Easy Reader

December 24, 2009                                 The South Bay’s Hometown News

Easy Week The South Bay Entertainment and Dining Guide

Open Wide and Say  Mmmm!”

Can recipes and relationships go together like toast and jam? Local author says yes.

by Bondo Wyszpolski
Published December 24, 2009

“Food is one of those tenuous tightropes,” says Jerry Solomon, “because you always run the risk of it not being done well, people not liking it, or it failing because you have to serve it at the right temperature and it doesn’t always work. So you’re always risking it. But I find that to be part of the excitement.”
Solomon, who lives in Redondo Beach and runs a catering company, has just published a book called A Man’s Guide to Food as Foreplay: How to Invite Romance into Your Life. The author himself is no longer in the running game, so to speak, having been married to his wife, Veda, for 35 years, and they have an adult son, Zach, who also graces the cover of the book – along with several young women who are pretending they desire him because he’s holding up a sign that says “I can cook!”

If I knew where some of those girls lived I’d go over there today and hold up my own sign: “Cook? No, but I can take you out to an expensive restaurant and a performance of ‘La Traviata’!”

I know my limitations – and my strengths.
But right now Solomon and I are sitting at his dining room table, spooning into our mouths a tasty dessert called Zabayon that he whipped up in about five minutes. It’s essentially egg yolk and sugar and Marsala sweet wine, heated up and blended together over a warm stove, and then – in this case – poured over freshly-sliced strawberries. The recipe for it, plus a little bit of background history, is in the book.

Go north, young man
Solomon grew up in Florida but then moved to New York around 1970 when he was in his early 20s. In his youth he’d worked as a busboy and waiter. In New York City he found a job in the Fulton Fish Market. The company specialized in lobster tails and shrimp. At the time, Solomon shared a place with his brother. They weren’t rich, but they’d frequently dine on shrimp and South African lobster tail.

Through one of his customers at the fish market, Solomon landed a job as a waiter at Little John’s, a busy singles bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
“That’s when I discovered that one of the best things about being a waiter was that women have to talk with you; everybody has to talk with you. It became a perfect environment to meet women. To meet people, but meet women. It was great.”

As Solomon writes in the synopsis of his cookbook, “Each recipe is wound around romance or relationship and encounters during everyday experiences, when I had the opportunity to meet the lust of the moment or the love of my life.”
Books like this typically contain 700-800 recipes, each focused on one specific woman, but Solomon has wisely pared down his hundreds (or maybe thousands in his case, who knows?) to a select few that ends with – appropriately enough – his wife Veda, but also features the presumably quite memorable Robyn, Sherri, Annie, Rita, Susan, and Dresden.

Now, Veda and Dresden are interesting names, especially the latter, whose parents must have had a thing for firebombed cities, but who’d ever want to date – let alone cook for – a girl with the prosaic name of Sherri or Susan? If a potential date doesn’t have a one-of-a-kind name – Mireille, Laavannya, Solomudu and Kéndakali are a few of the women I bonded with last month – then I’ll just be moving right along…

Zach in the sack
So, how did you come up with the idea for this book?
Well, it turns out that Zach – not Robyn and Rita et al – was the inspiration. Solomon mentions that he’s always done the cooking for the family, and he doesn’t hesitate to add that his wife doesn’t cook, aside from the symbolic one meal a year. I actually suspect that she’s a great cook but is keenly aware that having a husband who loves to cook is a small miracle and who wants to mess with a godsend?

“When Zach went away to college,” Solomon says, “I used to get phone calls from him saying, ‘Okay, so now what do I do with…?’ And one day I started thinking that this was really a nice direction to go because people need information [about cooking] that is more than just recipes. Recipes are easy. Anybody can follow a recipe, anybody can change it, and do what they want with it.”
Once you learn the basic techniques, he points out, then anything goes.
“So the idea was to put together this book that had information.” Solomon not only supplies us with recipes, but a shopping list, notes on pots and pans and knives, various oils and vinegars, and he tells us which fish are being depopulated and which have a sustainable population. He also tosses in tidbits of knowledge such as “Do not let the garlic burn – it will taste bitter” and “The most common hand injuries are from slicing bagels.”

I’d have guessed that the most common hand injuries result from when a guy’s being too fresh with his date.
If anyone wants to know what I would have included for the benefit of the reader, it might well be such pearls as “Just because it’s a fruit bat doesn’t mean it tastes like a nectarine” or “Eating parrots will give you diarrhea.”

“Then I needed to find the thing that was going to support all of this,” Solomon continues, “and that [thing, or glue] was the women I’d spent time with, that I’d had the opportunity to either cook for or go out to eat with, or have some kind of food interaction with while we were enjoying the time we were spending together. That became the impetus for the recipes based around the stories.”
We’ll get to that in a moment, but I was curious to find out if Zach, locked away in some East Coast college, made use of any of the recipes the way his old man had, a couple of centuries earlier.

