“So,” Jonathan says. “Who am I cooking for?”
“I’d love lunch,” Gretchen says.
“Too bad we need you to run some errands,” Xavier tells her.
“What?”
He hands her a list. “You are getting paid for today.”
“All right,” she grumbles, stuffing the paper in her back pocket without folding it. “I’ll be back—”
“—at two,” Xavier says.
She squints at him, then turns and sweetly offers her hand to Jonathan. “It’s been lovely to meet you.”
“You too, Gretchen. We’ll talk more this afternoon, I’m sure.”
“I’d like that.”
When she goes, Jonathan turns to the men. “Lunch for you?”
“No, we’re on our way out as well,” Xavier says. “Also have a few things to do before the judging.”
Now it’s my turn to narrow my eyes at him. He pats me on the shoulder as he passes, as does Jude, who whispers, “Behave.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to ditch me too,” Jonathan says.
I want to. My head pounds with exhaustion and talk and everything else bombarding me the past week. I see he’s offering to prepare a meal out of kindness and no other motive. He cooks because it’s who he is, and he can’t help but share that enthusiasm with others.
I understand.
“No, I’ll eat.”
“Don’t make me twist your arm.”
“I’m just tired.”
“Long day?”
“Long day. Long week. Long everything.”
He nods, swipes his finger over his smartphone, and pecks at the screen. “I hear you.”
Minutes later one of his assistants knocks on the back door, plastic grocery bag in hand, black case in another. Jonathan takes them both and thanks her. He must know I need a break because he doesn’t try to engage me in what he’s doing. Or perhaps he needs the respite too, and he finds his peace in chopping and sautéing and making foods better than they can be on their own. He moves instinctively around the stove, never asking where something is, opening drawers and removing utensils. He brings his own knives, unzips the case. I’m soothed by watching him. He halves fresh Brussels sprouts and tosses them in a pan of butter and garlic, squeezes the juice of a lemon over them. He thinly slices two sweet potatoes, setting them to boil. When they’re soft, he mashes and seasons them. Another pan heating on the gas burner, this one for rounds of filet mignon, seared and drizzled with a red wine reduction.
He plates the food and presents it to me, with a fork from Tee’s drawer and a steak knife from his kit. “Madam, lunch is served.”
“It’s lovely.”
“I know.” His words are without pride or arrogance. He can say it to me because I understand. It’s no crime to be skilled and know it.
We eat with only the sound of flatware against ceramic dishes, until finally Jonathan says, “This kitchen is really well laid out. Everything is where you’d expect it to be.”
“That’s Tee. My cook. She’s quite . . . fastidious. When you meet her this afternoon, she’ll probably give you an earful for using her beloved pots.”
“Looking forward to it.”
Another lull. Now I say, “Are your baguettes yeasted?”
“Guilty.” He covers his eyes with his hand in mock shame. “I’m no sourdough expert. Actually, in all honesty, I’ve never gotten the hang of it. This is the dough I use in my restaurant, a variation on pain a l’ancienne.”
“I can’t wait to try it.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
He disappears briefly into the café and returns with one of the long, slender loaves baked less than two hours ago. But before sitting, he grabs one of my baguettes too, shaking it like a sword as he comes back to the table. “Fair’s fair.”
“As long as it’s not breaking any rules.”
“I make the rules.”
Taking a wooden cutting board from where it hangs on the pot rack above us, he lines both loaves on it and holds his serrated knife over them. “Some days I hate cutting into it,” he tells me. “Destroying the perfection of it all.”
Jonathan’s baguette is much more rustic than mine, knobby and arthritic, the bony fingers of the ancients the name suggests. He slices. The crust is thicker, the crumb yellowish with erratically sized holes. I take a bite. Delicious. He doesn’t expect comment, though, instead slicing through my more traditional-looking loaf. The rooms are more uniform, each about the size of the tip of my pinky—I stick my finger in them, sometimes, measuring—the texture slightly heavier. He takes a bite now, moves the bread around his mouth slowly. Then he wipes it over his place, soaking up wine and beef juice and garlicky residue from the sprouts. “You think I’m a charlatan for that.”
