Reports of Mr. Henry’s bird have been greatly exaggerated.

A turkey is only a turkey, after all, not a pheasant, a goose, or a quail. Its flavor profile, as the foodies like to say, sings one note – mildly sweet.

Like stock market investors this year Mr. Henry once again fell victim to irrational exuberance. Upon spending $129 for an 8 ½ lb. Heritage Foods turkey raised in Kansas, he expected it to rise up and dance on the platter.

Yes, it was the best turkey he ever tasted. Yes, there was satisfaction in knowing he was eating a bird that according to explanatory information in the FedEx carton enjoyed an active social life (i.e., made it with a Tom or two). Far be it for Mr. Henry to prevent a turkey from fulfilling her inner hen!

But were these small pleasures worth the price? Was this bird three times better than the Citerella no-antibiotics and no-hormones bird of yesteryear?

Not really. Its bones did yield an exceptionally flavorful soup, however, an unanticipated bonus.

The dry salt rub did work perfectly. Skin was crisp and golden. The breast emerged bursting with juice because Mr. Henry cooked the turkey upside down. Although this left the skin on the breast a bit soft and pale, since no one at the Henry table eats skin there were no bruised feelings.

At home you dressed your dressing and stuffed your stuffing. You served a bountiful table. While feasting, discussions kept veering back to the wayward economy or Barack’s brilliant new economic team.

Was that so hard to do? To cook for a large table, that is. To cook at home and eat together is the essential family ritual, after all, the central sacrament of community.

Marcella Hazan makes excellent arguments in today’s New York Times:

The food Americans eat that is made fresh at home by someone who is close to them is shrinking compared with food consumed at restaurants or prepared outside. And while eating out or taking in may save us time or bring us enjoyment, I would argue that it deprives us of something important.

I am my family’s cook. It is the food prepared and shared at home that, for more than 50 years, has provided a solid center for our lives. In the context of the values that cement human relations, the clamor of restaurants and the facelessness of takeout are no match for what the well-laid family table has to offer. A restaurant will never strengthen familial bonds.

Straight from the airport on her very first visit to New York City, framed by Maxfield Parrish’s panoramic Old King Cole, Kenzie took her seat in the Astor Court restaurant of the St. Regis Hotel.

At twelve years old she was the youngest lady present. Accordingly the waiter first approached her to take, with great ceremony, her drink order. Flummoxed at being caught suddenly in the spotlight, she hesitated and then responded in an endearing southern accent, “I’ll just have sweet tea.”

Her fifteen-year old sister, also dressed immaculately, could not restrain her indignation. “Oh! I can’t believe you! They don’t have sweet tea here. That’s a southern thing.”

“But,” said Kenzie plaintively, “I just w-wanted sweet tea.”

Mr. Henry couldn’t resist calling her “sweet tea” for the remainder of the weekend. Could you?

What can you do when a restaurant isn’t serving your standard? Do you allow yourself to be buffaloed by the wait staff? With sixty-five years more restaurant experience than Kenzie, Nana stands her ground. She takes her tea brewed, iced and unsweetened. Whether or not it’s on the lunch menu, brewed unsweetened iced tea is what she’s having. With the nicest of smiles she entreats the waiter to brew it specially, ”if it’s not too much trouble.”

Experienced waiters quickly accede to Nana. They spot right away that she is the kind of client who won’t hesitate to send a dish back to the kitchen….several times. Don’t let her sunny demeanor fool you. Nana is not intimidated by big city restaurants.

When Mr. Henry orders a dry martini and receives one made with vodka in lieu of gin, he resists upbraiding the hapless server or upending the cocktail tray. Instead, he seizes the moment as a teaching opportunity. After all, few enjoy the benefits of his good fortune and education. Mr. Henry appreciates that some bartenders lack the advantages of proper instruction in mixed drinks, but he maintains faith in his fellow barman. He refuses to believe anyone would willfully pour cheap vodka when tradition calls for fine gin.

Clearly more should be done in bartender education, and in the next administration, if candidates are to be believed, more WILL be done. Surely both parties can agree to make this a policy priority.

Unlike some martini drinkers, it seems, Mr. Henry can taste the difference between vodka and gin. A simple sniff is sufficient. For those of you who cannot, Mr. Henry advises choosing your drinking establishment exclusively by price.

The more difficult aspect of the waiter/patron interaction is standing your ground. Be polite but firm. You should receive what you ordered, not something nearly almost like what you ordered.

Many years ago when Mr. Henry first approached a stove with motive and intent, he did not have the confidence he has today. Sweat collected on his furrowed young brow. From the start, however, he felt rookie confidence in tackling the grilled cheese sandwich.

There was the bread, of course, and the cheese, as well as a bit of butter in the pan. Through arduous trial and error young Mr. Henry honed his technique. Unguided and alone he discovered that to achieve even browning one must depress the sandwich lightly so that runny cheese not ooze embarrassingly out the sides. This required finesse with the spatula, a delicate up-and-down, chip-and-putt touch like Greg Norman’s, a touch you are born with, not a touch you can learn.

