Give a Girl a Knife

by Amy Thielen

  The plane I took from Minneapolis to Bemidji turned out to be a prop plane. As it started its approach to land, like a piece of paper wavering to the ground, I quaked with mounting anxiety. This plane was way too small.

  It seemed like all of Park Rapids attended the funeral, which passed by in a dirge of minor pipe-organ chords. I held tight to Aaron, but he was in another world. He and his family grieved the way you do when the universe steals away your firstborn child, your tall, ambitious, golden-haired thirty-one-year-old son, your admired older brother—down through their toes and into the glacial bedrock.

  Members of Aaron’s family sat at a table and shuffled old pictures like decks of cards. I couldn’t leave, and yet my ticket tugged, insistent. How much do I regret not pushing Mario for four days or more? Deeply.

  Aaron stayed back home with his family. When Matt died, along with him went the other half of Aaron’s childhood imagination, the commitment to fantasy and play that fueled so much of his work. He told me it would be for a few weeks, but I knew it might be longer.

  I returned to Brooklyn, and to Danube, whose challenges no longer seemed so amusing. I floundered my first day back on the line, Mario shouting at me while I tried to stopper my weepiness and plate the schnitzel with some sense of precision. The many jocular details of my day, formerly organized in situ for retelling to Aaron, didn’t seem to matter. They weren’t so funny anymore.

  In Brooklyn without Aaron, I realized how much our fields of vision differed and how much I had been relying on his to supplement mine. He was more panoramic, more long-sighted; he saw our New York stint as temporary, a time to build the skills we’d need when we eventually returned home to live out our days in the woods and ply our crafts. My view was more near-sighted: I saw a flood of shapes and colors, a world of vivid, moving plates. I saw my shoes, sturdy and flour-dusted against the tile floor. But outside of work my mind continued to churn with the sights of the kitchen and I didn’t see much but the clouds; I could hardly cross a street safely without him there to pull me back to the curb.

  That level of spaciness works when you have someone by your side looking out for you, but now, alone, I am forced to pay more attention. New York, chameleon city, with streets that can look like gold when you’re up, looks darker now, as if it had recently flooded and the mud just receded. Stranger exchanges on the street that usually fade off into the din sound bright and ominous, dangerously emotional. After work, I stop at the Pakistani cab stand, and when I get home I sit in our grungy window well overlooking Fulton Street and methodically eat all of my chicken korma, all of my green-velvet palak paneer, and all of my spicy chickpeas.

  The constant stream of trucks on Fulton Street honk at one another as rudely as the swans do back home on the creek in front of our house. One bleats, another answers. Like migratory birds inhabiting the same old familiar waterway, they’re all just verbalizing to make conversation, blaring to communicate their gripes, their wishes, and their warnings—but these here in the city with a greater sense of urgency and way more out of tune.

  3

  HOME COOKING

  For a month or so after his brother died, Aaron was okay. Devastated, but functional. He walked around the city in his usual patterns until one day the buried panic, which he thought he’d stuffed down a hole, rose up again. Like an emotional autoimmune disorder, his central nervous system began to attack itself, leaving him terrified to leave our apartment alone, terrified to drive in Brooklyn, terrified to take the subway by himself. For every plan, he had to consult his anxious mind for permission. Given the isolation he was living in, he might as well have been back in our house in the middle of the woods. He said very little about this, to me or anyone, and using his natural gift for persuasion, he found friends to accompany him where he needed to go. The one he really needed was me. And I was still working about eighty hours a week. I had no idea the terror I left him with each morning when I went to work, but late at night as I turned my key in the lock of our apartment door, I sometimes heard him singing his own songs at stage volume, his mournful voice seeping out of the cracks of the door like smoke from a fire. The full measure of my guilt over this, for so loving my job at Danube while Aaron suffered at home, came later.