“Of course not,” I say, a grin finding my mouth.
“You won’t tell anyone.”
“Never.” He pours more of the reduction on his plate and takes another piece of my baguette, and I laugh. “I like butter on mine. And salt.”
“Now we both have our secrets.” He reaches back for the stick on the counter, soft from the kitchen’s heat. I spread it thinly, sprinkle a pinch of sea salt over the bread, and help myself to another slice.
Ten
My best friend, Jennie Rausenberg, lets me borrow her navy pleated skirt for the funeral, the one she wore for her band concert last spring, and I match it with a dull-colored sweater and black flats. I take a pair of nylons from my mother’s dresser, still full of her things, and wriggle into them. She hadn’t let me wear them yet, though I desperately wanted to. My legs look plastic, too dark and slightly orangish. I run my hands up and down them, so silky I can’t stop rubbing. A sharp corner of fingernail catches, and I watch the fabric separate, the split climbing like a ladder from shin to thigh. I take off the torn pair and hide it in the bathroom trash pail inside my cousin’s wet disposable diaper, trim my nails, and put on another pair, this one brand new in egg-shaped packaging.
We’re leaving, my aunt—my father’s sister—calls up the stairs.
The service is at a funeral home. We don’t have a church, and my father doesn’t bother calling around to find one; he’s unsure of the Lutheran position on suicide and doesn’t want to find out. He knows where the Catholic church of his birth stands, and that’s more than enough for him to bear.
The viewing is short because there’s nothing to see but an urn of ashes and a few photos. No one speaks but the hired chaplain, who pronounces my mother’s name the American way. Clawdia. I think of the sand crabs in Maine, how my father took me out at night and we’d shine flashlights up the beach and watch them scamper back into the shadows, one white pincher larger than the other. Claw, claw, Clawdia. It sounds so harsh and nailed to the earth, unlike the German way of saying it. Cloudia. Ethereal. Floating. Destined for the clouds, not burned to soot and trapped in some glorified tin can.
They come back to our home, my father’s relatives and my mother’s friends, coworkers and meat buyers and neighbors. They eat and laugh, and I don’t understand why they come at all. It’s not comforting to have them here. Only loud and messy. I hide in my bedroom with Jennie, listening to my nearly worn New Kids on the Block cassette. My Aunt Anwyn finally finds me and drags me downstairs. Guests are leaving. Say good-bye. I collect hugs from people I barely know, their breath warm with Swedish meatballs and condolences. Finally, with everyone gone, my aunt upstairs putting my cousin down for a nap and her husband off to the grocery store for more baby wipes, my father and I stand in an empty living room between the long folding table of food and the sofa, where he found me four days ago.
Someone has placed my mother’s dough trough in the center of the table and filled it with store-bought rolls. There are only four left, and a half of one—torn, not cut—and crumbs. I think my father will stand here forever, that he’s turned to granite in his sadness, and I’ll have to tilt and roll him into the corner and dust him once a month. And st
and he does, without moving, long enough for my feet to hurt in my toe-pinching dress shoes. Uncle Russ should be home soon; his entrance will give me an opportunity to escape. It seems wrong to say something, to break through the stillness with my voice, or with motion. This is his requiem.
And then he roars, clutching my mother’s beloved antique trough in his clawed hands—claw, claw, Clawdia, the sand crab—and smashes it onto the planked floor. It splits in two with a bellow of its own.
We stand there again, no longer still, my body trembling with fear, his heaving in rage and exertion, both of us with our eyes on the bowl. Alistair, what happ—Aunt Anwyn stops at the bottom of the steps, freezing at the sight of the carnage. She knows too. My mother’s treasure, passed to her from grandmother, from great-grandmother, from the motherland, broken.