Solomon doesn’t give me a clear answer on this, and Zach himself is out of the house at the moment, but his father refers me to the Cheap and Easy section toward the end of the book. I’m guessing that these were the recipes that were shuttled toward Zach, but the first few words of the introduction aren’t promising: “The following recipes may not be seductive but…”
May not be seductive? Boy, if that isn’t a red flag!
In fact, it makes me want to grab my homemade sign, the one that says “I can take you out to an expensive restaurant,” etc. (And by the way, what’s the name of that brunette in the back row?)
This’ll catch their eye

Now, what’s with the title, A Man’s Guide to Food as Foreplay? On the cover, “Foreplay,” not “food,” is spelled out in caps. Maybe it’s just me, but a title like this could lead one to believe that there’ll be something spicy inside that doesn’t necessarily have to do with seasoning. You know, something a bit racy and lacy…
I gingerly broach this topic and Solomon takes a deep breath.
“Yeah,” he says. “Well, that’s why I leave it to the imagination. The imagination is much better than having it written out for you.” (Oh? Just try me) “That’s not what I do. For me, it’s just supposed to be: This is what happened; this was a moment in time. I don’t have to tell you the details, because the details become obvious.” (Not if they’re really interesting) In short, as Solomon explains, the reminiscence of time shared with a special lady is what’s important. “That, to me, is the intimacy. Sex is sex. How you do it is up to you. It’s not really relevant to me. What’s relevant is how food can work to bring two people together.”
Sex is sex? I mentioned Solomon’s words to my friend, Count Eugène de Panthémont, who frowned and said: In that case, it shouldn’t matter if you sleep with Mother Teresa or with Pamela Anderson? Or if you eat a hamburger instead of filet mignon.

Naturally, I defended Jerry Solomon to the best of my ability, but the Count yawned and told me a story that plainly illustrated his point: There’s sex, and then there’s sex. It had something to do with painting himself yellow from head to toe and then painting his girlfriend blue, sort of like those creatures in “Avatar.” Then they rolled all over one another until everything in the room, including themselves of course, had turned a bright green (The Hilton billed him $5,000). Furthermore, as if such a grand afternoon wasn’t enough, the Count took his friend to a fancy seafood restaurant (he wore a lifejacket, to amuse her) and ordered a seafood platter with one fish from each of the seven oceans.

But I digress.
Even so, I say, the title of your book could be misleading if one sees it on a shelf.
“I know what you’re saying,” Solomon replies; “of course, of course.”
I’m sure others have mentioned this…
“It’s funny. Women are very intrigued by the book, probably more so than men, because men are often ego-driven and don’t necessarily admit that they need guides for anything. It’s the idea that women find romantic. Women who have bought this book say, ‘I’ve got to buy it for my husband,’ or ‘My son’s going away to college.’ They get it. That’s really what it’s about.”
Do they skim through it beforehand, just to be sure it’s safe?
“Some of them have,” Solomon says. “I’d like to get this into Costco, for example, but there could be a problem with the title.”
Aha, I think to myself, so he’s admitting that the title might attract a raised eyebrow or two?

It turns out that I’ve brought with me a copy of How to Cook Your Way Into Her Pants!, a self-published book by Ted Taylor that came out in the fall of 2003. In case Taylor isn’t blatant enough, the cover depicts a young woman peeling off her blue jeans. Her sexy fire-red underwear is just about to say hello!
I don’t think that a book with this title would get into Costco either, I point out.
Solomon peruses the book, which has a number of impressive, full-page color photographs of the various dishes that Taylor has conjured up. The problem is, the language is a little coarse – and so the torpedo blows up inside the submarine.

“It’s not really needed,” Solomon concurs. “There’s room for this, yes. In our society, sex sells.” As does bad taste.
By comparison, Solomon’s book offers little two-inch by two-inch black and white photos of the food, 23 of them spread out over two pages and none of them doing full justice to any of the meals. That’s because there were matters of expense to contend with.
“I had all these lofty dreams of this having color photos,” he says. “I spent hours pulling together the color photos that I wanted in this book. But it’s so cost-prohibitive.”

On the other hand, he says, he didn’t want to compete with other cookbook writers. He just wanted his book to be user-friendly and entertaining, and in this he’s evidently succeeded. Not long ago he had a signing in Palos Verdes, at Annie’s Boutique owned by the wife of a friend with whom he plays racquetball. It’s not exactly Costco, but he seems pleased with the number of copies that were sold.

                                                      No one-trick pony                                                              
Solomon’s other passion these days is art and photography. He’s a member of RBAG, the Redondo Beach Art Group, and one of his photographs – “Long Island City Sunrise” – was in the recent Power of Art show at the former Venezia on Harbor Drive. His pictures adorn the walls of his home and Solomon explains that he’s currently amassing a body of work in hopes of having an exhibition. If he had the time, he says, “I’d be painting all day.” That, and making fountains, ones that can be placed indoors or out, and which are soothing to look at or listen to. For the moment, however, he still does catering to pay the bills.
“Life is a tightrope, regardless of whether you want to play the game or not,” Solomon says, explaining why he gave up a corporate job in New York to move west. He points out that people find their own ways to make things lively or to push the envelope, and he admits that he appreciates a good challenge. “I’m one of those people who like to do new things all the time,” he says, and it’s in that bon vivant (and bon appétit) spirit that Jerry Solomon is cooking and writing and painting and tackling one new endeavor after another. Stick with him, and you won’t go hungry.

A Man’s Guide to Food as Foreplay, by Jerry Solomon, sells for $14.95 softcover, and is published by Strategic Book Publishing in New York. On Jan. 7, he’ll be interviewed by Angela McKeller for her “Kick Back and Kook” website. The podcast will be available at kickbackkook.com. And in the meantime there’s more about the author, the book, and his art at amansguidetofoodasforeplay.com. ER