  Six months in and working the lunchtime meat entremet, I arrived in the kitchen early every day, second only to Michael on the meat roast station. He was cheerful and seemed to be in control of all the sauces on his list, rare for that position. Each morning I copped a new breakfast treat for us from the rack in the next-door Bouley prep kitchen—Seba, the French-African baker, just smiled and looked away. Michael and I agreed that the light, coarse-sugar-topped savory brioche buns were better than the pastries, especially when they were warm and the butter seemed to perspire right through the dough; the few meager pebbles of sugar on top were sweetness enough.

  Then one day Chef Bouley called me into his office. Wearing a slim-cut pair of wool pants, a stiff French-cuffed shirt, and a cabled sweater, he possessed all the calm of a bolt of lightning at rest. Without looking up from his work, he asked me if I’d like to work on his cookbook. I was to stop working the meat entremet and start to shadow every cook at Danube, write down each station’s recipes, and hand them over to Melissa Clark, the book’s coauthor.

  Bouley was sitting with steel-rod posture in an office chair in the center of a tornado of clutter, an office so full of papers and white shipping boxes that it looked black and white, and I admired this surrounding shitstorm—just as I did the serious avalanche of unpaid parking tickets that fell from his glove compartment on our last catering job—because the disorder seemed to me a sign of his brilliance. I also have a disordered mind—although he didn’t know that. He thought that because I was a young, nerdy, clean-cut girl, I must surely also be disciplined and efficient, and that I would be the perfect person to help him whip his long-overdue cookbook into shape.

  I was intrigued. Recipes! Cookbook! It was an opportunity so perfect I couldn’t have dreamed it up. But I was so loving my current groove that I said without thinking, “But what about working entremet? I want to be a line cook.”

  He finally looked up at me over his red-framed reading glasses. “What? Why do you want to be a line cook? You can always do that.”

  He dismissed me. He barely knew me, but he knew my type. Of course I’d do it.

  Mario called a group huddle to announce my new position, which I suffered through, feeling both precocious and like a deserter. Then he grabbed Harrison, who was working fish roast, T2, and me and ceremoniously carried a tureen of the soup he’d been making all morning down to the plush private dining room near the wine cellar. With florid Austrian gravitas, Mario ladled it out for each of us.

  “Goulash soup!” he informed us, and handed each of us a Christofle spoon. “This is the soup of the Tyrol, where I am from.” He tipped his wineglass, filled with sparkling water, into the air.

  “To Ahmy’s success on the cookbook!” he said, and winked. By this point I knew to be suspicious of his Austrian formality routine, and this one was turned on full jets. Mario slipped out to grab a napkin, and Harrison, thinking about the stacks of preservice work he’d left behind on his station, quickly spooned the goulash soup into his mouth, then leaned over and hissed, “This is so fucking weird.” And it was. But I would soon know why: Mario was anticipating the cookbook process ahead and he wanted me on his side.

  Quickly, I saw the issue: There were no recipes written down. Few fine-dining kitchens have a full set of typed-up recipes, but the Danube kitchen was positively negligent. It appeared to exist prelanguage. All I had to go on were the line cooks’ scribbled notes, which showed no quantities but included lots of arrows to show the passage of time: “brown butter —› shallot —› celery root —› sweat out all the way —› white wine, reduce —› fill up with half-milk/half-veg stock.” The cooks’ recipes were as reliable as a game of telephone; that is, slightly more corrupted each time someone new took over the statio
n. We ran fully on taste memory, which, among this tribe, was pretty finely tuned. And I soon discovered that taste memory was, in fact, more precise than a printed recipe. The act of translating an oral tradition to a written one would be both a corruption of everyone’s artistry and a record of their collected genius all at once.

  Embarking on what became a kind of culinary graduate school, I worked alongside each cook and recorded the separate parts of every dish in long, painstaking recipe form. Being a novice, I made a lot of mistakes. Mario and Bouley tasted every one of them.

  I spent most of my time chasing one or the other of them across Duane Street as they hustled between the two restaurants and the office, toting small pots of parsnip puree, apple-horseradish sauce, or veal ravioli. Each individual component might have been an education for me, but divorced from their completed dishes, they stood out in odd isolation. Working on the meat station one day, I brought a small portion of beef cheek goulash, Danube’s signature dish, to the office for Bouley’s approval.

