by Daniel Duane
Me, weeks later: “Hey, Mom, how are you?”
“Fine, honey. What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh. Well, I’m glad you called.”
“Yeah, how are you?”
“Everything’s really good. Umm … let’s see. I had a wonderful walk last night with your father, he was just so funny talking about …”
“I need the ring.”
“Right.”
“Today.”
“Forty-five minutes, outside the Bank of America?”
“Bye.”
I met my mother at the neighborhood branch across from Alice Waters’s hallowed Chez Panisse. Mom handed me a blue velvet ring box like it was a meaningless brick we’d never discuss again.
Then she suggested lunch.
“Where?”
“Saul’s?”
That would indeed be the only Jewish deli in the entire city of Berkeley.
“Matzo-ball soup?” she suggested, with a playful laugh.
To be fair, Saul’s really was the obvious lunch spot in that neighborhood, and when Mom suggested a side of latkes, she openly cracked up, enjoying the tease. But the message was there, inside the joke: Accommodate, my son. You’ll never meet a better girl as long as you live, so eat whatever the hell these people like to eat, to make this lucky marriage soar.
Then there was Liz’s family, although I certainly didn’t think of them while I was driving my crappy Toyota truck back over the Bay Bridge with a diamond in my pocket, all my energy focused on the proposal, and on getting to “Yes.” I’d contemplated Grandma’s rock long enough to figure it would suffice; I’d settled on the apartment building’s roof for the proper place to pop the question; and I’d pictured Liz’s pretty lips forming my desired answer. After that, however, I’d pictured nothing but joyous white light filling the scene, followed by years of undifferentiated bliss. Never once had I contemplated all the other human beings that a marriage proposal implicates, least of all the late Chef Schimmel’s three daughters: Liz’s mother, Judy, back in Wellesley, Massachusetts, screaming into the phone upon hearing the news; Liz’s Aunt Connie, across the bay in Piedmont, likewise screaming into the phone; and Liz’s Aunt Mary, living near their mom, Bea, in Omaha, where the Blackstone had long since been sold to the Radisson chain and, finally, turned into an office building. Aunt Mary not only screamed, she asked the pressing question on every Schimmel girl’s mind: filet mignon, rack of lamb, or salmon, at the reception?
The Weils, in other words, did not exactly take Liz out for tacos to celebrate her union to this California surfer. Judy had boots on the ground in San Francisco within two weeks, knocking out the flower contract and the wedding dress before lunch on the first morning. Liz’s father, Doug, a dedicated gourmand, golfer, and real estate investor—who had perhaps loved his father-in-law’s cooking more than anybody—then drove us all around the greater Bay Area to look at the grassy outdoor wedding spots Liz and I liked. Judy, meanwhile, strategized about how to cope with Grandma Bea’s inevitable objections—not to my being a gentile, but to the far more serious family-cultural breach of Liz’s wanting an outdoor wedding in the middle of the day, instead of a blacktie affair in a grand hotel.
“And the coffee,” Judy asked the dazed manager of a casual coastal California inn, at two o’clock that very afternoon, “how will you serve the coffee?”
“Well, ma’am, typically, we do a very nice coffee buffet with hot-pot thermoses and cups and saucers and cream in silver creamers, but … I suppose we could have table service, if …”
“Table service.”
“And Dan,” asked Judy, on our return drive toward the Golden Gate and San Francisco, as the autumn darkness settled over the commute-hour freeway. “Have you thought about how you’re going to raise the kids, in terms of religion?”
Traffic so clogged the road, and the air in the car had become so thick, that Doug had an inspiration: Why not pull into that there mall and start in on the wedding registry?
I should say up front, before I describe the scene, that I’d never really eaten sugar-glazed jumbo pretzels. In fact, I’d never heard of sugar-glazed jumbo pretzels. But something about standing in that crowded Crate & Barrel, anxiety mounting as I gazed across pile upon pile of purple, pink, and yellow plates and white and blue bowls and green mugs, violet soup tureens and shining steel knife holders and leather-clad ice buckets and white plastic spice racks and calico kitchen towels and cheap Martini glasses and dish-drying racks and stainless-steel blenders, gave me a desperate jones for a snack, a really big snack.
