The Cookbook Club

by Beth Harbison

  But she did have a superb knife.

  And that could take her a reasonable distance toward some satisfaction, if not happiness. Culinary satisfaction.

  The prospect of eating a huge plate of tender-tough noodles with bright Tuscan tomato and shaved Parmesan was extremely appealing. She literally couldn’t imagine the last time she’d made something decadent in this house because she was always so worried about Calvin’s needs.

  Damn it, it wasn’t fair that she’d had to worry about his needs so much when he clearly didn’t give a damn about her.

  She put down the knife and went to the beautifully organized pantry she took so much pride in.

  She was pained deeply and suddenly by the idea of cooking anything for herself. Dicing, kneading, pounding meat—even the aggressive promise of emotional release sounded like too much energy. She’d have to draw too much from an empty well.

  The tears were slow to come by now. The ache came. The pain was there all the time. But the satisfaction of tears was growing elusive.

  Her eyes blurred on the shelf full of collected spices.

  Malnutrition and misery sank her to her feet, and she slammed against the door, then reached for her phone.

  Out of habit, she opened Instagram.

  She was faced with women her age who had taken a nosedive into the Mommy-identity, and girls from her past posting fancy cocktails at trendy restaurants.

  Speaking of moms.

  She tapped the “favorites” button, then “Mom.” She held the phone to her ear for one second before hanging up. Good God, she didn’t even know what time it was. So instead she went to her cookbook collection to pick out just the right recipe, no matter how much energy it drained from her.

  She knew which book she was going to pick. She knew it was always Marcella Hazan’s. But she took the time to linger over the spines nevertheless, like she was perusing high school pictures of old friends.

  The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Oh, what a pleasure that was! Mollie Katzen’s handwritten and illustrated recipes that recalled some glorious time in upstate New York when a girl with an appetite could work at a funky vegetarian restaurant and jot down some tasty favorites between shifts. That one had the Pumpkin Tureen soup that Margo had made so many times when she first got the book. She loved the cheesy onion soup served from a pumpkin with a hot dash of horseradish and rye croutons. And the Cardamom Coffee Cake, full of butter, real vanilla, and rich brown sugar, said to be a favorite at the restaurant, where Margo loved to imagine the patrons picking up extras to take back to their green, grassy, shady farmhouses dotted along winding country roads.

  Linda’s Kitchen by Linda McCartney, Paul’s first wife, the vegetarian cookbook that had initially spurred her yearlong attempt at vegetarianism (with cheese and eggs, thank you very much) right after college. Margo used to have to drag Calvin into such phases and had finally lured him in by saying that surely anything Paul would eat was good enough for them.

  Because of Linda’s Kitchen, Margo had dived into the world of textured vegetable protein instead of meat, and tons of soups, including a very good watercress, which she never would have tried without Linda’s inspiration. It had also inspired her to get a gorgeous, long marble-topped island for prep work. Sometimes she only cooked for the aesthetic pleasure of the gleaming marble topped with rustic pottery containing bright fresh veggies, chopped to perfection.

  Then Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells caught her eye, and she took it down. Some pages were stuck together from previous cooking nights, but the one she turned to, the most splattered of all, was the one for Onion Soup au Gratin, the recipe that had taught her the importance of cheese quality. No mozzarella or broken string cheeses with—maybe—a little lacy Swiss thrown on. And definitely none of the “fat-free” cheese that she’d tried in order to give Calvin a rich dish without the cholesterol.

  No, for this to be great, you needed a good, aged, nutty Gruyère from what you couldn’t help but imagine as the green grassy Alps of Switzerland, where cows grazed lazily under a cheerful children’s-book blue sky with puffy white clouds.

  Good Gruyère was blocked into rind-covered rounds and aged in caves before being shipped fresh to the USA with a whisper of fairy-tale clouds still lingering over it. There was a cheese shop downtown that sold the best she’d ever had. She’d tried it one afternoon when she was avoiding returning home. A spunky girl in a visor and an apron had perked up as she walked by the counter, saying, “Cheese can change your life!”