  “How is it?” he asked, pulling a cleanish plate out from under a mountain of papers. I reluctantly handed him a fork, suddenly insecure.

  “I wouldn’t make a meal out of it.”

  “Mmmhhf,” he agreed, chewing. “There’s way too much vinegar. Next time, more pickle juice at the end to acidify, less vinegar in the beginning. Vinegar cooks out harshly.” This, I never forgot.

  The cooking details I absorbed from Bouley and Mario stacked up so thick and so high I couldn’t access them until much later, but I did know one thing: I was seriously lucky to have this job. Unfortunately, however, without the military structure of line cooking, with no impending service, no real schedule, and no one charting my progress, and as befitting an undisciplined twenty-four-year-old coming off eighty-plus-hour weeks, I started coming in late. And then even later.

  It didn’t seem to matter. It felt almost as if the chefs avoided me with my incessant foisting of small pots. I chased down Bouley at the entrance to Danube, trying to get him to approve my latest recipe, mushroom goulash with leek dumplings, made under T2’s guidance. It was a homey, stewy thing built on shallots, garlic, paprika, two kinds of chanterelles, black trumpet mushrooms, and crème fraîche, then garnished with a plush little leek dumpling, its browned face shiny with butter. T2 made it Austrian-housewife style, by vigorously beating eggs and smashed butter-fried croutons into a lump of room-temperature butter. The emulsion was surprisingly tricky. T2 perspired lightly as he whipped it, muttering, “My mother made it like this….I don’t know how you’ll make it a recipe, it’s really by feel.” I presented it to Bouley with two forks. We both dug in to taste.

  “See, this is so straightforward,” he said. “So pure. So rustic. So good!”

  He then launched into a tangent, as he was prone to doing—passionate descriptions tripped by the sight of whatever was right in front of him. He rarely said a thing directly, but always made you feel like you were entering midstream into some sort of ongoing narrative he was writing about the senses. He talked about the sweetness of the onions his grandma cooked in the ashes left after a wood fire; the softness of fresh homemade vinegar in comparison to the harsh commercial “battery acid” we used in this country; the intoxicating aroma of thousands of Frenchwomen passing by him in a crowded ballroom in some fancy château, every one of them smelling like a different exotic animal in her own perfume, yet somehow it’s not overwhelming, each one is really distinct, just a delicious parade of woman scent….

  “This book really needs to be about home cooking.” He interrupted his daydream and looked at me directly. “Home cooking is different. It comes from the heart, not the head. It’s not refined in the way that we’re refining it here. Home cooking is simple. Every single part of the whole, every ingredient, needs to taste perfectly delicious. You can’t catch up to that later. Everything in this book should be stripped to its basic elements. That’s where home cooking is really powerful.”

  What? I thought. Now he’s changing the book from whole recipes to separate components?

  And then suddenly he was walking away with my pot. “And tell Mario let’s leave out the crème fraîche, make this in larger batches at the beginning of service so it can sit, and garnish it with the cream à la minute.”

  Back in the kitchen, Mario swished this suggestion away. He leaned in close to me conspiratorially and said, “Ahmy. We are not going to do a home-cooking book here. Don’t make things simpler. It should be like a European book. A chef’s book. Don’t take away. If anything, add.”

  So it continued with Bouley whispering in one ear, Mario in the other, and Melissa the coauthor sighing and saying she’d need to make the recipes more home-cook friendly.

  That’s what I tried to do, but it was so much easier just to reproduce the restaurant dishes. For instance, it’s easier to slavishly replicate Foie-Gras-Stuffed Squab with Parsley Puree and Schupfnudeln—even if it did take me a full day to make all the components—than it is to trim it of its cheffiness. How should one conjure up the original Austrian grandmotherly inspiration for such a dish? Did Grandma have access to foie gras? How about the Vitamix blender required to make grass-green parsley puree? Did she have one of those? Mario said yes, yes, of course.