“You don’t have to get involved in this,” Doug said to me, in his first of many kindnesses. “Just let the girls have fun.”
Excusing myself, I stepped into the flow of shoppers in that mall’s pedestrian walkway, marching fast until I saw the local Wetzel’s Pretzels franchise. Moments later, I returned to Crate & Barrel, with liquid sugar glinting white on my chin, and asked Doug if he’d like a bite—“ ’s really amazingly good, I mean, you just wouldn’t believe how good, you sure? You sure you don’t want a bite? I mean, okay, okay, but don’t be shy, because, in fact, I think maybe I’ll just pop on back and score another one of these babies and, man, I’d be so happy to score a honey-glazed for you, too, Doug. Or even Judy—any interest? Sugar-glazed? I mean, I’m sure they’ve got other kinds …”
Nothing came of that night, no list of goodies, thanks largely to Liz’s understanding that my sugar-glazed pretzel mania had to be a cry for help. But we found our way to Williams-Sonoma weeks later, for the confusing experience of picking out an entire kitchen’s worth of great gear with the reasonable expectation that the lion’s share might magically appear from UPS. I’d never before bought anybody a wedding present. Berkeley weddings tended toward a polite request for donations to an elementary school in the Guatemalan Highlands, and at the few normal weddings I’d attended, I’d always been too cheap even to ask how the registry process worked. So I discovered only at Williams-Sonoma the food-centric nature of the middle-class American wedding registry at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The primary purpose of marriage, it appeared, was not child rearing so much as home entertaining dependent upon professional-grade culinary equipment affordable only by an entire community’s pitching in. At Williams-Sonoma, where avaricious couples just like ourselves (or, rather, like me, as Liz didn’t find kitchen gear all that interesting) bumped elbows in the aisles trying to pretend this perverse combination of conspicuous consumption and lottery-style windfall was simply a very serious matter of good middle-class values, I discovered that cooking equipment marked status in a language known to every couple who’d registered in the prior ten years. Every upscale kitchenware chain offered precisely the same five strata of every kind of gear, most obviously in the pan department. So as we browsed the aisles, and noticed some super-skinny good-looking couple in expensive shoes checking off the Copper Core 11-inch Sauteuse, we knew without a doubt not only that they were richer than ourselves, but that they also had richer friends and family, because we were only looking at the 5-Ply Stainless collection. Knives were a bit of an exception—nobody wanted to gift the murder weapon, and the pricey Japanese upgrades hadn’t yet hit those stores—but it was absolutely true of appliances, where we had to gauge the gamble of listing that four-hundred-dollar toaster. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, of course, and Liz might well have had an aunt or uncle willing to go big, but we also risked offending all seventy-five of the people that I personally had invited to the wedding, as they all asked each other the reasonable question such a listing would raise. To wit: Who the fuck does that asshole think we are?
Liz and I lived together during that year of engagement, but we had a lot on our minds besides food: the mounting financial disaster of that eviction lawsuit, for example, as our home’s then-current tenants, a pair of graduate students, decided they were in fact the victimized proletariat under capitalist assault from yuppie scum, and therefore had a moral obliga
tion to all mankind to make sure that Dan and Liz either paid an enormous cash settlement to make them move or else found the experience of moving into their own very first home, to start a family, so morbidly painful and costly that nobody else would ever consider it, and real estate would return to its rightful owners, the People. Once that was all over, our energy went into blowing the remainder of Liz’s money on a carpenter’s doing what I could not yet do myself: lace up the work boots, strap on the old tool belt, crank some tunes, suck a few bong hits, and fix up yet another home, for yet another pretty young woman. We had to eat, of course, but we mostly patronized cheap ethnic joints in perfect conformity with our young/liberal/creative peer group: Indian food one night, Thai the next. Once a week or so, we snuck beers and relatively quiet handheld foods (burritos, falafel, nothing with a loud wrapper) into arthouse movie theaters.
