Don't Kill the Birthday Girl

by Sandra Beasley

“Next up, rigatoni with shrimp,” Giada says. Damn. This will not be a recipe I can use. She walks over to the shiny stunt fridge and opens the door with a flourish to reveal … an empty shelf.

  “The shrimp are not in the fridge,” she announces, looking offstage for help. The young crewman shrugs. This is the peril of being the first demo of the day. “We are improvising!” Giada says. “No shrimp!”

  Her next audience assistant is Linda, a twentysomething woman in thick-rimmed glasses and an olive green cardigan. Linda swears she is the biggest fan ever.

  “Do you cook?” Giada asks.

  “I clean vegetables,” Linda replies.

  “What about pasta?”

  “I clean vegetables,” Linda says again, firmly.

  With no shellfish handy, Giada has decided to fix rigatoni with butternut squash. The squash is already peeled and diced, meaning there are no vegetables to clean. Linda tenses her shoulders at this news. Giada is held captive behind the counter, guiding her step by step, while the lineup of audience members with questions grows longer.

  Giada hands Linda the box of pasta. Linda dumps it in.

  Giada asks her to grind the pepper. Linda turns the knob over and over, robotic, until our host places a hand on her arm to stop her.

  “Otherwise,” she says, “we’ll be serving a plate of pepper with pasta, not pasta with pepper.”

  Giada tells Linda to cut some basil. When she picks up the correct herb, one of only two bunches on the counter, Giada cheers, “Good for you!”

  The pace is tedious, but at least it is easy to follow. I could re-create this later. Then, as the squash is sautéing, a carton of milk materializes in Giada’s hand. Where did that come from? And why is she—Noooo!

  “You see how it’s coming together?” she asks Linda, pointing her spoon into the pot. “Loosening up, becoming nice and creamy?”

  Giada picks up a big, firm triangle of cheese and a long, thin grater. “Lots of Parmesan,” she says, grating it in. “Then grill the shrimp and throw ’em on.”

  This often happens when I watch cooking shows. I’ll sit patiently, taking notes for fifteen minutes, only to realize some clutch ingredient renders the whole recipe useless to me. My salt-water pasta lacks creaminess. It will always lack creaminess. I am doomed to a life of lackluster, shrimp-less pasta.

  Giada, on the other hand, lives with a gourmet’s passion. She clasps her hands to her chest and swoons at the mention of squash blossom fritters. A bona fide swoon; her body mic booms. She lights up when an audience member asks how to fix struffoli, telling him to lift the deep-fried dough out the moment the honey begins to crystallize, rhapsodizing that it is a favorite treat in her hometown.

  Did I mention how perfectly thin she is?

  The dessert is something involving ricotta and crumbles of biscotti, neither of which I can eat. The volunteer assistants have been increasingly starstruck and decreasingly helpful, and by this point the stage is crowded with the next generation of foodies: five girls ages ten to twelve, a five-year-old whose eyes barely clear the demonstration counter, a pregnant woman who introduces her protruding belly as “Megan,” and one other extremely sheepish-looking grown-up.

  As Giada spoons cheese into a food processor, I have no useful reference point for how this would or could taste. Maybe this is the true definition of pornography—being invited to take satisfaction in images devoid of larger meaning. My mind wanders back to college days, when one of my guy friends would pop into another’s dorm room and announce, “I got a Shakira video off Napster.” I loved that these guys had broadened their musical horizons to include Latin girl-pop. Then I realized they were watching Shakira with the sound turned off.

  Up onstage, in response to repeated pulses of the blades, the espresso powder blending into the ricotta makes for a sexy, sultry brown cream. But it’s an empty pleasure for me. There’s no future in it. I feel an urge to shower.

  Our hour with Giada is up. She thanks us and retreats backstage. Amy and I follow the crowd toward row after row of sponsor displays and vendor tables, each offering a little taste of something. It’s dizzying: FunniBonz Barbeque, BelGioioso Cheese, Belmont Peanuts, Pestos with Panache, Red Rocker Candy, McNulty’s Chutney.

  Cutting a wide berth around the cheese, I focus on the possibilities. I’ve never seen so many salsas. Each proprietor sizes you up as you pass the table. Are you a potential sale? Sample mooch? Food journalist? They don’t appreciate me spinning jars around to examine labels. I am messing with their display.

