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"  It was a brave man who first ate an oyster, but what kind of man first cooked with Campbell&amp;#039;s Cream of Mushroom Soup? What kind of man saw the familiar red-and-white can sitting in his pantry, then thought of opening it up and using it \u2014 straight, uncut, and unedited \u2014 as a sauce? Was it a brave man, an inspired man, a lazy man, or a desperate man? Was it a man confined to the corporate test kitchen, or Andy Warhol, or even the great Mr. Campbell himself? These days, when you go to the soup aisle to buy some of the stuff, it says right there on the can, GREAT FOR COOKING. But someone had to have the idea, and whoever it was defined an epoch of American cuisine, at least the kind made at home, on special occasions, for grateful American boys and girls doomed to outgrow the cuisine and their gratitude both. Indeed, the person who instituted the era of Cream of Mushroom cookery in America probably wasn&amp;#039;t a man at all \u2014 it was probably an American housewife, since Cream of Mushroom cookery is indelibly associated with the generation of American women who first defined free time as time away from the house and yet still had families to please. It might even have been my mom. Between 1965 and 1980, my mother, Frances Junod, served cutlets of pale flesh \u2014 mostly veal and chicken, though sometimes pork \u2014 to my father, my brother and sister, and me at least twice a week. The word cutlet is itself passing from the culinary lexicon, to be replaced by medallions and tournedos and what have you. You can&amp;#039;t even buy meat identified as veal or chicken cutlets at local supermarkets. But back in post-Betty Friedan Long Island, you sure could, and my mom bought them by the thousands and always cooked them the same way \u2014 dipped in egg, crusted in Progresso&amp;#039;s Italian-style bread crumbs, then fried in an electric fry pan in whatever kind of oil was at hand. The only time she deviated from the formula was to slather the breaded cutlets in Rag\u00FA and serve them with spaghetti as &amp;quot;cacciatore,&amp;quot; and then, twice a year, to cook them in a casserole, blanketed with a can of Cream of Mushroom. There was no name for the dish. My mother just called it &amp;quot;fancy,&amp;quot; and it was. It was, to my mind, revelatory, because it was both my first experience with sauce of the non-tomato variety and my first experience with mushrooms. Not that there were a lot of mushrooms in Campbell&amp;#039;s Cream of Mushroom Soup. I don&amp;#039;t know if you&amp;#039;ve had any lately, or if you can remember what it tastes like \u2014 indeed, I don&amp;#039;t know if anyone has ever eaten a bowl of Campbell&amp;#039;s Cream of Mushroom Soup, which is why it&amp;#039;s so &amp;quot;great for cooking.&amp;quot; But I ate a bowl the other day, and it was tantalizing in its absence of mushrooms. It was all about texture, and the texture was pillowy \u2014 it was like having a mushroom-induced dream about eating mushrooms, and then waking up and realizing that you were only chewing the corner of your pillow. But back then, when all I knew about mushrooms was that they gave you bad dreams, the Cream of Mushroom Soup my mother served on top of her cutlets offered all the mushrooms I could handle, and all the exoticism. No matter that it was penitentiary beige and turned gray under the heat, like the surface of the moon: I couldn&amp;#039;t get over the way the soup gripped the edges of the once-familiar cutlets, without ever spilling over. I couldn&amp;#039;t get over the ambition of the dish, and the way it whispered of vague, faraway places, like France and New Jersey. Above all, I couldn&amp;#039;t get over the fact that I was eating it, and liking it, and of course it was that sensation \u2014 the sensation of eating what you don&amp;#039;t think you can eat, of liking what you don&amp;#039;t think you can like, of certainty in the face of incredulity \u2014 that became the basis of what I think now about food. It is hard to recapture the sources of nostalgia, especially when you&amp;#039;re nostalgic for a moment when you didn&amp;#039;t know anything: You can&amp;#039;t unknow what you know. But I tried, last Christmas Eve, to re-create my mom&amp;#039;s Cutlets \u00E0 la Campbell&amp;#039;s, not as an ironic exercise or even as a nostalgic one, but rather to see if it was good or not. I cook for friends on Christmas Eve. I cook a lot, cook all day, and this year in addition to slow-roasting a pork shoulder with garlic and chiles, in addition to baking clams and frying eel and saut\u00E9ing squid and squeezing lemons and limes and oranges on uncooked bay scallops, in addition to making a salad of kale and brussels sprouts and toasted almonds, I went to the store and bought the industrial-grade ingredients \u2014 the skinless and boneless chicken breasts, the bread crumbs, and the soup that miraculously turns to sauce \u2014 and assembled them in a casserole. It wasn&amp;#039;t hard; it wasn&amp;#039;t supposed to be. Though the chicken breasts were plumped beyond all recognition and made me pine for the minimalist cutlets of my youth, I split them, pounded them flat, dragged them through the Progresso, and threw them in the pan, and they smelled like my mom&amp;#039;s kitchen as they hissed and browned and crisped and crackled. I mean, I wanted to eat them, right there, but managed to get them in a roasting pan, and then to spread the Campbell&amp;#039;s Cream of Mushroom right on top of them. I knew it was a mistake. The soup slid out of the can as cold and mysteriously ridged as a can of cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. My modern-day sensibilities recoiled and whispered desecration as I took a trowel and effaced the chicken with it, but I told myself that the soup, being condensed, was already a reduction of sorts, and sent it to the table with high hopes. Impossible hopes, really, because they were redemptive in nature \u2014 because I hoped not simply that people would like it but that they would like it more than anything else I served, and thereby prove me wrong about cooking in general, and my mom&amp;#039;s cooking in particular. They didn&amp;#039;t. The rest of the trays were passed and duly pillaged by the hungry mob. The chicken cutlets bubbling with the universal solvent of Greatest Generation cuisine followed untouched. A ghost dish, invisible and cruelly unloved. Sent, by unspoken decree, to kitchen island, where it stayed for the duration. I hadn&amp;#039;t informed anyone in advance about the casserole&amp;#039;s special provenance, but when the meal was over, I said, &amp;quot;Let me tell you about the chicken,&amp;quot; and a friend said, &amp;quot;Yeah, what was that about?&amp;quot; So then I asked if anyone ate it, if anyone liked it, and it turned out that someone did. He was eleven years old, and he sat at the kid&amp;#039;s table with my daughter. The chicken cutlets covered in Campbell&amp;#039;s Cream of Mushroom Soup were his favorite part of the meal, because he was innocent of them \u2014 because he had never eaten anything like them before, until he asked for seconds. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a12945/cooking-with-campbells-0312/>