  The charm of her youthful innocence would have been enough to be cheered by, but the sample she handed out really did it.

  The taste was beyond delicious. It was good alone, but it cried out for ham or turkey or a rich beefy broth with deep caramelized onions for soup.

  She bought plenty. Asked for the girl’s name, fully intending to contact the store and say how helpful she’d been—but as with all things like that, Margo forgot.

  And as with most things Margo forgot, she ate cheese instead.

  Margo loved best pulling the browned melted cheese off the lip and sides of the bowl after broiling it. It was a hard-earned delicacy like no other.

  She made a mental note to revisit that soup, but tonight she needed carbs. Tonight she needed Marcella Hazan. The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. It sounded dull, right? That’s what Margo had thought every time she passed it in her grandparents’ kitchen. Until that time she’d desperately needed her grandfather’s Bolognese recipe and learned it came straight from the book. It didn’t matter; that might be his source, but to her it was still the dish she ate and loved at the long, scarred wood table in her grandparents’ modest apartment kitchen, the wood out of place on the ugly linoleum floor, yet perfect when topped with the slightly chipped porcelain plates he brought back from the tiny restaurant he owned, when he could no longer serve on them, and the fresh, bright green salads and crisped, buttery garlic bread that was a must with every meal.

  There was no question that if she was going to have one solid comfort meal, it would be one of Marcella’s pasta dishes.

  Screw Calvin. She was going to do it.

  First she set one of her four-quart All-Clad saucepans on the stove. America’s Test Kitchen had rated them highest once upon a time, and she had been collecting bits and pieces ever since. Most treasured were these beautiful, bright, Skittle-colored lacquered pots.

  Next, she took out a head of garlic from the bowl on the green-flecked black countertop she’d once loved passionately. Now it was just a surface, but it was a strong enough surface for her to crash her fist down on the head of garlic and split it into multiple cloves, which could then be easily separated with a knock on the broad side of her favorite knife.

  Shun to the rescue again. She smashed eight cloves of garlic and set them aside, knowing whatever she made she wanted it to be rich and garlicky, then swept the bits of papery skin into her hand and threw them in the trash.

  Next, she heated the Le Creuset gently on the gas stove. The piece was robin’s-egg blue on the outside, cream on the inside, like an old convertible or a young girl’s gingham dress and pinafore. The color had seemed so fun and retro when she bought it. Calvin hated it, said without explanation that it was so like her to pick that.

  When, in fact, it wasn’t. In some senseless, unidentifiable way, it had been a compromise. Maybe she’d just gotten so used to thinking that anything she hated equaled something he liked, and vice versa.

  In reality, she wanted pretty things. Especially in the kitchen.

  She wanted pastel chaos—a cacophony of sweet colors to set ablaze on the gas stove and from which to plume well-spiced aromas.

  Who knew how long she’d compromised unnecessarily, but nevertheless, here she was in her stainless and marble kitchen, surrounded by dull-oak cabinets. A spark of color found only where she’d been unable to resist it.

  Like this Le Creuset Dutch oven.

  When her energy dipped again, she paired her phone with th
e speaker Calvin was always silencing and put on her retro playlist. Etta James wailed out “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” and Margo shut her eyes and forced herself to give a damn about anything.

  Margo tested for the right heat by flicking a speck of water onto the hot surface of the Dutch oven. When it sizzled and evaporated, she put in some pungent olive oil—not extra-virgin, nothing around here was—and let it heat until it shimmered.

  It wasn’t until then that she decided what to make: that thick, meaty Bolognese sauce. It didn’t normally call for the garlic, but so what? She happened to have some, and she loved braised garlic in anything. She would eat the soft, tender meat straight off a knife if that was all she had at hand.