  But then something turned over in me, and I knew that Bouley was right: good home cooking, the kind that’s both rustic and sophisticated, is so much harder to pin down. It reminded me of those days spent in my nineteenth-century-like garden-based kitchen back home, my struggles to elevate a freshly dug perfect potato. On the surface, complexity looked difficult, but in truth, simplicity was a lot harder to pull off.

  When the time came for the cookbook photo shoot, Mario told me he needed me for the duration and then proceeded to speak urgently in German to T2 and the Austrian photographer (yet another Thomas) all day long, shutting me out of the conversation. I got it. I was lucky to be on the project: I was just supposed to help cook. We shot all of the food photos in the dark, raw-industrial lower level of the Mohawk building across the street, where creatures scurried in the corners. But taking away the sound, the sights were life-changing. There were no food-styling tricks at play on this shoot: no tweezers, no blowtorches used to make congealed cheese melt, no pots of hot water vaporizing behind the scrim. The minute we finished cooking in the kitchen, we ran across Duane Street with pots covering the pots, and pans covering the pans (because there’s no such thing as a lid in a restaurant kitchen), keeping everything hot. The steam was real. Everything was plated just as lovingly as it was for the guests, everything looked as ravishing as it did in the kitchen, and everything was delicious. Once a shot was called (“Fertig!”) we broke down the set and scooped the contents on the plates into our mouths with our hands, because we had no forks in the Mohawk. Striped bass stuffed with paprika-bacon-wine-kraut, cabbage rolls filled with foie-gras-stuffed dates, an entire suckling pig, the pan juices scooped up with shards of crispy skin. I promptly gained five pounds. Not a good move, because soon I was going to France with my mom, just the two of us, to eat. And also to locate the origins of her French-Canadian father’s people. But mostly to eat.

  —

  To put the haute cuisine in which I found myself immersed into some kind of perspective, let me submit to you the rural Midwestern cuisine of my youth.

  There were ice cream buckets, lots of them, and they rarely contained ice cream. In the summertime, women walked in the door with the handles of swinging buckets hooked over their arms like purses. If the potluck party was at our house, they stacked these buckets, two high, in our downstairs refrigerator. The labels promised Kemps French vanilla, Edy’s Grand rocky road, Blue Bunny butter brickle, but when you pried open the lids with a dry, cracking sound, the contents under the bluish plastic were always a surprise. You might find yellow potato salad, Italian macaroni salad, fruit-and-marshmallow Jell-O salad, or that wrong (but oh, so right) crushed-ramen-mock-crab-almond salad. Or maybe you’d find a pile of cold chocolate-chip cookies (
which, in retrospect, did not even require refrigeration; however, if you ever want to refrigerate an entire batch of cookies, you should do it in an empty gallon ice cream bucket).

  Later I would roll my eyes at the buckets, because I couldn’t see these milky, repurposed, plastic gallon containers for what they really were: a symbol of the whole community’s eating, a marker of generosity and thrift at the same time. In any other place, these ideas of abundance and frugality would sit at odds with each other, but in the Midwest of my youth they were bosom buddies, as tight as tongue and groove. The irony is this: Many of the traditional Midwestern favorites require a lot of time and effort to make but no one would ever want to say so. A neighbor lady might make potato salad by the gallon, spending an hour dicing potatoes into baby-bite-size cubes, but then, with consummate modesty, as if to say “No big deal,” she would carry it around in some junky, old reused plastic tub. If people sometimes wonder why Midwestern food hasn’t gotten the respect it deserves, I want to say that it’s not the food, which is generally quite good; it’s the shitty, self-deprecating plastic storage vessels.

  There were also lots of plastic Tupperware containers with yellow and orange tops whose bright button centers looked exactly like childhood drawings of crayon-colored suns with radiating rays. Light aluminum nine-by-thirteen pans with plastic lids. Rinsed-out glass mayonnaise jars, none of which were ever thrown away. Some of the dearer salads, such as the mock crab and the clam dip, were ritually made in smaller batches and went into empty Cool Whip containers—that is, if you were a Cool Whip family. Which we were not.