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Pasta al dente, please, and don’t overcook it |
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By Betsy Rothstein
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Posted: 10/17/07 07:01 PM [ET] |
Some people are pushy in traffic. Others grow impatient with a long airport line or a slow cashier at the neighborhood grocery store.
For Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), his pushiness and pickiness concern the proper preparation of pasta. And why not? He treasures his late mother’s homemade manicotti recipe and believes it falls somewhere between sinful and criminal to overcook pasta.
After scanning the menu at Sonoma, an upscale Italian eatery on Pennsylvania Avenue, he settles on the pasta alla carbonara and a glass of crisp white wine. “Is the pasta cooked to order?” he questions the waiter. “Is it homemade? I want it extra al dente. Tell them not to overcook it.”
Doyle, out of the waiter’s earshot, explains that pasta ought to be cooked until “it feels right, when it still falls off your hands, but it’s not wet.” And gnocchi? “Once you put too much flour in it, it’s done,” he says. As in finished. Kaput. Destroyed.
The waiter takes Doyle’s pushiness without so much as a blink or mood change. Doyle is, after all, a member of Congress, as evidenced by the pin on his lapel. He will get his pasta as he likes it.
Today, however, he scans the prices as he tries to figure out how the restaurant charged him $40 per head the previous day at a fundraiser, when the amount eaten was far less.
Doyle’s pickiness about food harkens back to childhood in Swissvale, Pa. Thursdays and Sundays were huge, special cooking days: Thursday was pasta, Sunday a roast and potatoes. On Sundays, his mother, Rosemarie, would also bake a cake, icing it to their liking.
He remembers with particular fondness the spaghetti cooked in fresh garlic and olive oil. “I could eat pasta every day,” he says, beaming.
Other days were less special, like when he and his brother got their hated fish sticks. “We’d stuff them in our pockets, feed them to the dog,” he says.
Dinner wasn’t optional. “Dinner was 5 o’clock and it was not an invitation,” he says, recalling his late father’s hard days at the steel mill. “You better have your rear end in your chair at 5.”
Doyle, 54, knows his way around the kitchen. In fact, he recently appeared on a cooking segment of a local TV show, in which he cooked his mother’s famous manicotti.
Lunch arrives swiftly: a small bowl of pasta with a soft sunny-side-up egg on top. The congressman takes in the meal slowly, twirling the pasta around a fork like a Tuscan native with all the time in the world.
“It’s good,” he says upon tasting. “At the good restaurants you don’t have to tell them [how to cook it], but a lot of Americans eat their pasta overcooked. In my house, if the pasta is overcooked, you throw it in the garbage.”
If there is something the congressman is as finicky about as his pasta, it’s being interrupted during a family meal. Hence the reason he recently proposed his Do Not Call legislation. Confidently twirling his pasta, he explains that by June 2008, 52 million phone numbers will come off the Do Not Call list and owners will not be notified, except by phone solicitors sure to bother them at dinnertime.
“We want to stop that and make it permanent,” says Doyle, vice chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. “It shouldn’t be a situation where you have to remember what date you registered.”
The House has taken no other action on the matter, while the Senate plans to hold a hearing in two weeks.
Doyle, previously in the insurance business, says he can sympathize with telemarketers and always treats them politely. But, he says, “For someone who really treasures sitting around the dinner table, it really bothered me.”
So he took his phone off the hook.
The congressman’s Democratic politics stem from his youth. His father told him early on, “Don’t ever vote for Republicans. They are not for working people.”
In 1972, with hair cascading down the middle of his back, Doyle told his father that he was doing something he’d finally approve of — he was volunteering on George McGovern’s presidential campaign.
“McGovern, he’s a freakin’ communist,” Doyle recalls his father saying, only in harsher language. “I’m voting for Nixon.”
He jokes, “My father hated me. He hated hippies.”
Doyle didn’t come to Congress easily. In 1994 he won a seven-way primary in which he was not favored to win. “It’s still a mystery to me,” he says.
He says he’s enjoying life in the majority. “I have an opportunity to actually get things done,” he says. “I’m actually enjoying this phase of my career.”
When at home, Doyle cooks for family and friends. He’s also not overly taken with Washington. “I don’t want to be president,” he says. “I don’t want to be a Washington celebrity. When I get home I want to hang out with my buddies and forget I’m a member of Congress for a while.”
Yet the lawmaker’s inner snob comes out when it comes to Italian cooking. When he makes pasta, he explains, “it would be an insult to buy manicotti or gnocchi” from the supermarket. Instead, he always makes his from scratch. “I would never dream of buying store-bought sauce,” he says.
He jokes about his wife’s cooking. “I married a Swedish girl,” he says. “I realized I better learn early how to cook. My wife does other things well.”
The congressman gets competitive about cooking. He and his younger brother, Pat, regularly have cooking contests and routinely crack on each other about whose sauce is better — clearly, says the congressman, it’s his.
“Oh, I am definitely a better cook,” the lawmaker gushes. “He thinks he has a wider repertoire than I do, but his wife likes my sauce better and he gets mad every time she says it.”
What’s in Doyle’s sauce? “My sauce is very basic,” he says, reeling off the ingredients: San Marzano tomatoes, basil, red wine, garlic, onions, imported olive oil, bay leaves, oregano and red-pepper flakes.
He concedes that his brother has a “wonderful garden” where he grows basil, from which he makes “pesto to die for.” The congressman admits he’s “crazy for pesto.” Most recently, he had a pesto craving and had to phone his brother, who was out of town, so he could get into his freezer for a special bag of frozen pesto.
Doyle is enjoying his pasta at Sonoma.
“It’s actually quite good,” he says, explaining that the cream keeps the pasta from getting too dry and that restaurants often make the mistake of having the egg come out looking scrambled. “I like how they have the egg sitting with the yoke on top. You see that in Europe a lot. You get to break the yoke and stir it around yourself. Some people might be squeamish about that.”
But, he adds, “I’m not one of those people.” |
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