Angelina’s
Bachelors
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are
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First Gallery Books trade paperback edition August 2011
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Reilly, Brian.
Angelina’s bachelors : a novel, with food / by Brian
O’Reilly.—1st Gallery Books trade paperback ed.
p. cm.
1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Food—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3615.R453A85 2011
813’.6—dc22
2011013170
ISBN 978-1-4516-2056-6
ISBN 978-1-4516-2057-3 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Dreaming in Dark Chocolate
Chapter 2: Life Goes On
Chapter 3: Stracciatella and Storm Clouds
Chapter 4: In the Wee Hours of the Mourning
Chapter 5: Mr. Cupertino’s Proposal
Chapter 6: Eggs Benedict with Basil
Chapter 7: Hunger is the Best Sauce
Chapter 8: Nothing Beats a Box of Steaks
Chapter 9: Fortune’s Fool
Chapter 10: A Seven Fishes to Remember
Chapter 11: The Pie’s the Thing
Chapter 12: High Tea and Sympathy
Chapter 13: Snowbound and Determined
Chapter 14: Frittatas and High Finance
Chapter 15: The First Love
Chapter 16: Crullers, Champagne, and Croquembouche
Chapter 17: Christmas day delivery
Index of Recipes
Acknowledgments
Readers Group Guide
Angelina’s
Bachelors
CHAPTER ONE
Dreaming in Dark Chocolate
PERFECT,” WHISPERED ANGELINA.
Standing alone in the moonlit warmth of her kitchen, she stroked them each softly in turn and applied the slightest, knowing pressure to each. They were cool to the touch now, all risen to exactly the same height, the same shape and consistency, laid side by side by side on the well-worn wooden table. The dusky scent of dark chocolate lingered in the air and on her fingers.
She heard a tiny creak of expanding metal behind her. She’d left the oven on and the door halfway open, and heat was escaping into the room. She crossed the floor in her thick woolen socks and clicked off the knob. When she closed the door, a pillowy, cocoa-laced draft brushed up past her shoulders and face. She breathed in deeply, pulled back her unruly tumble of raven-black hair, and cinched the belt on her robe a little tighter.
Back to the business at hand: her Frangelico Chocolate “Dream” Cake.
As she mentally rehearsed the steps to come, as she always did when she was working out her methods for a new recipe, Angelina thought about that “dream.” It was unlike her to give a recipe such an extravagant title. She preferred practical headings as a rule, which told you what was required for cooking and not much more. She always made cakes for birthdays and special occasions, but this one, for her niece Tina’s twenty-first birthday party, felt special. This was going to be a cake to be remembered.
She imagined how Frank would laugh when she plunked down a big slice in front of him and called it by its whimsical name. He would laugh precisely because it was unlike her. Angelina liked to think that she could still surprise him from time to time after five years of marriage. She thought of him taking his first bite; she could hardly wait.
That would show him.
Angelina knew that she was making a point with this cake, as lovingly and in the most appetizing way possible, but making a point just the same. It had nothing to do with vanity. It was about certainty. She needed to be sure that her husband understood certain realities. Most important, she needed to be sure that he understood that cooking was not just about food. It was about character.
A few weeks earlier, she and Frank had been invited to dinner at Vince Cunio’s house. Vince was a local contractor, who did well for himself and had kept both Frank and Angelina gainfully employed for the past four years—Frank as a finishing carpenter and Angelina as office manager and part-time bookkeeper.
Vince was closing in on sixty, and his wife, Amy, was busty and younger by about twenty years; you didn’t have to know her long to spot the surgically enhanced chip on her shoulder. She’d left the neighborhood at seventeen for Nevada, in hot pursuit of a married man twice her age. She had returned four years ago without explanation and had wrangled Vince to the altar in short order. Amy belonged and was out of place at the same time, like a grown woman forced to move back into her teenage room, plotting a woman’s schemes while lying amongst a girl’s stuffed animals and high school pennants.
The four of them were friendly and familiar enough, having all grown up in the same South Philly neighborhood, though at different times and ages, but Angelina was always sure to keep in mind that it didn’t pay to fool yourself into thinking that you could count too much on your close, personal friendship with your boss. One minute you’re all one big happy family; the next, you’ve accidentally crossed some line, which was always moving, and just that quickly you’re out in the cold. You can never be equals when one of you is writing the other’s paycheck.
It had been a nice, genial get-together that Saturday night: Vince and Amy, Angelina and Frank, and two other couples. It had started off innocently, with drinks, a couple of trays of crab puffs and cocktail wieners from the freezer section, chips and dip. Dinner had been simple enough, a big, family-style bowl of salad, good steaks, baked potatoes with sour cream and chives, and steamed broccoli “boiled in a bag,” swimming in a prefabricated cheddar-cheese sauce. They opened a couple of bottles of wine that were too expensive for the occasion and passed a companionable meal talking about the rain, the Phillies’ chances, and the trouble Vince was having getting an approval for the wraparound deck he was adding to his house down the shore.