  She went to the ventilated drawer she’d had installed under the counter, where she kept the root vegetables. She took out two medium yellow onions and one Vidalia. Piece by piece, she cut the ends off, sliced into the brittle skins and pulled them off, dropping them into the trash. She loved onions, but they made such a mess. A subtle one, tiny bits of papery skin on the counter and floor, but a mess nonetheless. When they were all peeled, she set them aside and got the dish sponge so she could clean up all the little flecks of skin that had stuck to the counter and cutting board.

  Then she chopped the onion finely and dumped it into the hot pot with a sizzle. A little salt to sweat the vegetables, and within moments the savory aroma was rising into the air. Her appetite pinged in reflexive reaction.

  She took carrots and celery out of the fridge and peeled and chopped, stopping every now and then to stir the onion to keep it from sticking. It was getting sweet and translucent, so she tossed the other vegetables in and added a pinch more salt.

  Mirepoix. She thought the word to herself, rolling it around in her mind. Mirepoix, mirepoix, mirepoix. Cajun “Holy Trinity”—onions, celery, and carrots, diced fine, heated to savory sweet, and left to bring magic to whatever dish they were added into.

  No doubt about it, this was going to be great. Almost holy. With a little bread and red wine—body and blood of Christ—she might make up for years of not going to mass.

  Either way, they’d go great with the meal.

  She dug in the freezer for ground beef and ground pork, found both—of course; she was nothing if not thorough at keeping the kitchen well stocked. She unwrapped the meat. No need to thaw, she just tossed them right in with the cooking mirepoix and stirred, contemplating her life and how many meals she had prepared at this stove, and how many moods had accompanied them.

  There were a few standouts—the ricotta she’d finally perfected after watching a ton of YouTube videos. She’d fucked up batch after batch (one burned, one was so thin she ended up with about a quarter cup of cheese curds, one—inexplicably—never set at all and just poured like milk right through the strainer), but finally it had come together, and she’d infused the finished product with garlic and sliced basil and eaten most of it herself before Calvin arrived home and declared it “too rich” and ate his salad without it or the dressing she’d made.

  Why did she miss him?

  She’d just spent two weeks without getting properly dressed, watching everything from The Sopranos to Chopped and eating through everything in the house from frozen and awful to good and laborious.

  And why? Because a selfish, narcissistic jerk had left her life?

  Well, kind of, yeah. It’s pretty insulting to be dumped by a jerk you fantasized about being without.

  You’d think it’d be easier. Good riddance.

  But it’s not. It’s just a different kind of pain.

  Really makes you revisit your sense of self-worth. Was he with someone else?

  Was he with his therapist?

  That was the misery-wound she’d self-inflicted and chose to constantly agitate.

  An insane theory that not only had he left her for another woman, but also that the woman was his therapist.

  She always pictured her in glasses and tweed, like a She’s All That plus a PhD.

  Did she lie in bed next to him every night now, waking every so often to his foghorn farts, her heart pounding so hard she couldn’t get back to sleep without an hour or a Benadryl because of the stress that she could not isolate an origin for?

  Did he ask her every morning if the bald spot on the crown of his head was visible (it was) and if the generic Rogaine from Costco was working (it wasn’t)? Did she artfully squeeze around the question, like a gazelle in a china shop, reassuring him that he was handsome and charismatic and, apparently, everything a professional therapist could want in a married patient?

  Margo stood dazed and lethargic over the stove, methodically turning the blocks of frozen meat over and scraped the cooked bits off, incorporating them into the chopped vegetables. She was getting the milk out of the refrigerator when the phone rang.

  She glanced at it. Mom. She set the milk down and lowered the heat.

  “Hey, there you are!”

  “Yeah, here I am. Sorry, I’ve been busy.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It was . . .” She scanned her mental file of lame lies, pushed aside dead fictional husband (Mom knew better), and instead came up with, “Pocket dial.”

  “So you just never answered again?”

  “I—I’ve been busy. I said. I’ve been busy.” She flipped a chunk of ground beef.

  “Oh. Huh. I was kind of hoping you had some big news for me.”

  “Big news?”

  “Maybe little news is more like it.”