More important, he found from the beginning that cooking suited his innate talents. He likes to be in control of his own destiny, and he likes to eat. From his success with the grilled cheese sandwich, he strode on ahead to new challenges.

In short order, as it were, he became master of the scrambled egg, too. (Or so he supposed. Now he knows better. Truly velvety scrambled eggs must be cooked slowly over mild heat. After the eggs begin to clump you add a touch of milk or cream to retard the process.)

When faced with more complicated fabrications like soups or stews, however, he wilted. For help he stole peeks at Fannie Farmer or Joy of Cooking, furtive scans in the corner lest a big sister discover him in feminine occupations thereby obtaining premium ammunition for teasing.

In the Henry household, real men did not cook. Mother Henry herself only cooked under duress. Genuine slow cooking – gravies, stews, cakes – was conducted uniquely by women in household employ who closely monitored and roundly discouraged children in their kitchen. That is, cooks shooed kids out the back door.

While the skill of cooking held commercial value, the act itself was looked upon as drudgery. Since maids did not come on Sunday, traditional Sunday dinner slumbered in the freezer, R.I.P. And to think those little prison-issue aluminum trays once held genuine excitement. Ah, yesterday.

Now for Mr. Henry cooking has become a form of recreation and relaxation, a task that fully occupies the mind and the hand, a task concluding in a treat for the cook and his tablemates. Since he works more and more from home, and since he shops for food on foot, the burden of driving the car has transformed into something similar, too, a pleasure and a pastime.

In a completely unforeseen cultural development, TV cooking shows have become the teen-age rage. Once the daily grind of servants, cooking has entered the pantheon of applied arts.

“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Well, today taking the heat has become cool.

Who saw this coming? What does this seismic cultural event portend?

Today’s kitchen is the focal point of the house, its beating heart. Traveling salesman know that if you can get the client into her kitchen, you can close the deal. Someone who allows you into their kitchen has allowed you into their family.

Interior design today usually favors an open plan with no wall between kitchen and living area. The shift in America’s approach to cooking has changed not only living patterns but architecture, as well. Mom standing at the stove in a kitchen cubicle has become Dad standing at the stove in the center of the house.

This happy arrangement leaves Mom free to pursue her destiny – free to discipline the children and pay the mortgage.

When asked what was her favorite food, Diana Vreeland famously responded “Salad, though I’m not sure it is food.”

Mr. Henry’s friend Bernard, superb home chef and coiner of original observations, declared decades ago that although he was giving the kids pizza one night, “Pizza is not food.”

Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food: an eater’s manifesto, declares: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

It’s a book replete with genius:

“Don’t eat anything you can’t pronounce.”

“Don’t eat anything that contains more than five ingredients.”

“Eat mostly plants, especially green leaves.”

And so on until you want to sign the manifesto and wear the button on your lapel, if not for its practical good sense than certainly for its wit.

Of this three-part directive, the trickiest one to follow is “Eat food.” Modern industrialized food markets are cluttered with “foodlike substances” – comestibles that at first bite seem tasty and toothsome but quickly sicken or addict the organism.

As a quick reference for friends and relations, Mr. Henry provides the following inventory of everyday horrors:

Foodlike substances
candy
doughnuts
packaged cupcakes
packaged snacks
chips of all varieties
pretzels
American cheese
processed cheese
“spreads”
cheese sticks, twists, etc.
bologna
hot dogs
Spam
McAnything
Pizza Hut, et.al.
KFC
tacos
Subway sandwiches
Cosi focaccia
bottled salad dressings
processed peanut butter
jelly
“snack food”
breakfast bars
pop tarts
sweetened breakfast cereals

Drinklike substances
soda
vitamin water
protein drinks
fruit drinks
Budweiser

Last Saturday at Princeton University’s Prospect House, Mr. Henry was fêted to a dinner in honor of the Art Museum’s 125th anniversary exhibition. The entrée was a “deconstructed beef Wellington” – a slice of filet astride a square of puff pastry accompanied by a bordelaise sauce and several toothsome slices of black truffle. The Duke of Wellington was “but a man.” This was more than a beef Wellington, and less.

It went down easily, not least because right when the Wellington arrived the table chat finally abandoned academic niceties (“Oh, you did your doctorate at Harvard with Cornelius?”) and got down to a heated Hillary vs. Barack slugfest.

To Mr. Henry’s surprise, the graduate students took a dim view of Obama’s popularity among the “young,” a distinction that relegates Mr. Henry to Cro-Magnon status. They insisted on deconstructing Obama’s rhetoric of inclusion until it lay open on the table like flayed game.

Whatever happened to stew, to soup, to edible assemblages honored by tradition and favored by time? Where are the constructions of yesteryear? Why do we feel compelled to deconstruct them today? Can’t we yield to the sure pleasure of a simple enough preparation like beef Wellington, the filet’s aromas and juices neatly captured by its pastry shell?

Or is the real reason for this presumptuousness the practical fact that beef Wellington is difficult to prepare for a room of 120 without drying out the filet?

