Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  Sharyn Mann, the FAI’s vice chairman and the mistress of ceremonies, was motivated by similar concerns: her daughter, Tamara, suffers from severe food allergies. Mann wore a strapless black gown and a spray of black feathers in her upswept hair, in keeping with the black-and-white décor inspired by Cecil Beaton’s set designs for My Fair Lady. Mann had managed to enlist ten cast members of the show’s London revival to fly over and perform, and friends of Mann testified that her maternal vigilance was as impressive as her event production talents. “I was there the first time her daughter turned blue,” said Wanda Dworman. “If she went anywhere, she couldn’t eat anything outside of water or Jell-O.” Dworman described how her own consciousness about allergic reactions was raised during a trip to Aspen, where a bee flew behind her wraparound sunglasses and stung her twice; and she was pleased to report that there were at least some restaurateurs who took the issue seriously. “A lot of places have nuts in bread, but there are restaurants, like Le Cirque and Daniel, that are very sympathetic to this,” she said.

  The guests of honor were Joseph Flom, the senior partner of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom—and, according to Ronald Perelman, who introduced him, “my lawyer, my friend, and a member of my family”—and Flom’s son Jason, the president of Lava Records. Jason Flom described how his aversion to nuts had caused him to make a hasty, gasping exit from the Chappaqua dinner table of former president Clinton not long ago, after it became clear that assurances from the waitstaff that the meal was nut-free depended on what your definition of “nut” was. Other politicians have also failed to grasp the seriousness of the food-allergy issue. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is a board member of FAI, said that he had written to Jimmy Carter after Carter sent a letter to the airlines in defense of packaged peanuts as an in flight snack.

  The main course was beef goulash with garlic-chive spaetzle. The Plaza kitchen, having striven so hard to create an allergy-proof menu, was momentarily flummoxed by requests for a vegetarian alternative; eventually someone rustled up a plate or two of steamed baby vegetables, the kind of thing children only pretend to be allergic to. The seven different desserts—created by the restaurants Danube and Bouley, whose chef, David Bouley, was honored with the Joe Baum Lifetime Achievement Award—were delivered to dimmed lights, a drumroll, and a rousing trumpet voluntary.

  Bouley, on receiving his award, cited “the right to have a fine culinary experience without fear,” and the evening’s menu demonstrated the possibility of having a fine culinary experience without nuts—although some guests admitted quietly that a nut or two could be a good thing. Rita Blake, who owns a company that makes what she described as “very, very, very high-end window treatments,” said that a few handfuls of nuts had served as her dinner the previous night. Blake was sympathetic to those with food allergies, having developed an intolerance to shellfish a few years ago, but nonetheless defended the maligned foodstuff. “I love nuts,” she said. “I think they are nature’s perfect food. I give my dog raw almond butter with her vitamins.”

  2003

  “If I told you the secret of making light, flaky piecrust, it wouldn’t be much of a secret anymore, now would it?”

  KILLING DINNER

  GABRIELLE HAMILTON

  It’s quite something to go bare-handed up through a chicken’s ass and dislodge its warm guts. Startling, the first time, how fragilely they are attached. I have since put countless suckling pigs—pink, the same weight and size as a pet beagle—into slow ovens to roast overnight so that their skin becomes crisp and their still-forming bones melt into the meat. I have butchered 220-pound sides of beef down to their primal cuts; carved the tongues out of the heads of goats; fastened baby lambs with crooked sets of teeth onto green applewood spits and set them by the foursome over hot coals; and boned the saddles and legs of rabbits, which, even skinned, look exactly like bunnies.

  But when I killed my first chicken I was only seventeen and unaccustomed. I had dropped out of school and was staying in the basement of my father’s house, in rural New Jersey, for very little rent. That fall, I spent a lot of time sitting outside on the log pile at dusk smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in my canvas jacket, watching the garden decay and thinking about death and the inherent beauty of the cycle of life. In my father’s chicken coop, one bird was being badly henpecked. My dad said we should kill it and spare it the slow torture by its pen mates. I said I could do it. I said it was important to confront the death of the animal you had the privilege of eating, that it was cowardly to buy cellophane-wrapped packages of boneless, skinless breasts at the grocery store. My father said, “You can kill the damned thing when I get home from work.”