My trembling becomes quaking, tears spilling now, fear metamorphosing to anger. My fingers curl into my palms and I wish I hadn’t cut my nails this morning. I want to claw the skin from his face.
Claw, claw, Clawdia.
And then, her voice. It’s grief. Step over it, or pick up the pieces.
I gather the two halves in my arms. It’s her body, and I offer them to my father, saying, Daddy, it’s grief.
He holds me as he weeps in a way I have never seen before or since, and I ignore that my neck is crimped and my hair is caught between my shoulder and his, and it hurts. His tears wash away my own, and in the morning I find my mother’s trough in front of the fireplace, the halves clamped together, the glue almost dry, the break nearly imperceptible.
While Jonathan Scott cleans the kitchen, I tend to the ciabatta. I do offer to wash for him, or to at least wipe the counters and load the dishwasher, but he refuses my help. “Scrubbing keeps me humble,” he says.
Jonathan’s secret ingredient bread continues to proof. No more manipulation is needed. My ciabatta, however, must be divided into four loaves, stretched, and folded. I slice the dough and let it rest a moment while I mash the goat cheese with the caramelized onions. I still have to decide on a third ingredient and, heading back into the kitchen, rummage through the cooler and pantry to see what Tee has on hand. Sun-dried tomatoes. Xavier called it expected, and he’s right, but I need something and can’t think of a better alternative. Where is Tee when I need her? She teases flavors in ways one would never consider, stretching ingredient combinations into the deliciously bizarre. Like Gretchen, Tee is being paid to be here. The only other time she’s missed work is when her sister died.
I dice the tomatoes, my knife skills looking even more mediocre now that I’ve seen Jonathan’s, and stir them into the onion. He sees me and says, “Wait. The camera.”
I sigh. “Really?”
“We have to film something for TV.”
He sends a text and the cameraman, who has been in the Good Food Channel bus outside the bakery, stumbles in, hair matted flat to one side of his head, cheek etched with indentations of sleep. The guy films as I stretch the dough and, before folding, spoon the goat cheese mixture over it. Now another hour to proof.
“Napping on the job?” I raise my eyebrows after the camera leaves again.
“Bread is much more exciting on television. In real life? Not so much. That’s why we typically only do one or two bread episodes per season, because of the logistics. But I think it’s necessary.”
“Because you love it.”
“I appreciate it deeply,” Jonathan says. “I don’t love it, not like you, or others I’ve met. For me, it’s cooking. You know how it is when you find that thing you were born to do. Your soul sings. We are two of the lucky ones. Most people never do.”
“How did you, then? If you don’t mind me asking.”
He realizes he’s leaning against my glass display counter, his handprints smeared on top. Bending over, he blows on them, holds the bottom of his sleeve, and buffs them away. Then he settles back against the counter again, this time on his elbow only. “I was six. In kindergarten. There was this play kitchen, and I would use it with all the girls. But I’d cook with Legos. Each color was a different ingredient, depending on what I was making. And I wrote down my recipes. Seven red Lego tomatoes. Three white Lego onions. Whatever it was. One day my teacher—Miss Lois, we called her—decided to make one of the recipes in the proportions I specified. I don’t know why, but she did. And it worked. So she tried another, and another. She told my parents I should be enrolled in cooking classes. My parents, a lawyer and a CEO, lived on takeout or premade grocery store meals or whatever my nanny heated up before they came home from work. They didn’t take the teacher’s advice, but I still found a way to experiment. The nannies—none of them cared as long as I cleaned up after myself.