  Margo’s brain felt like a stalled car. “I’m not following.”

  “Baby news.”

  Ugh. “Not at all,” she said. God forbid. When was the last time she and Calvin had had sex? She couldn’t even remember. There was no way she could be pregnant. She used to think she wanted kids, though. She had assumed it would happen someday, probably fairly soon.

  She wondered if Robin, unfair symbol of Margo’s loss, wanted kids.

  “Well, never mind,” her mom said, “how’s everything?”

  “I’m just cooking.” She picked up the milk and took it to the stove, then poured a good slosh in with the meat.

  “Oooh, another video for us?”

  “Not this time.” Margo stirred the milk as it began to bubble in the hot pot. “How’s Sullivan’s Island treating you guys?”

  “Wonderful, but lordy it gets hot.”

  “That’s the south for you. It’s pretty hot here too.” At least it had been last she went outside.

  An awkward moment passed, then her mother asked, “How is Calvin?”

  Margo stirred the sauce. “He’s an asshole.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. But he is.”

  “What’s going on?”

  She wanted to tell her. She wanted to blurt it all out and get the kind of comfort her mother used to be able to give her when she was a kid and had a nightmare. But she wasn’t a kid with a nightmare now, she was an adult with a problem that no one could solve for her.

  “I can’t get into it right now. It’s just so much and I’m so tired. Suffice it to say he’s not a great guy.”

  The only thing she could work up any interest in whatsoever was what was going on right in front of her. The Bolognese. Preparing it, following the tiny steps that moved this one, ultimately inconsequential, yet complete, accomplishment forward.

  “I need wine,” Margo added, though more to herself than to her mother. Her voice was still strangled with emotion, but she hoped it didn’t show.

  “Oh, honey, whatever is happening, I really don’t know that drinking is the answer. In a mood like this, it might just make you feel worse. You know you already feel worse at night than in the morning.”

  That was true, though she didn’t know if it was real or the power of suggestion. Her mother always told her things would look better in the morning, no matter what was wrong. “I’m not drinking it, I’m making Bolognese.” Margo went to the refrigerator and looked for the flaccid bladder
bag from a box of chardonnay she’d had a few weeks back.

  “You’re making Bolognese? No wonder you said it wasn’t for June’s Cleaver.”

  “Right? You might as well put a clothespin on Dad’s aorta.” Margo turned up the burner. “I’m making this for me.” She poured the wine into the Dutch oven and breathed in the bright, citrusy fumes as it sizzled and evaporated. “I’ve been hungry for years.”

  “Name me a woman who hasn’t been. What we do for men is ridiculous.”

  “I can’t help but feel like a good man wouldn’t want a woman to make that sacrifice for him.” A good man. Could she still find a good man? She was young, but she was so tired that the idea was overwhelming. “Also I don’t do everything I do for a man.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Margo balked. “Wow, Mom.”

  “Well, for a man and everything that comes with a man.”

  “So kids. Baby news.”

  “Sure.”

  “Why were you expecting that? You know I’m not sure if I even want them.”

  Her mother laughed. “Getting a little late in the game, honey. You know they call it a geriatric pregnancy at this point.”

  “Mom, I’m fine.”

  But was she? She didn’t know if she wanted them, but if she did . . .

  If she calculated how long it might take to meet someone new, then to get to know them, hopefully enough to fall in love and maybe get married if they weren’t too jaded by the idea, that ate up years. Then time spent trying to get pregnant . . . she could be lucky or unlucky with that.

  The decision was a luxury, before. She used to think she was safely partnered up, but suddenly she wasn’t. And that made all the rest of her assumptions about life nothing more than big old question marks.

  “Calvin’s a good man at heart.”

  Margo rolled her eyes. “No, Mom. He’s really not.”

  “I don’t know what you two fought about but it must have been a whopper.”

  “Well—”

  There was a muffled sound as her mother obviously covered the phone instead of hitting “mute,” then she said, “Your father just came in. Do you want to talk to him?”