  From a remote spot on the back kitchen steps, he told me how to pull the chicken decisively out of the pen. I spoke to it philosophically about death, grasping it firmly yet calmly with what I hoped was a soothing authority. Then he told me to take it by the legs and hold it upside down. The chicken protested from deep inside its throat, close to the heart, a violent, vehement, full-bodied cluck. The crowing was almost an afterthought. To get it to stop, I started swinging it in full arm circles, as my dad instructed me. I windmilled that bird around and around the way I’d spun lettuce as a kid in the front yard, sending droplets of water out onto the gravel and pachysandra from the old-fashioned wire-basket spinner my mom used.

  He said this would disorient the bird—make it so dizzy that it couldn’t move—and that’s when I should lay it down on the block and chop its head off, with one machinelike whack. In my own way, not like a machine at all, I laid it down on a tree stump, and while it was trying to recover I clutched the hatchet and came down on its neck. This first blow made a vague dent, barely breaking the skin. I hurried to strike it again, but lost a few seconds in my grief and horror. The second blow hit the neck like a boat oar on a hay bale. I was still holding its feet in one hand and trying to cut its head off with the dull hatchet in my other when both the chicken and my father became quite lucid, and not a little agitated. The chicken began to thrash, its eyes open, as if chastising me for my false promises of a merciful death. My dad yelled, “Kill it! Kill it! Aw, Gabs, kill the fucking thing!” from his bloodless perch. I kept coming down on the bird’s throat—which was now broken but still issuing terrible clucks—stroke after miserable stroke, until I finally got its head off. I was blubbering through clenched teeth. My dad was animated with disgust at his dropout daughter—so morose and unfeminine, with the tips of her braids dyed aquamarine, and unable even to kill a chicken properly. As I released the bird, finally, and it ran around the yard, bloody and ragged but at least now silent, he screamed, “What kind of person are you?”

  It was a solid minute before the chicken’s nerves gave out and it fell over motionless in some dead brown leaves. I wiped my snot on my sleeve, picked up the bird from the frozen ground, tied its feet, and hung it on a low tree branch to bleed it. The other chickens in their pen, silhouetted against the dusk, retreated inside to roost for the night. My dad closed the kitchen door and turned on the oven. I boiled a blue enameled lobster pot full of water, and submerged the bird to loosen its feathers. Sitting out on the back steps in the yellow pool of light from the kitchen window, I plucked the feathers off the chicken, two and three at a time. Its viscera came out with an easy tug: a small palmful of livery, bloody jewels that I tossed out into the dark yard.

  There are two things you should never do with your father: learn how to drive, and learn how to kill a chicken. I’m not sure you should sit across from each other and eat the roasted bird in resentful silence, either, but we did that, too, and the meat was disagreeably tough.

  2004

  FICTION

  “Peas and carrots, peas and carrots, always together…but are they really happy?”

  TASTE

  ROALD DAHL

  There were six of us to dinner that night at Mike Schofield’s house in London: Mike and his wife and daughter, my wife and I, and a man called Richard Pratt.

  Ri
chard Pratt was a famous gourmet. He was president of a small society known as the Epicures, and each month he circulated privately to its members a pamphlet on food and wines. He organized dinners where sumptuous dishes and rare wines were served. He refused to smoke for fear of harming his palate, and when discussing a wine, he had a curious, rather droll habit of referring to it as though it were a living being. “A prudent wine,” he would say, “rather diffident and evasive, but quite prudent.” Or, “a good-humored wine, benevolent and cheerful—slightly obscene, perhaps, but nonetheless good-humored.”

