by Amy Thielen
No, Karen Dion’s taste defied the local inconspicuous consumption. She was in the habit of whipping real bona fide heavy cream for our topping pouf. And in general, going against the grain of the town’s collective thrift, she liked fancy things. Following her lead, we were all vulnerable to the charms of the tiny newfangled Häagen-Dazs pints. Just one of them was enough for my brothers and me if we ate our ice cream as she did, in a teacup, topped with a spray of broken pecans and a thick spoonful of Mrs. Richardson’s butterscotch caramel, the cold ice cream turning the caramel into thick, chewy clods. It was possibly some remnant of her French-Canadian father’s side that caused my mom’s penchant for all things “petit” in a supersized Midwestern world, but despite that, sometimes my mom bought ice cream by the gallon, once in a while anyway, just so she could have the buckets. They were that requisite.
She was no snob, though. At the store, honest ingredients like chuck roasts and fresh ginger shared her cart with bags of miniature candy bars, cans of mushroom soup, and Lipton onion soup mix—the addition she insisted made her pulled-beef sandwiches better than everyone else’s. (When I later found her beef recipe on the back of the packet, I was disappointed, but nothing could take away from the fact that that onion soup mix, with its telltale rattlesnake shake and its burned-sugar-and-soy tang, possessed the power to reach through the decades and jolt all my dead memories alive.)
She bought canned black olives, too, which at the time were considered—I’ll say it—a little bit exotic. In our town, those fat black O’s were everywhere: on top of chili, in Mexican Chicken Bake, mixed with slices of pepperoni and cubes of Swiss cheese in Pizza Enchiladas, and, of course, on pizza. Mexican, Italian, or even Asian, black olives were the diplomats of our diet, serving as foreign ambassadors from everywhere else. They ruled what our hometown grocery store called the “Ethnic Aisle.”
That we were card-carrying members of this Midwestern culinary world and yet two steps different was a feeling that lay dormant in me for years.
It was a distinction I remember noticing while accompanying my mom on her daily shop at the local Red Owl. She ran her finger over the tight plastic covering the top half of a chuck roast, sighing, showing me how this one didn’t have any of the proper marbling and wouldn’t get really tender. “This part, the deckle, is too damn lean,” she said, forcefully whacking the bell on the counter to see if she could score a better roast “from the back”—a bold position for a woman of her era, standing as she was beneath a poster advertising lean pork as “The Other White Meat.” Accompanying my mother at the meat counter, I always got the sense that some mysterious saboteur was stockpiling the good stuff, thick-cut pork chops of rosy dark meat and heavy jumbo-cut Boston butt pork roasts with thick caps of fat, behind the swinging doors.
—
My mom is in New York two days before we leave for France, making dinner for me and Aaron and all of our expat Minnesotan friends, and she is not afraid to cook for Mario. She’s making her specialty—slow-roasted pork with spaetzle and gravy—known in our family as “the meal.”
“Did you ask him?” Her lips slide into a wicked smile.
“No.”
“Well, then maybe Bouley wants to come for the meal. Did you ask him?”
“Mom, neither one of them can take a day off to come out here to eat pork roast and spaetzle.” Even though I think that her spaetzle, crowned with brown butter and possessing a soulful chew, is actually better than the photogenic, puffy ones we serve daily at Danube.
“And gravy!” she says.
“And gravy. I mean, I’m sure they’d be flattered, but they won’t do that.”
I admire her nerve. I would never dare to cook them a home-cooked meal from my grubby apartment kitchen. When we turn down the lights after dinner, roach feelers wave out from the crack between the counter and the sink and mice peep out of my burners on their haunches to have a look at what’s going on. I can’t bear to ask them over.
At this point, my mom is about seven years divorced from my dad and largely recovered from it. Single and thinner, she has lost her trademark perm, and she is ready to go looking for her roots, the homeland of her long-ago-departed French-Canadian father. All of my coworkers at Danube expect my trip to France to include some kitchen stints (called stages) at three-star Michelin restaurants, but no—we plan to eat in them. Our first Michelin stop will be Pierre Gagnaire in Paris, our second Michel Bras in Laguiole, deep in the Auvergne countryside. On this trip, neither one of us gets to play queen cook in the kitchen; we will both be submissive eaters, absorbing our family’s French lineage through the plates.
