At some point in the ’70s my mom bought her first pair of bluejeans. She didn’t suddenly throw away all her tailored wool skirts and silk scarves, or dump all the cashmere sweaters from the dresser drawers into bags destined for the Salvation Army, but there they were, in rotation: A pair of soft bluejeans, modestly flared at the ankle, with two flat front pockets, that she wore, if I may say, with exceptional and enviable style.
And then, around this same time, you opened the fridge one day and found she had glass jars lying on their sides, cheesecloth held with rubber bands over their mouths, alfalfa sprouts growing inside. And there on the kitchen counter, nestled like a flock of broken fledglings fallen too early from the nest, were eight little glass jars wrapped in kitchen towels and set on an electric medical heating pad meant for sore back muscles, incubating her homemade cultured yogurt. Which turned out tangy and creamy and expert.
My mother was dispositionally unwilling to sacrifice pleasure for politics, or style for trends, enough so that I did not mind the dialed-down frequency of her customary brown-butter sauces, ripe, oozing full-fat cheeses and visits to the butchers. And I welcomed the open-faced avocado sandwiches on pumpernickel with cream cheese, red onion and alfalfa sprouts (hers were clean and fresh and lively) and fruit preserves stirred into yogurt for dessert and shopping trips to the memorably dirty health-food store. There the bulk jugs of tamari and tahini and separated almond butter under an inch of rancid oil had crud on their spouts, and the bulk bins of oats and millet and whole-grain flours were lively with meal moths. This was as fascinating to me as the whole sides of bloody animals hanging from hooks in the refrigerated walk-in at the Italian butcher we used.
I thought it was just as miraculous and cool to see her making her own yogurt and granola, and sprouting her own sprouts, as I did watching her make Irish soda bread or duck-leg confit or the annual birthday baked alaska that she set under mesmerizing blue rivulets of fire with kirsch flowing from half an empty eggshell set at the top of the meringue Vesuvius. In a way, her French background, her impeccable kitchen skills and her intractable devotion to pleasure in eating made her a kind of perfect precursor and model for healthful whole-foods cooking, 45 years ago.
Tofu, however, I came to for the first time during my second attempt at college in the early ’80s, at a lefty, rigorously political liberal-arts college in New England, under decidedly less stylish and markedly less pleasure-principled circumstances. It seemed as if there were a dog-eared ‘‘Moosewood Cookbook’’ in every kitchen on campus. They sold it in the campus bookstore next to Wollstonecraft and Hume and John Stuart Mill. The chore wheel — that egalitarian method for distributing household chores to make these experiments in communal living harmonious and less fetid — in our on-campus apartment had a slot wedged right there between Clean Bathrooms and Vacuum Common Area: Water the Tofu! Everybody cut the tofu into cubes and steamed it in a wok with celery and onions and mushrooms and garlic and ginger. We meant to stir-fry it, but you could never get a wok hot enough on those electric coil burners, so tofu dinner was always wet and limp, then drenched in tamari. It was not stylish, expert or enviable.
When I started making soft, silken tofu about five years ago, it was like getting my own first pair of bluejeans. I did not toss out all my marrow bones and suckling pig and the crème Chantilly to remake myself in soy. I started my first batch in a stainless-steel pot on the kitchen counter and finished in glass Ball jars. I took exceptional care of the beans, the soak, the milk. The tofu was rich, almost nutty. It had, and will always have, a faint, chalky mouth-feel, which the unctuousness of salted French butter will completely smooth out in the finished dish. If you went at this in the spirit of the chefs who have labs/test kitchens/ateliers with interesting appliances and chemicals, I think you could add lecithin or other mail-ordered emulsifiers to ‘‘correct’’ that effect in the milk before you coagulate the tofu. But I really want you to go at this the way my mom eventually went for the macramé bikini and the addition of brewer’s yeast on our popcorn: Enjoy yourself, but remain yourself.
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