  I had been to dinner at Mike’s twice before when Richard Pratt was there, and on each occasion Mike and his wife had gone out of their way to produce a special meal for the famous gourmet. And this one, clearly, was to be no exception. The moment we entered the dining room, I could see that the table was laid for a feast. The tall candles, the yellow roses, the quantity of shining silver, the three wineglasses to each person, and, above all, the faint scent of roasting meat from the kitchen brought the first warm oozings of saliva to my mouth.

  As we sat down, I remembered that on both Richard Pratt’s previous visits Mike had played a little betting game with him over the claret, challenging him to name its breed and its vintage. Pratt had replied that that should not be too difficult, provided it was one of the great years. Mike had then bet him a case of the wine in question that he could not do it. Pratt had accepted, and had won both times. Tonight I felt sure that the little game would be played over again, for Mike was quite willing to lose the bet in order to prove that his wine was good enough to be recognized, and Pratt, for his part, seemed to take a grave, restrained pleasure in displaying his knowledge.

  The meal began with a plate of whitebait, fried very crisp in butter, and to go with it there was a Moselle. Mike got up and poured the wine himself, and when he sat down again, I could see that he was watching Richard Pratt. He had set the bottle down in front of me so that I could read the label. It said GEIERSLAY OHLIGSBERG, 1945. He leaned over and whispered to me that Geierslay was a tiny village in the Moselle, almost unknown outside Germany. He said that this wine we were drinking was something unusual, that the output of the vineyard was so small that it was almost impossible for a stranger to get any of it. He had visited Geierslay personally the previous summer in order to obtain the few dozen bottles that they had finally allowed him to have.

  “I doubt anyone else in the country has any of it at the moment,” he said. I saw him glance again at Richard Pratt. “Great thing about Moselle,” he continued, raising his voice, “it’s the perfect wine to serve before a claret. A lot of people serve a Rhine wine instead, but that’s because they don’t know any better. A Rhine wine will kill a delicate claret, you know that? It’s barbaric to serve a Rhine before a claret. But a Moselle—ah!—a Moselle is exactly right.”

  Mike Schofield was an amiable, middle-aged man. But he was a stockbroker. To be precise, he was a jobber in the stock market, and, like a number of his kind, he seemed to be somewhat embarrassed, almost ashamed, to find that he had made so much money with so slight a talent. In his heart he knew that he was not really much more than a bookmaker—an unctuous, infinitely respectable, secretly unscrupulous bookmaker—and he knew that his friends knew it, too. So he was seeking now to become a man of culture, to cultivate a literary and aesthetic taste, to collect paintings, music, books, and all the rest of it. His little sermon about Rhine wine and Moselle was a part of this thing, this culture that he sought.

  “A charming little wine, don’t you think?” he said. He was still watching Richard Pratt. I could see him give a rapid, furtive glance down the table each time he dropped his head to take a mouthful of whitebait. I could almost feel him waiting for the moment when Pratt would take his first sip, and look up from his glass with a smile of pleasure, of astonishment, perhaps even of wonder, and then there would be a discussion and Mike would tell him about the village of Geierslay.

  But Richard Pratt did not taste his wine. He was completely engrossed in conversation with Mike’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Louise. He was half turned toward her, smiling at her, telling her, so far as I could gather, some story about a chef in a Paris restaurant. As he spoke, he leaned closer and closer to her, seeming in his eagerness almost to impinge upon her, and the poor girl leaned as far as she could away from him, nodding politely, rather desperately, and looking not at his face but at the topmost button of his dinner jacket.

  We finished our fish, and the maid came around removing the plates. When she came to Pratt, she saw that he had not yet touched his food, so she hesitated, and Pratt noticed her. He waved her away, broke off his conversation, and quickly began to eat, popping the little crisp brown fish quickly into his mouth with rapid jabbing movements of his fork. Then, when he had finished, he reached for his glass, and in two short swallows he tipped the wine down his throat, and turned immediately to resume his conversation with Louise Schofield.

  Mike saw it all. I was conscious of him sitting there, very still, containing himself, looking at his guest. His round, jovial face seemed to loosen slightly and to sag, but he contained himself and was still and said nothing.