  For every dip or sauce I decide I can try, there’s the consequent challenge of getting it to my mouth. The only serving utensils are in the form of unmarked chips and pretzels. I have to be careful. A pretzel used to consist of flour, yeast, and salt, but now even mainstream varieties use buttermilk. Some tortilla chips use a lime flavor that is bound with a milk derivative.

  “May I ask what kind of chips these are?” I ask one seller, hoping he’ll produce a bag I can check for ingredients.

  “The cheap kind,” he says. “What do you want to know about my salsa?”

  I’m impeding the flow of valuable traffic. Most of these vendors don’t have national shelf presence; they rely on Internet sales, bulk orders, and the hope that some enthused blogger will set their product on the path to viral popularity. As entrepreneurs, they know that lack of everyday access is a deal breaker for many customers. People who smile over a free sample will ultimately choose a cheap Trader Joe’s variation or something they can get delivered to their house by Peapod.

  Many will choose those routes. Not all. Not the foodies, and not the parents of food-allergic children, for whom stalking brands across time and distance is everyday housekeeping. When Duncan Hines pulled the one Sandra-friendly, store-bought oatmeal raisin cookie from the shelves of local grocery stores, my mother made a special deal with the distributor to buy cookies by the case until the manufacturer’s supply ran out. We became proselytizers, giving a pack to any parents who had a house I might visit to play with their kids.

  Somewhere in between the fifteenth spicy salsa and the twentieth hot sauce, I begin to feel tingly, with what is either a glimmer of hope or an overdose of capsaicin. What I’m thinking is, what makes someone a foodie? A pickiness toward brands; an obsession over provenance; a curiosity about cooking technique? What are traits common to a food-allergic adult? All the same ones. Maybe my genetics haven’t cursed me to a lifetime of boring meals. Maybe they have made me a natural-born foodie.

  I see a large crowd huddled around a demonstration, and walk over to find Carla Hall, of cable television fame, making peanut soup. Hall is a longtime Washingtonian who teaches at CulinAerie, one of D.C.’s newer catering service/cooking school ventures. She became a fan favorite during the fifth season of Bravo’s Top Chef in part because of her positive attitude (“cook with love”), and in part because of her refusal to fix anything that didn’t truly nourish the body.

  Hall’s competition highlight, for me, was when contestants were asked to serve a cocktail pairing for their food. A non-drinker herself, the “chef-testant” didn’t compromise her ethics by using spirits. She didn’t fake it with a mocktail masking the lack of alcohol. Instead, she made a cranberry and ginger spritzer based on key lime soda, a drink not trying to be anything other than what it was—delicious.

  Now she is ladling out tastes of the soup to the hungry crowd. Someone asks about avoiding the calories of heavy cream, and Hall mentions using tofu to thicken the consistency of her broth. An older man asks if she ever wants to open her own restaurant, and she says no. I ask if CulinAerie has ever thought about offering classes for those with food allergies. She looks at me.

  “I think it’s a really good idea. The class would be all about substitutions, right? If you have milk, use this. If you can’t eat peanuts, use this.”

  I should be happy at her enthusiasm, but my heart sinks. All about substitutions? There are so many worthy dishes. She could have said that one could prog
ram a gourmet cooking class without ever needing to use (or substitute for) milk, peanuts, eggs, or wheat. Instead she articulated the allergen-centric mentality I am trying to shake. The one that whispers, You’ll never really be one of us.

  An assistant tries to hand me a Dixie cup of Carla’s soup, but I shake my head. I didn’t catch the ingredients. Knowing it was “cooked with love” doesn’t quite cover it.

  • • •

  I grew up a conservative eater, slow to expand my palate. Even though I knew to ask for olive oil in restaurants, it wasn’t until I was twenty years old, standing at a salad bar and looking down at a bin of chopped black olives, that I thought, Oh. I bet I can eat those, too. I avoided eggplant for years, not because I’d had reactions to other nightshade plants but because the echo of egg made me nervous. Certain foods, like lobster, were too intimidating to fix at home and too expensive to test in public. I came to appreciate repetition and dishes in which the simplicity is its own aesthetic.