“By the time I graduated high school, things were . . . strained . . . between my father and me. He was the attorney. He saw cooking as a waste of my potential. We fought and I left. I had some money saved and I went to France. I didn’t have a plan, other than to eat great food and try to learn to make it. I didn’t want to go to some stuffy culinary school or hit the famous restaurants with the famous chefs. I believed—and still do—some of the best food is prepared by the untrained, the naturally talented, the undiscovered in little holes-in-the-wall tucked away where only locals know about them. So I traveled and found these places. Many of the owners let me intern with them in return for scrubbing pots or doing prep work or even running to the market. I slept in barns and back rooms or in a hostel now and then. I ate one meal a day wherever I was working, if I was working, and when I wasn’t I’d find produce drops at the open market or pick from the trash behind the cafés. I was skinny and sunburned with blistered toes and surviving on adventure, which was more than enough for a nineteen-year-old idealist. I lived two years like that, and then landed a real chef’s position in Lyon for another eighteen months; one of those little dive owners opened his dream restaurant there and remembered me, found me, and offered me a job. I went back to the States at twenty-three and started my first restaurant. Never looked back.”
“And the boulangerie?”
“You read my bio,” he says, and tells me of a time in Paris, exploring the narrow streets of the less desirable arrondisements, one evening stumbling upon a tiny bakery in a crumbling building. It offered only five or six types of bread but all the locals bought there, carrying their newsprint-wrapped baguettes in their armpits and hurrying home after work. The business was owned by an old man called Henri, nearly eighty then, bitter and aloof, never married and with no children. After three visits, he refused to speak to Jonathan or listen to the American’s very bad French. He’d wave his hand across his nose and tell the boy to casse toi before getting through the door. Jonathan would come every day and stand with his francs pressed against the glass. If the old man placed a loaf of bread beside the ancient cast-iron register, it meant Jonathan could come in and purchase it—as long as he didn’t say a word.
Alexandre Dumas, père, wrote of the bakers:
In Paris today millions of pounds of bread are sold daily, made during the previous night by those strange, half-naked beings one glimpses through cellar windows, whose wild-seeming cries floating out of those depths always makes a painful impression. In the morning, one sees these pale men, still white with flour, carrying a loaf under one arm, going off to rest and gather new strength to renew their hard and useful labor when night comes again. I have always highly esteemed the brave and humble workers who labor all night to produce those soft but crusty loaves that look more like cake than bread . . .
And this was how Jonathan saw Henri. His wood oven was in the basement—constructed in the mid-1800s—like most of old Paris, just the way Dumas described, with low ceiling and stone walls, full of crumbs and ash and the smell of sewer. Henri fashioned his dough on the first floor in a small room off the retail area and hobbled to the oven with a dozen unbaked loaves at a time, navigating his way down the narrow, uneven staircase by memory because he couldn’t see over the bread board. Years of neglect cake
d the windows of the storefront too, and the floors. Cobwebs grew over the walls, gray blankets of dust. It didn’t seem to faze the customers, but one day Jonathan brought a French friend to tell Henri he’d clean the bakery until it was spotless, if Henri would let him watch the bread being made. Henri was suspicious but agreed—as long as Jonathan promised not to say a word. He told the friend that Jonathan “parlait français comme une vache espagnole”—spoke French like a Spanish cow.
So he observed. Henri began at five in the morning, opened at seven. By two in the afternoon he’d shut the lights and go upstairs, where he lived, to take a nap and then reopen around six for people to buy bread for supper. And Jonathan scrubbed. First the windows, then the racks, the walls. He crawled on his hands and knees and used a toothbrush and toothpaste on the grout, foaming away years and years of grime from around thousands of those tiny white and black octagonal tiles. When he finished, he brought his friend back to thank the old man, and Henri said he could come back the next day and watch some more, if he wanted.
Jonathan did, staying on for six more months. The old man finally allowed him to work the dough, berating him for ill-formed loaves and often shouting, “Tu as une tête en pain de sucre,” and rapping him with a broom handle every now and again. Eventually, though, Henri told his story. His parents owned the bakery before him, and he’d worked there every day since he was eleven, except for when he tried to be a soldier during World War II. Eventually he was taken as a prisoner of war and sent to a factory in southwest Berlin to build tanks and armored vehicles for the German war effort. Conditions were harsh and hours of work long, but he could write letters. Some made their way home to his family.
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