  Soon the maid came forward with the second course. This was a large roast of beef. She placed it on the table in front of Mike, who stood up and carved it, cutting the slices very thin, laying them gently on the plates for the maid to take around. When he had served everyone, including himself, he put down the carving knife and leaned forward with both hands on the edge of the table.

  “Now,” he said, speaking to all of us but looking at Richard Pratt. “Now for the claret. I must go and fetch the claret, if you’ll excuse me.”

  “You go and fetch it, Mike?” I said. “Where is it?”

  “In my study, with the cork out—breathing.”

  “Why the study?”

  “Acquiring room temperature, of course. It’s been there twenty-four hours.”

  “But why the study?”

  “It’s the best place in the house. Richard helped me choose it last time he was here.”

  At the sound of his name, Pratt looked around.

  “That’s right, isn’t it?” Mike said.

  “Yes,” Pratt answered, nodding gravely. “That’s right.”

  “On top of the green filing cabinet in my study,” Mike said. “That’s the place we chose. A good draft-free spot in a room with an even temperature. Excuse me, now, will you, while I fetch it.”

  The thought of another wine to play with had restored his humor, and he hurried out the door, to return a minute later, more slowly, walking softly, holding in both hands a wine basket in which a dark bottle lay. The label was out of sight, facing downward. “Now!” he cried as he came toward the table. “What about this one, Richard? You’ll never name this one!”

  Richard Pratt turned slowly and looked up at Mike; then his eyes traveled down to the bottle, nestling in its small wicker basket, and he raised his eyebrows, a slight, supercilious arching movement of the brows, and with it a pushing outward of the wet lower lip, suddenly imperious and ugly.

  “You’ll never get it,” Mike said. “Not in a hundred years.”

  “A claret?” Richard Pratt asked, condescending.

  “Of course.”

  “I assume, then, that it’s from one of the smaller vineyards?”

  “Maybe it is, Richard. And then again, maybe it isn’t.”

  “But it’s a good year? One of the great years?”

  “Yes, I guarantee that.”

  “Then it shouldn’t be too difficult,” Richard Pratt said, drawling his words, looking exceedingly bored. Except that, to me, there was something strange about his drawling and his boredom: between the eyes a shadow of something evil, and in his bearing an intentness that gave me a faint sense of uneasiness as I watched him.

  “This one is really rather difficult,” Mike said. “I won’t force you to bet on this one.”

  “Indeed. And why not?” Again the slow arch
ing of the brows, the cool, intent look.

  “Because it’s difficult.”

  “That’s not very complimentary to me, you know.”

  “My dear man,” Mike said, “I’ll bet you with pleasure, if that’s what you wish.”

  “It shouldn’t be too hard to name it.”

  “You mean you want to bet?”

  “I’m perfectly willing to bet,” Richard Pratt said.

  “All right, then, we’ll have the usual. A case of the wine itself.”

  “You don’t think I’ll be able to name it, do you?”

  “As a matter of fact, and with all due respect, I don’t,” Mike said. He was making some effort to remain polite, but Pratt was not bothering overmuch to conceal his contempt for the whole proceeding. And yet, curiously, his next question seemed to betray a certain interest.

  “You like to increase the bet?”

  “No, Richard. A case is plenty.”

  “Would you like to bet fifty cases?”

  “That would be silly.”

  Mike stood very still behind his chair at the head of the table, and he was still carefully holding the bottle in its ridiculous wicker basket. There was a trace of whiteness around his nostrils now, and his mouth was shut very tight.

  Pratt was lolling back in his chair, looking up at him, the eyebrows raised, the eyes half closed, a little smile touching the corners of his lips. And again I saw, or thought I saw, something distinctly disturbing about the man’s face, that shadow of intentness between the eyes, and in the eyes themselves, right in their centers, where it was black, a small, slow spark of shrewdness, hiding. “So you don’t want to increase the bet?”