This lack of culinary focus created a vacuum easily filled by Judy and Doug, who flew out once a month to work on wedding plans and treat us to grand Francophile meals at great San Francisco restaurants like Gary Danko, Charles Nob Hill, Zuni Café, and Boulevard. I had a doctor tell me, at about this time, that I’d officially become an Overweight American with High Cholesterol, and that does dampen one’s gastronomic enthusiasm. Plus, every time I’d gone to a decent restaurant with my own family, growing up, there’d always been stern looks and cleared throats to make sure that nobody ever got the foolish idea it would be okay to order a starter, and that everybody noticed the bargain-priced burger at the bottom of the entrée list, a perfectly fine choice for the entire family. Worse still were the nights when my grandparents took us to the Burlingame Country Club, where even kids had to wear a tie. My hippie parents, despite knowing this, never once made me arrive with a tie, so I always had to wear some heinous blood-red knit tie kept by the maître d’ as a kind of Scarlet Letter, announcing to all the members eating their curiously shitty food in the club’s dining room that I Do Not Belong. That’s where my sister Kelly, a born Child of Nature, once leaned over to sniff her ridiculous shrimp cocktail. Grandma flinched in horror and then whacked Kelly in the back of her pretty head, smashing Kelly’s freckled nose into that canned cocktail sauce. Kelly looked up in astonishment, smeared with blood-red goop. Dad marched out of the club to avoid punching somebody. Mom bent over and sniffed the hell out of her Cobb Salad, in protest. And I developed a deep-seated association between fancy dining rooms and rage, and a total inability to link formality with pleasure.
Liz’s own anti-Schimmel ordering habits reinforced this killjoy attitude—calibrated, as were hers, toward hammering home the point that she could not be corralled into putting silly undue emphasis on expensively stuffing her face, nor could she be talked into having even one itty-bitty little teeny-tiny taste of a single, solitary dish that didn’t interest her. But after a few fine-dining restaurants in which I copied my betrothed, hoping to fit in, Liz explained that I was going about it all wrong. The proper way to show gratitude to her parents was to order exactly what I felt like eating, price be damned. I didn’t have a clue what I felt like eating because I didn’t even recognize most of the words on the menus. I also sensed that restaurant ordering, in the company of Doug, Judy, and old Bernie’s ghost, served as a proving ground, an arena for the demonstration of culinary insight and, just as readily, culinary stupidity. If you picked well, murmuring approval might burble forth; if your dish sucked, and you admitted as much, you would learn that Doug and Judy and even Liz had all had doubts about the Baked Pasta with Nettles and Duck Confit from the moment they’d looked at the menu. So, with Doug’s big-hearted encouragement—Order like a man, my boy! Ignore these waist-watching ladies and party with me!—I began copying my new mentor-and-benefactor’s every move, swinging for the fences with the seared foie gras and fig appetizer, the Kobe filet mignon with sauce Bordelaise and shaved black truffle, the peach crème brûlée. And that’s how old Bernie’s legacy—and Doug’s generosity—awakened me for the first time to the fact that a human mouth can deliver astonishing pleasure. And yet, fawning enthusiasm was not the Weil way. In order to fit in, I had to sit there all calm and collected, pretending that I could make a discriminating comparison of this particular foie gras torchon against every other I’d ever eaten, and maybe even the foie served by Judy’s own father at Judy’s own fancy-hotel wedding, when all I really wanted to do was scream and writhe like a Pentecostal tongue-talker, praising the Lord with choking sobs of ecstatic gratitude for keeping me alive long enough to experience mouthfuls of enlarged goose liver washed down by Château d’Yquem Sauternes.
Doug phoned, eventually, from the wedding caterer’s office. He and Judy were up in Sonoma tasting menu possibilities without us because I was maintaining the ruse, for the sake of my bride-to-be, that I still shared her disinterest in pigging out on fine free food at every opportunity.
As it happened, Doug had a question about cake.
“I really don’t care,” Liz said into the phone. “I have absolutely no opinion.” Then she turned to me and said, “You don’t either, right, honey? What kind of cake we have?”
“Ah …”
“I mean, I’d just as soon not even have a cake.”
“What do you mean?”
“I never even like wedding cakes. They’re never any good. I might rather have a cobbler.”
“A wedding cobbler?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Tell your dad I like lemon cake.”
She looked at me funny. “You’re serious?”
