly from the jar. “Gross!” we would scream, and then he would do it again. To this day, several of my siblings can’t abide the sight or taste of mayonnaise. I consider it no small stroke of fortune that I inherited my father’s palate. There are only two things I won’t eat: eggplant and bananas. The rest of the food universe is fair game.
I have always pined for his yogurt. I remember watching as he mixed his culture and poured milk into small glass jars, which he would place into our brown enamel Crock Pot overnight. The next morning, we had yogurt: slightly warm, quivering on the edge of the spoon, tangy and utterly delicious.
I phoned him the other day to ask for the recipe.
What kind of milk are you going to use? He wanted to know.
Raw milk, I told him.
Where did you get it? He sounded puzzled.
I had bought it at Whole Foods. While I was talking to him, I opened up the refrigerator door to be sure. Yep, there it was: Raw Organic Milk from Watsonville, in glass quart jars. He told me that it is illegal to sell raw milk in Oregon. If people want to buy it legally, they have to purchase a “share” in a cow, thus making them a part-owner, and thus entitling them to some of the milk. Or, he said, they could purchase it at certain stores under the guise of buying pet food.
Fascinating! I felt slightly miffed that it had been so easy for me to procure mine.
“So you set the jars of cultured milk into the water in the Crock Pot,” I repeated after him, “and then…”
“Well, you need to keep the temperature constant at about 105 degrees.”
“So that would be the ‘low’ setting on the Crock Pot?”
“Oh, no. The low setting is much too hot. I use a dimmer switch.”
The dimmer switch! I had completely forgotten that he had rigged up the cord on the Crock Pot with a dimmer switch to regulate the temperature. I was crestfallen; my grand plans were punctured. Perhaps I would have to buy a yogurt maker. Perhaps I would just have to be happy with the yogurt at the store. Perhaps I would never again taste...
Then: “It really isn’t hard to put a dimmer switch on your Crock Pot,” he said.
And suddenly I was scribbling down directions on how to strip one part of the cord and install a dimmer switch, and feeling excited all over again.
Next time, I’ll tell you what happened. Is happening, even as I type this.