Is this “concept entrée” all a caterer’s ruse to make things less likely to screw up in the kitchen?

Do you take more pleasure seeing things in parts? Do you see foods on the plate as images in motion like Nude Descending a Staircase?

Although foods may be cultural constructs, bearers of identity, markers of clan, and applied art, they are also appetizers, entrées, and desserts. Are foods more fetching, more alluring, more seductive, or more artistic when chopped up into elemental components?

Mr. Henry might appreciate a woman’s garments piece by piece, and he would certainly enjoy deconstructing the ensemble, but he appreciates the whole outfit as the higher achievement, the synthesis of beauty concealed and revealed.

A woman robed is more seductive than a woman disrobed because it is the rare woman who feels totally at ease in her skin. Her confidence slumps, and so does her posture. Her defenses take over. She needs that little bit of armor to take her into battle.

And so it is with the deconstructed beef Wellington. The chemistry just isn’t there. The poetry gets lost in the translation.

Where food is concerned, Mr. Henry maintains that deconstruction is something best done with the teeth.

Stuck at home with a winter cold, Mr. Henry has been drinking tea, eating Carr’s whole wheat crackers topped with goat cheese and honey (lots of honey), and sipping unsweetened Meyer lemonade. He drank every drop of Scotch and Cognac and is down to his last finger of gin. Nothing tastes right. Red wine tastes sour and meat tastes minerally. He chooses foods principally for texture. Consequently, in place of eating, he reads.

Sleeplessness accompanying this particular strain of grippe thankfully permitted Mr. Henry to read David Kamp’s The United States of Arugula, a romp through the American food culture revolution of the past 50 years. Here you will find the history of chefs, food, and food writers, as well as the finest gourmet gossip, well-researched and brightly told.

Salted among the accounts of sexual peccadillos at Chez Panisse is the note that Alice Waters, doyenne of American locally-sourced cuisine, once studied to become a Montessori teacher. For Mr. Henry, the penny dropped.

The American food revolution, therefore, was all about letting toddlers loose in the kitchen to freely use knives and fire. Alice Waters, the Montessori instructor, might have gently offered some direction, but chefs were encouraged to play on their own and to follow whatever creative outlets they might discover – a cuisine fresh from the kindergarten!

The best (and worst) aspect of America culture is its perpetually hopeful, and profoundly revolutionary, culture of personal re-invention, the cult of think-for-yourself-ism. As cultural expectation, it’s exciting but exhausting. The other, deeper American cultural trait is conformity, the butt-headed mob mentality. For the most part, however, the new American man is not fired with ambition. He’s not headed for the stratosphere, he’s headed for the strato-lounger. Only now, thanks to the food revolution, he’s comfortable sitting and eating arugula.

Essential reading for the food-obsessed, David Kamp’s other food book, The Food Snob’s Dictionary, sits on Mr. Henry’s most important bookshelf, the one in the bathroom.

Self-minted “experts” such as the new American foodie provide a ripe harvest for Mr. Kamp who seizes on their pioneering jargon and adroitly skewers it. His choices of adjectives include “poncey,” “weird-ass,” and “twee.” Mr. Henry defies you to read it without hooting, one more reason for a closed bathroom door.

Buttercup says:

There is only one thing missing from this, the quintessential guide to home cooking hardware for newlyweds. That would be, of course, a picture of the Mr. Henry, the Benevolent God of Cooking to hang in the kitchen to over see the festivities of meal preparation!

Mr. Henry fears that his picture may not be benevolent enough for kitchen purposes. Long and thin, with deep-set eyes adorned by dark eyebrows, it suggests superciliousness and disapproval.

It is well known, too, that God has a beard, and Mr. Henry is clean shaven. Although he once sported a beard, it wasn’t God-like. The beard grew in his stripling youth when, for a critical review of brewed beverages, he needed to pass for 21 years of age.

In Mr. Henry’s opinion, Buttercup is misguided. The Benevolent God of Cooking is a woman, or perhaps women.

Spinoza, Mr. Henry’s favorite philosopher, believed God was the sum of the universe itself, residing in everything animate and inanimate. Spinoza’s courageous apostasy left subsequent generations free to imagine a state uncoupled with God, a notion central to America’s founding fathers yet somehow forgotten today.

Like Spinoza, Mr. Henry here offers logical proof of his theorem:

First, like God, women are unknowable. Although he has spent most of his good thinking hours trying to penetrate the minds of women, Mr. Henry has come to believe the task beyond the feeble abilities of man.

Second, like God, women are everywhere. There is no corner of the world, no private club or association, no bastion of learning or of power where women are not found.

Third, like God, women are the fundamental creative force. From their own bodies women give issue to babies and the milk that nourishes them. Is it any wonder that primitive societies worship images of fecund women?

Fourth, like the B.P.O.E., women are benevolent and protective.

Fifth, no matter what, women can always rustle up some supper.

As a practical matter, women do most of the cooking in this world. Therefore, unless you yearn to see the next world very soon, you had best stay on good terms with the women who feed your body (as well as your soul). Pepper understands this precept profoundly.