“Tell him.”
“You really want me to tell my father that.”
“I do.”
She did. Then Liz rubbed her eyes, looked away from me, and said, to the wall but really to me, “Okay, so now my dad wants to know how lemony.”
“Super fucking lemony.”
“He’s putting the baker on the phone.”
Liz handed me the handset, and I discovered, to my own surprise, that I absolutely did not want this baker putting artificial flavoring into the white cake itself, but that I’d love to have the buttercream frosting and buttercream filling carry a knockout lemony punch.
Then came the Big Day, which really was the happiest day of my life, up until that point—the very first thing I’d ever done that felt positively, unequivocally like the Right Move. My folks threw a terrific West Coast barbecue the night before, with live country music and one of Dad’s new climbing buddies dressed up in a bear costume, hoping to rattle all the visiting East Coasters. The next morning, the sun shone down on the green lawns at the appointed hour. Liz’s regal Grandma Beatrice flinched at my surf buddies in their “dress-up” silk Hawaiian shirts and their best flip-flops. My grandfather toasted not the bride and groom, nor even the bride’s family, but his very own law firm. And the very first thing I did, at the ceremony’s glorious end, was to beat all the guests in a mad sprint to the raw oyster bar. Nobody had yet told me that a touch of class called for letting others go first—that hospitality toward friends and family was the whole point—so I plowed about a dozen Point Reyes oysters before I let anybody else get near the half-shells. Then, seeing the line patiently building behind me, I felt the very same shame—the identical awareness of a misstep—as that described by Francine Prose in Gluttony. Recounting how she and her husband joined a friend in eating three plates of oysters at a large cocktail party, Prose says that she overheard another guest say, “They’ve eaten all the oysters.” Mortified by the error, she and her husband fled the party “as hurried and guilty as Adam and Eve fleeing Eden in a Renaissance painting.”
As A. J. Liebling has pointed out, in describing the challenges of the non-professional eater trying to consume professional portions, oysters offer “no problem, since they present no bulk.” For this reason, I had plenty of room to make myself the only wedding guest demanding not just a second but a third helping of the rack of lamb with more and more Pinot Noir, all provided by Doug and Judy.
I was cutting into the go
rgeous yellow wedding cake, congratulating myself on my choice of in-laws, when I saw a sterling opportunity for a display of the selfless mensch-like concern for others that was going to make me such a terrific addition to their family: handing that second slice (after the one for my wife) to my new father-in-law.
“Oh, no thanks,” Doug said.“I actually hate lemon.”
“Sweetheart,” I hissed quietly to Liz, “why on earth did you allow me to insist on a lemon cake, knowing your father hates lemon?”
She had a great answer: Old Bernie, it turned out, loved lemon so much he always kept lemon drops in his pocket, even had lemon boughs on his coffin. “My mom loves lemon, too,” Liz told me. “It’s her favorite thing. So you got huge points.”
2
On the Cookbook as Scripture
Most of us own cookbooks we never use, largely because we buy cookbooks for reasons other than a clear intent to cook from them—as mementos, maybe, from some beloved restaurant, or in aspiration toward a given lifestyle. I’d acquired Mollie Katzen’s all-vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook, for example, despite being neither vegetarian nor a cook, because the Moosewood Restaurant happened to be the best restaurant in my college town of Ithaca, New York, where Katzen taught generation after generation of bright young things to think of her Russian Cabbage Borscht as a thrilling cultural experience. As for the two slab-like amber volumes of The Gourmet Cookbook, compiled by the magazine’s editors from recipes published in their pages, they caused me a sick self-hatred because, every time I saw them, I remembered the day my grandfather and his second wife moved to an old-folks home. I’d been mostly focused on grabbing everything of value he’d meant to leave for the Goodwill, including those miserable books. Even my three Alice Waters cookbooks had come into my life for goofy reasons: she’d been my Montessori preschool teacher, in Berkeley, before she opened my hometown’s most famous restaurant, Chez Panisse. I’d felt a certain pride in that—like somebody who’s once been a schoolmate of a president, and who therefore buys that president’s biography because its presence on a shelf will generate warm feelings of connectedness to power.