Actually, I wish I had asked Bouley and Mario for dinner, because “the meal” is, as always, quite impressive. Her pork, specifically, is a marvel. Hours of slow, low-temperature baking turn the meat inside to pure plush—as soft as angel food cake—and its outside into a cage of golden, holy crisp. The fat slowly leaks out of the roast’s carapace, leaving behind vacancies, like the comb in a beehive. This effect cannot be achieved if the cook continually opens the oven to peek and poke at the roast, allowing the pent-up humors to fly out the door. No, honeycombing happens only to the faithful.
I’d tried to make her crispy roasted pork a couple of times back at our house in Two Inlets, but it always came out tough; I blamed the first failure on the local-pastured pork roast, the second on our leaky 1940s Roper oven. When I tried making it in my Brooklyn kitchen, with a store-bought Boston butt roast and the same plain, cheap, air-locked oven my mother had at home, it still refused to collapse for me the way it did for her. Long-cooked pork went properly slack for me at work, but this one defied me. I cursed myself and then thought that I was not entirely sure that she has really given me the real recipe. Maybe it’s not three and a half hours, but more like five. Maybe the temperature is lower, below her stated 325 degrees. When it comes to recipes and the women in my family, you can’t trust them to hand over the truth. You’d think after having watched her make it all those years I would have absorbed her technique through the skin, but some meals, they’re like pets. They have an unshakable loyalty to their owners.
And for the first time, I am slightly sheepish about one facet of “the meal,” a thing she does that marks us with our small-town origins: the cheese sauce.
Like all of her sauces, she prizes this one for its thinness and the way it cloaks the steamed broccoli and runs so nicely into the meat, but still, it’s just block American cheese melted in milk. I loved it as a child, for the way the bland yellow cheese ran down my throat, but now I think: It’s so processed. And—what’s the deal?—she doesn’t even put any butter in it. She puts butter in everything.
The tensions in this kitchen run high.
“Move a little slower!” she says tightly. She hates the way I lob the sauté pan from one hand to the other as I make the browned Brussels sprouts, my sole contribution to this meal. It’s macho, I suppose. Some of that testosterone-rich swagger has rubbed off on me. Also, totally irritating to her, I cook over such high heat that flames dance under the pan.
“Amy,” she says with shock, “fire is shooting up the sides!”
“Mom! The Brussels sprouts need to brown or they’ll taste steamed.” What can I say? I’m a newly minted line cook. I live to sear.
What my mom sees in me is a pace of working that seems frantic, a speed that disgraces the memory of my great-grandma, my grandma Dion, and herself. That I am her only daughter but have not inherited their smooth, almost vehicular way of moving in the kitchen is a shame. She purses her mouth in disapproval.
We are like flipped-screen images of each other. On the surface I look to be frenetically juggling three things, but on the inside I’m as calm as a cat; her outward movements are as smooth as a ball in the air, but I can feel in my head, as constant as a metronome, the insistent beat of her inner fretting. When I’m cooking with her, I enter a weird kitchen void. I am caught between the worlds of home cooking and professional cooking, of my past a
nd my present, like a panicky bug trapped in the space between the window and the screen.
I know that the emotion below the iceberg is the fact that I’m not trying to replicate her best dishes, as a good daughter should. She thinks I only want to cook like Bouley, like Mario. I don’t think it occurs to her that I’m trying to cook in my own style, to fashion my own repertoire that will take influence from all of the great cooks I’ve known, including, obviously, her. But I can’t figure out a way to explain this without offending her, so I say nothing.
We are both perfectionists, but with different motives: I like to invent a dish, resolve all its problems, and then I don’t feel the need to make it again. She has a tried-and-true arsenal of about twenty blockbuster meals. It’s an age-old battle, really, between improvisation and repetition.