  A few years ago, I was at a friend’s party and complaining about fusion cuisine. The fusion trend means there is always some nouveau element, such as pesto foam or a garnish of chili-chocolate shavings, that renders a dish deadly in a way I could not have anticipated from the menu description. I hate taking one look at a plate and sending it back. It’s a waste of their food and of my time.

  But, oh, sushi! My rant gradually turned into an ode to sushi. Fresh fish, combined in elegant ways according to traditional assembly techniques. No random slices of honeydew. No hoity-toity vinaigrettes. Sushi is safe. Sushi is sacred.

  The boyfriend of the hostess, who happened to be the managing editor of a local monthly magazine, proposed that I write a roundup of Washington’s sushi joints. My article included instructions on how to handle nigiri with chopsticks, orgasmic praise of high-grade salmon sashimi, and an extreme close-up of seaweed salad—tangled and dripping with sesame oil—that would have been at home in an issue of Penthouse. Readers responded, and the magazine offered me a regular gig as a reviewer.

  It was then I discovered that despite two decades of caution, I loved food. I loved writing about culinary trivia. I relished knowing that the mango was related to the cashew, which was related to the pistachio, facts gathered as part of a know-thy-enemy strategy. I could ask about the base of a Vietnamese pho (beef broth? shrimp? vegetable?) not as an allergic obsessive but as a Food Writer.

  I invited my family to accompany me on a few “research” meals in the city, relying on their impressions to complement my own. After years of altering her orders so that I could have a taste, my mother welcomed the task of ordering exactly what I couldn’t have. She was my go-to expert on coconut-crusted shrimp.

  My father, perhaps waxing nostalgic for his days in the army’s Psychological Operations unit, seemed to most relish the covert aspect of reviewing. Yet he didn’t exactly play it cool; he always made sure to introduce himself to the house manager using his (and my) last name. After one dinner of jerk chicken and fried plantains, he raved about the coffee. A Caribbean import, he could tell. He insisted we find out the blend’s name in case I wanted to work it into the review.

  The waiter returned shortly. “Maxwell House, sir! Fresh made.”

  Much as I enjoyed the gig, I was not destined to be the next Ruth Reichl. The limitations of my abilities became increasingly apparent. I was assigned to review an Italian restaurant specializing in pizza, which I would report in my review served thin crusts “crisped to perfection.” I claimed “to perfection” based on my lunch date liking her Pizza Margherita. She said the mozzarella was “tasty,” which I dutifully recorded.

  Tasty. That was all I had to go on. My dish was dry pasta—hold the cheese, hold the chorizo, hold the meat sauce. Definitely not the house specialty. How could I judge them based on that? This wasn’t how the chef had designed his flavor profile. This was how I’d forced them to fix it.

  My reviews became regurgitated ingredient lists, prettied up with adjectives. Then my editor suggested that I review a new French restaurant. I tried to picture a Gallic meal without butter or cheese or beef, and I told them the jig was up. In two short years, my critical reign had come and gone.

  Even the chefs can find themselves on the wrong side of an allergy-unfriendly menu. In a 2009 piece for The Atlantic, Ming Tsai—a Chinese-American chef, James Beard Foundation Award-winner, and host of public television’s Simply Ming—described being turned away from a Massachusetts restaurant based on his five-year-old son’s allergies. Before being seated, Tsai asked to speak to a manager and warned him of his son’s severe sensitivities to peanuts, tree nuts, wheat, soy, dairy, egg, and shellfish.

  “Instead of being greeted with a can-do attitude or any amount of graciousness,” Tsai recounts, “I was literally told ‘We’d prefer not to serve you.’ ”

  Tsai, now a spokesperson for the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, resolved to change the attitudes of restaurateurs in his home state. At his restaurant Blue Ginger, opened in Wellesley in 1998, Tsai developed a “Food Allergy Reference Book.” This three-ring binder lists the ingredients of every menu item to provide efficient, reliable answers to queries. No more saying, as I have heard so often, “We don’t know what’s in the soup because the chef is gone for the night.”