Then came coffee and cake. It was a pretty cake; white frosting with a decorative swirl of chocolate sauce on top, a chocolate-covered strawberry in the center, adorned with slivers of toasted almonds on the side. Angelina knew it was going to be good before she tasted it. She recognized the style right away. It was from Tollerico’s Bakery and old Mr. Tollerico knew what he was doing. The men dug right in.
“Wow, Amy,” said Frank, always quick with a sincere compliment, which was one of the qualities Angelina loved about him. “What kind of cake is this?”
“It’s an Italian rum cake.”
“Did you make this yoursel
f?” asked Frank.
“Sure did,” said Amy.
There it was. Liar, thought Angelina.
That the cake was from Tollerico’s was beyond any doubt. Angelina had recognized it as easily as if the old man had signed it. She knew the decoration, the flavors, she could probably write up the recipe in her sleep. In fact, she could write a better recipe in her sleep.
Angelina felt the heat rising at the back of her neck. She couldn’t just let it pass, on principle, but calling Amy on it in front of the others was out of the question. Maybe she just needed a little nudge toward confession. Without taking her eyes off her cake, Angelina said, “The butter cream is really nice. Did you poach the eggs in the syrup or make the custard first?”
Any baker capable of making this cake would know which was the more stable emulsion method, the one that keeps in the refrigerator longer if you’re making it a day or two ahead for guests. She was pretty sure Amy wouldn’t.
Angelina had dark, penetrating eyes. She had been told more than once that she often unnerved people she hardly knew by looking at them too intently, so she looked purposefully down at her plate and listened for her answer.
“I just did it the regular way,” said Amy, after a noticeable hesitation.
“Oh,” said Angelina. Busted, she thought.
Taking credit for a cake you couldn’t bake if your life depended on it, that you’d bought instead, was so like Amy. She would have told the same lie to the first person who’d asked; it just happened to be Frank. But the way she’d said it, preening, flirtatious, almost as if she’d been making a play for her husband right in front of her, and under false pretenses no less … it was like stroking a cat’s fur backward; it rubbed Angelina the wrong way.
Or, maybe, Angelina thought, if she were going to be completely honest, maybe she was just jealous. Not jealous of Amy; that would be beyond ridiculous and beyond unfair to a man like Frank. But maybe she was jealous that her husband might possibly like somebody else’s cake just a little too much. Maybe the fact that it was Lying Amy’s cake was just the icing.
As they drove home after the party, she’d told Frank about the deception, and he had treated it lightly, as she knew he would.
“So, if you needed a heart transplant, and Amy was your doctor and told you she could do it, but she was really a podiatrist, that would be okay with you?” Angelina had argued.
“Honey, telling me Amy isn’t a baker is like telling me Amy isn’t a doctor. It doesn’t really come as a surprise,” said Frank.
Angelina rolled her eyes in mock exasperation. “Boys don’t know anything!”
She was enjoying her over-the-top sense of moral outrage and so was Frank. She loved the way it made her feel whenever she could make him laugh.
She was going to show him, though. Because she loved him, she had to make sure he’d never again forget the difference between a store-bought and a homemade cake, especially hers. This cake would be irresistible.
When she’d come down to the kitchen after her shower, she’d deliberately left the lights off. She liked the way the cake looked in the bright light of the full moon that was streaming in through the windows. On the kitchen table a wooden spoon sat in a small saucepot, which held crushed hazelnuts that had been soaked and heated in Frangelico, next to the bowl of thick, velvety pastry cream she had prepared earlier. She released one of the layers from its baking pan and settled it onto the cake plate. She had sprinkled them while they were still warm with the same infused brandy, so they were now redolent with a harmonious perfume of filberts and chocolate. She deftly spread some of the pastry cream on the first layer and sprinkled a tablespoon of the crushed nuts on top of it. She added the second layer of cake, more buttery cream, and a dusting of nuts.
Angelina always aimed for an extra shading of flavor when she created a recipe, something to complement and enhance the most prominent flavor in a dish, something that tickled the palate and the imagination. Here, she had chosen aromatic, earthy hazelnuts to add an extra dimension of texture and taste. She’d heard someplace that some musical composers said that it was the spaces between the notes that made all of the difference; when you were cooking, it was the little details, too.
Each layer of the dense cake covered the one beneath it as she laid them on, like dark disks of chocolate eclipsing moons made of crème anglaise instead of green cheese. In short order, the sixth and final layer had efficiently been fixed into place. She took a half step back to check for symmetry and balance, then moved on to the frosting.