Silently, we fuel a standoff that pits professional cooking against home cooking in the unfairest of ways. She seems to take no interest in what I’m learning to cook firsthand from the best chefs in New York City, asks me no questions about it, and never wants me to make anything. To her, I am turning my back on our food, on our family.
Neither of us is wrong.
Essentially, we take sides that neither of us really believes in. It will be at least another five years before she allows me to contribute a dish of my own to her Thanksgiving table. It will be just as long before I give her the full measure of props she deserves.
As we sit down at the table, even after our plates are loaded her eyes stay on me, and when her chewing slows, her food sitting in her mouth like marbles, I know she’s trying to hold herself back from saying something and I know what it will be. “Oh, honey, your plate looks dry.” By this she means that my plush mound of soft meat is undersauced, vulnerable, open to the air—the worst of all plate offenses. “Can someone pass Amy the cheese sauce?” Even though I don’t think it needs it, I dutifully comply.
—
Mom and I arrived in Paris in the morning, but not our morning.
I walked down to the grocery store and bought the most beautiful strawberries (looking unwashed, as they should be), little pots of whole-milk yogurt, and two croissants, and brought them back to our room. We ate our breakfast on our little balcony overlooking a side street in the Marais, the fourth arrondissement, and then I wanted to take a nap—but she’d have none of it. Having just finished the cookbook shoot and not slept while crossing the ocean, I was eager, in my heavy fatigue, to luxuriate in the cool sheets and give in to being prone for a while. And this was just the first of the trip’s repeating battles: I wanted to sleep in and then careen around the city in regular noncomfortable shoes without a plan. I wanted to pretend that I lived there, that I was just going to the corner café to get a glass of wine after work and watch the locals come and go, the women with their lace-encrusted bras that they dared to let show through their blouses, the men in their shiny shoes and slim-cut pants. She wanted to query the desk people at the tourist bureau for their recommendations, to ask the waitress, “What’s good here?” I wanted to order unfamiliar things, take indirect routes, and make my own mistakes. My mother wanted to eat croque monsieurs and tour-book us to a crisp.
As I look back on it, she had only flagged the requisite museums and cathedrals, perfectly amazing places I otherwise would have wanted to see, but I railed against her devotion to what I privately called her “demonic day-planner.” It was unreasonable, it was the tired part of me talking, and it was our generational gap, to be sure, and if I could gently seat-kick my younger self from fifteen years in the future I would.
Our first Michelin-three-starred stop was Restaurant Pierre Gagnaire, which the gracious reservationist from Bouley had called to reserve for me. Its formality was paralyzing, in the way that the fanciest restaurants in the world feel simultaneously welcoming and terrifying. I recall the first time that Aaron and I ate at Danube, and how spooked we were. By this time, it should have felt old hat, but this was Paris.
The parade of dishes was epic—delicate, precise, and manic with flavor. I struggled to unpack the various components and then just gave myself over to the dazzling artistry: the three kinds of protein used in so many of the courses; the pétoncles I’d just eaten that the slim French culinary dictionary I was sitting on translated as “barnacles.” With each course I grew ever more aware of the invisible hands of the cooks on my plate, and more impressed by the complexities at work. With its wild juxtapositions, this place had more to do with Aaron’s world, with conceptual art, than anything else.
This realization both rattled and soothed me at the same time; the extraordinary house wine we were drinking helped settle me down. As we ate, and ate, my belly swelling into a smooth rock, I prided myself on my growing stamina to put away a long tasting menu. My mom and I made small talk about our plans, voicing an occasional “ooooh” over the food but not dissecting it. On the sixth course, a crisp translucent disk of sweet-and-sour eggplant set on a pad of yellow sauce, my mother finally made a comment.
“This part, this yellow sauce, is too tart for me,” she said, surprised. Once she said it, I knew she was right. The yellow pepper sauce, infused with a bizarre amount of acidity, had slipped right by me. Embarrassed, I realized that the showmanship had blinded me. My enthusiasm for the industry had snowplowed my palate.
When the chef came out to greet the tables, tall and regal with long silver-blond California-beach-bum hair, I was totally star-struck. Meanwhile, my mom was struck with the bill.
