Last year one of my sister's college roommates came back from her editor's job in New York to visit. She edits Home magazine for the Conde Nast publishing group, and travels over wide scopes of the world studying homes and homemaking. One thing she noted in a talk at luncheon was that the new designs in homes are eliminating the dining room and reducing the importance of the kitchen.

For several years, the trend has been to use cabinets and drain boards for kids to store cookies to go with their milk and parents to mix the dog and cat's food. Franchise pizza and fried chicken had to be unwrapped on the counter top. But in the main part, after the Pop Tarts were soaked in the breakfast cereal bowls in the morning, kitchens were a handy placed to leave notes and the children's lunch money.

Women having to go to work outside the home was the main reason families started eating in restaurants so much. Also, women grow tired of cooking before men become tired of eating. But an old gal tearing home from her job to hit a concession stand at the soccer game on a slim margin of time before a piano recital can't be blamed for not cooking a sit-down meal for a household home only long enough to mess up the bathrooms.

The ones of us who do still cook can pass on recipes in big bundles, but we don't have the recipe for how to buy all the high school students a car and a cell phone, staying home baking Betty Crocker devil's food cakes. The front porch of the Mertzon house faces the high school parking lot. Students roar by the house in new pickups and sleek sports cars, fueled on buck-forty a gallon gas, and steered by the immortal nerve of the young. On the cool autumn mornings, I sit and watch this revolving motorcade halt at the first bell, wondering how many hours parents work to pay for the scene.

However, back to cooking: the tip-off on how much a person likes to cook is how much that person worries about how much mess the preparation takes, so now is one test. I am going to tell how to prepare Portuguese sauce the way a mining engineer in Musquiz, Coahuilla passed the recipe on to an old cook at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras. I learned by watching him cook on a huge wood stove flaming with mesquite wood that smoked up the room and darkened his mood. His apron looked like a blacksmith's. A red bandana had slipped over his bad eye. He set the butter in the skillet on fire for effect. I'm sure I was the first gringo to ever enter his kitchen.

Portuguese sauce is made to go on broiled chicken or fried corn tortillas. In its true form, a brown sauce goes over the chicken or the tortillas first, the Portuguese sauce is added next, then a garnish of black olives complete the presentation. The brown sauce prepared correctly is too rich. Prepared incorrectly, only cucumbers and black pepper sausage can match the gastric disruptions of the failed flour lumps and the floating grease suspending a skim of chili powder. (I try to be forthright, but I invariably understate my feelings).

But here is the way the old hombre in the Victory Club and I devised the recipe: sauté one large chopped onion and two cloves of garlic in two tablespoons of butter in a soup pot until wilted, not browned. Peel six of the best tomatoes available. Don't buy the slick-skinned sawdust variety and don't think about the cost. I am trying to teach you to cook, not how to be thrifty. Add the tomatoes cut in wedges to the onion and garlic to simmer. Next, season with two small cans of chopped roasted Ortega peppers, two teaspoons of comino seeds and two boullion cubes. Start adding grated longhorn-style cheddar cheese until the sauce thickens to where you're barely able to pour it. The cheese must be real cheese and not the artificial, phony stuff. Read the labels to be sure the cheese is not that travesty to man's palate that is pawned off in salad bars as cheese when it is not as flavorful or nutritious as Elmer's glue. (I did better in this paragraph at expressing my feelings, don't you think?)

The offer if off if you use jalapenos, margarine, or tomato paste. It's your choice whether the sauce is added to chicken or tortillas. I've served it for supper on Christmas since 1960. But I thought I had better pass it around before my bandana starts slipping over my good eye.

August 3, 2000