  From washing dishes to de-croutoning salads to shaking out linen napkins, every aspect of Blue Ginger’s service has been refined to head off cross-contamination. Tsai emphasizes that the key to creating a safe kitchen is good (and no-cost) technique, not pricey substitutions. He asks his prep chefs to keep ingredients as separate as possible for as long as possible, a habit already somewhat ingrained in kitchen culture.

  “Everyone knows to wash their board and knife thoroughly, if not change out their board entirely, after working with raw chicken because of the risk of salmonella,” Tsai wrote in his article. “At Blue Ginger, every ingredient is raw chicken.”

  Thanks in part to lobbying by Tsai and FAAN, in 2009, Massachusetts passed the Food Allergy Awareness Act (Senate Bill 2701). This bill requires all restaurants to display an allergen awareness poster in the kitchen that details the “big eight” allergens, describes reaction symptoms, and prescribes response protocol. Restaurants must request on their menus that customers inform servers of their allergies before ordering. (This provides some liability protection to the vendors as well.) They must train managers about responding to those with allergy concerns, using a video developed through a partnership with FAAN and the Massachusetts Restaurant Association.

  A restaurant that complies with these standards and, in addition, voluntarily develops its own “Food Allergy Reference Book,” is eligible for a “food-allergy friendly” designation from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

  Legislations comparable to parts or all of these guidelines have also been introduced in Minnesota, New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. But even where the government has not gotten involved, there is rising awareness of the need for a coordinated response to those with allergies. The National Restaurant Association provides its membership with a free booklet, “Welcoming Guests with Food Allergies,” that articulates some of the delicate cultural issues I’ve dealt with firsthand. If you’ve ever identified yourself as a customer with allergies, know that:

  Yes, they’ve been told to give you a knowledgeable, senior contact person for your order. So if you suddenly have a new waiter, it’s not some form of rejection.

  Yes, they’ve been told they must discard any accidentally tainted plate and start from scratch. If you suspect this has not happened, you have a right to insist on it. (None of this brushing Parmesan from the rim of the spaghetti plate and serving it back to me. Vivace in Charlottesville, that’s right, I’m looking at you.)

  Yes, the ultimate decision on what is “safe” belongs to the customer. If your gut says that the dish they bring out will make you sick—whether because of a botched order or an untrustworthy server—you can politely decline, you should not be bille
d, and you should not feel guilty.

  This last guideline makes me regret all the “absolutely nondairy” sorbets I’ve been bullied into trying for dessert. I could have saved a lot of time, pain, and money if I’d just given myself permission to say, “Sorry, I don’t think that’s going to work, after all,” at the sight of a stray swirl of another flavor.

  The Culinary Institute of America (CIA), in partnership with the National Peanut Board, offers even more extensive guidance through its website. They are trying to reach the chefs of the future as well as the restaurants of today. Frankly, the industry needs the help. It’s a little terrifying to see a survey of one hundred dining establishments, conducted by the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in which 24 percent believes “a small amount is safe” and 35 percent believe fryer heat destroys allergens. For me, the latter is particularly troubling when it comes to menus that offer deep-fried shrimp or fried mozzarella sticks alongside French fries.

  The CIA site breaks it down, rule by rule: Do not reuse pasta water that was used to cook cheese-filled gnocchi. Do not reuse a cutting board that hosted Asiago bread. Know that cold cuts of mortadella sausage carry traces of nuts, and that fake crab often contains fish and egg. Don’t forget the cheese hidden in a pesto that may have been made earlier in the day. Wheat shows up in soy sauce, bouillon cubes, and ice cream. If someone orders chicken and is allergic to beef, check before using the same grill surface.

  One CIA webpage is devoted to easy variations on proteins and spreads. Adapting recipes for allergies is presented not as a compromise of one’s techniques but as a further dimension of knowing one’s way around the kitchen. Anyone can hold the tofu on a dish for someone allergic to soy. A superior chef might know his options well enough to offer cubes of paneer (pressed Indian cheese) instead. Or, in my case, a chef might offer to substitute for something creamy by using a base of pureed avocado.

  Safety is a right, not a luxury, though sometimes the phrasing of well-meaning restaurateurs conflates the two. I was thrilled when the innovative Spanish chef José Andrés’s Think-FoodGroup announced menus designed for those with allergies. That said, I had to giggle at their come-hither line on behalf of Café Atlántico.