“I knew it would be expensive, but four hundred dollars for lunch! My god, it’s only our second day.”
We promptly ordered two mint-green chartreuse digestifs, to ensure that we got our money’s worth.
—
Trips to France were not littered throughout my childhood; in fact, I had never before been out of the country. But taking her daughter to her departed father’s fatherland to taste its delicacies was on my mom’s bucket list, and if she hadn’t been paying for everything, I wouldn’t have been there. Before we left she had told me, “I’ll pick up some prepaid calling cards for us both.”
The only one I wanted to call was Aaron. We’d rarely been apart in four years, and even less so since Matt’s death, and had never gone a day without talking, but I figured, Okay, maybe we could handle touching base just every other day, or every third.
But my mom kept a tight rein on the calling cards.
“Why do you need to talk to him? Let him miss you a little bit,” she said, mumbling something about making the heart grow fonder as she walked away. I held off until the fifth day when I grabbed the card from her wallet and folded myself into a phone booth. I reassured him that I was okay and that we were somewhere in the Savoie region. It was clear who held the purse strings on this trip.
We had good times, though, on our way to our second Michelin-starred meal. We dipped south to visit my mom’s cousins who had retired to a farmhouse outside of Marseille. We went to the touristy village of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and bought six bottles of the delicate red wine, the boxes for which we passed back and forth filled with Christmas gifts for years to come. My five years of strictly B-minus high school and college French grudgingly came back to me, and I was able to navigate the rural roads, get us into hotels, and even snag a recipe for apricot confiture from my cousin’s neighbor. If it had to do with food, I could muddle through.
My mother, not so much. It was clear that the simple French phrases she’d crammed on the airplane hadn’t stuck when she walked into a restaurant and brightly declared “Merci!” in greeting. It’s bonjour, Mom, bonjour! It quickly became the running gag we pulled out whenever we needed to break intergenerational tension.
Over the food, all our sharp edges fell off. We both loved the buckwheat galettes, the frisée salads with duck gizzard confit and walnut-oil vinaigrette, and the pâté en croûte, even the supermarket kind, and somehow managed to cram three full meals of these, our new favorites, and more into each day. Sitting on a sunlit terrace in Provence, in
front of a milky half-orb of fresh chèvre with niçoise olives and oven-dried tomatoes, we finally had to agree to disagree.
“How can you not like this goat cheese?” I asked. “It’s almost impossible.” The curd was so fresh the milk trickled out when I broke it, and the signature flavor of the goat milk laid down low in the background. But the woman who had introduced her kids to stinky blue cheese, dripping rare beef, and fresh coconut—whose tastes always pushed back against our small town’s collective conservatism—was sticking to it.
“Sorry, I just don’t like it. I’ve never liked goat cheese.”
She turned away and I couldn’t persuade her to enjoy the only good goat cheese she’d never have. In her I saw my own food prejudices reflected—although I count among her favorites some things I now dislike: raw green bell peppers, undercooked green beans, and, yes, even our family’s beloved American cheese. I vowed someday to strike them all down.
We made our pilgrimage to Normandy, to the small town of Mortagne-au-Perche from which her Dion ancestors had migrated so long ago, and scaled a tiny turret inside a historical museum devoted to the horde of North American tourists tracing their roots to Canada. Jean Guyon (Dion) arrived in what became Montreal in the seventeenth century, making ours one of the first French families to settle in Canada. On the walls hung grainy black-and-white photos of the short, round, dark-haired men and women who had immigrated to Montreal. That round belly, which occasioned the men to belt their pants around the middle like an equator, I recognize as belonging to my grandfather and his father before him. Had my mom’s dad lived long enough, he would certainly have grown the same midsection magnificence. Yes, these were our people. We were French, but more specifically, we were les Canadiens. Voyageurs. Northern people, going back many generations.
My mom asked the director of the museum the question that visitors must have asked, oh, just a few times a day: Could we be related to Céline Dion, the singer? Of the ten CDs my mom owned, Céline Dion’s was the one she liked to play at top volume in her sporty sedan, the operatic high notes booming out the moon-roof blowhole.