She poured the mixture of butter, milk, and chocolate that had been resting on the stove top into a mixing bowl, added a pinch of salt, a dash of real vanilla extract, and began whisking it all together with powdered sugar, which she sifted in stages to make sure that it combined thoroughly.
She took the bowl to the counter and plugged in the electric hand mixer.
Stiff peaks, she thought, as the blades purred to life in her hand.
The first time her mother, Emmaline, had let her use the mixer on her own was when she was seven… .
“Swirl it around gently, all the way in, until you get stiff peaks,” her mother said.
As a little girl, Angelina had no idea what that meant, but soldiered ahead and started vigorously whipping the cream, assuming that her mother would tell her right when to stop, as she always did.
“Ma, is it ‘stiff peaks’ yet?” she had asked after a minute or two.
Her mother glanced over casually and said, “Not yet.”
Half a minute later: “How about now?”
“Not yet.”
Then the oven timer dinged. When Emmaline went to pull that day’s cake out of the oven, she failed to completely cover the heel of her hand with her towel and gave herself a little burn. She rinsed it quickly under cold water, no harm done, as Angelina kept mixing. A moment too long later, Emmaline reached in and turned off the beaters.
They leaned over the bowl together. Emmaline dipped in a finger and tasted. “Oops. You made butter.”
Angelina poked in a finger and tasted, too. It was sweet, but it wasn’t whipped cream. She had miraculously made butter.
As they prepared a second batch, Emmaline explained the mystical relationship between cream and butter, in a way that was easy for a seven-year-old to understand and remember. Emmaline was French, having been courted and swept away to America by Angelina’s father after the war, and she was a wonderful cook. She had a deep, abiding appreciation for all things culinary that she had passed on to her daughter like her eye color and thoughtful turn of mind.
While she’d been lost in memories of her mother, Angelina’s frosting had come together nicely. She dragged a high wooden stool over to the bowl on the table and lithely perched on it cross-legged, her habit since she was a teenager. She had an artist’s touch with a frosting knife, and soon the cake stood royally resplendent in a smooth, russet-colored coating.
She reached for a block of white chocolate and started whittling thin, blond strips off it with a vegetable peeler. When she had a generous pile in front of her, she put down the peeler, scooped up a double handful of shavings, and paused for a beat as she considered the top of the cake, the way a golfer coolly considers a fairway. With a single, graceful movement, she passed her hands over the top and a curtain of white curls settled like magic on the cake’s surface, each shaving falling precisely where she had meant it to.
Only then did she let out a satisfied breath and start cleaning up. Of all life’s rich rewards, Angelina felt that the creation of cake must be one of the most gratifying, if you knew what you were doing.
Once she had everything back in its proper place, she opened her recipe diary.
When she was fifteen, her mother had given her a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child and a volume of Larousse Gastronomique. Angelina had studied them systematically and completely, and she had started making her own notes in a recipe diary soon after she’d graduated from high sch
ool, a practice she kept up diligently to this day. The crushed hazelnuts were a new invention and she wanted to make sure that she made note of it on the day she first thought of it, as was her longtime practice.
She placed the glass cover over the cake stand and put the cake in the refrigerator. She tipped a little Frangelico into two tiny aperitif glasses and took them with her as she headed back upstairs.
Frangelico Chocolate “Dream” Cake
* * *
Serves 16
INGREDIENTS FOR PASTRY CREAM
3 cups whole milk
9 tablespoons cornstarch, sifted
¾ cup sugar
5 eggs
5 tablespoons cold butter, cubed
1⅛ teaspoons vanilla extract
INGREDIENTS FOR THE SIX-LAYER CHOCOLATE CAKE
1⅛ cups flour
1 cup Ghirardelli sweet ground chocolate powder
3 teaspoons baking powder
2¼ cups sugar
15 eggs, room temperature
6 tablespoons butter, room temperature
¾ cup milk, room temperature
INGREDIENTS FOR HAZELNUT FILLING
2½ cups sugar
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
½ cup Frangelico brandy
1¼ cups hazelnuts (coarsely crushed in a plastic bag with the side of a meat mallet)
INGREDIENTS FOR CHOCOLATE FROSTING AND GARNISH
⅛ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons Frangelico brandy
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups butter
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa
6 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar
1 two-ounce bar white chocolate for shaving curls (such as Perugina) or ½ cup white chocolate chips (such as Ghirardelli)
METHOD FOR THE PASTRY CREAM
Pour ⅜ cup of the milk into a large mixing bowl. Gradually sift in the cornstarch, whisking it into the milk as you go to create a slurry. Add half the sugar (⅜ cup) and the eggs and whisk to completely combine.
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