by Amy Thielen
“NO GOOD!” Dao pronounced. Mei One tried it and had the same reaction. He was appalled; his body shuddered at the combination of sugar and fish.
“Wei-Chin, try the herring. Very good,” I said. He chewed it carefully, spat it immediately into the garbage, and grinned slyly at me.
The tables had been turned. In pickled herring we Westerners had found our chicken feet. Similarly, its joys were largely textural. Good herring has a sensuous resistance to the bite. When cured perfectly—not too sweet—it holds the mark of your teeth, as fudge does. The sting of the pickle transported me straight to summer at our lake cabin, where my mom ceremoniously uncapped the plastic tub of silver diamond-cut fish bobbing in brine, setting my mouth to swim with juice.
We ate and ate, slurping it up lasciviously. The dim sum team laughed at us and animatedly tapped their short dim sum rolling pins on the metal counter, talking joyously about our bizarre food.
You had to give it to them: New York was not diluting their heritage. They walked around the city in a Chinese dome, eating Chinese food, frequenting Chinese stores, speaking very little English. They were there, in New York, but as prideful, conflicted defectors, like me. I talked up Minnesota as if it were the promised land, stubbornly wore an unhip hippie belt that reminded me of my former rural life, and insisted on calling soda “pop.” I wanted to keep training in New York, had no idea how I’d cook professionally back home in Two Inlets, but felt a powerful need to keep up my allegiances. Like my Chinese coworkers, I sailed around the kitchen with my home in my back pocket.
My nostalgia was like a slipcover for a precious-but-ugly family heirloom. No amount of gingered crab could erase the truth: The meat and potatoes that had once defined me no longer sufficed. My palate had been whetted for more complicated flavors, more diverse populations, more chili fire. As I kneaded lotus-paste dough, I weighed my two homelands, the old and the new, and began to wonder which one would eventually win out. Unlike my Chinese comrades, I didn’t see a clear path back.
—
I worked like I was on repeat, walking out of the apartment each day around 10 A.M. with my glass pint jar of maple-sweetened iced coffee, returning home each day by taxi at 1 A.M., fried and sweaty. When I cracked Aaron’s studio door I was often met with a cloud of cigar smoke and the sight of him and Rob sitting on rocking chairs in the gray mist, yakking about art and listening to a steady soundtrack of outlaw country. Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Gretchen Wilson. The rural narrative was part of our collective consciousness, our group persona. They were the country boys who had reluctantly come to the city to find work in the art world; I was Aaron’s exhausted third-shift waitress wife. My feet throbbing, I figured I was about as tired as a girl in a country song. I considered seventy-plus hours a week an inevitable schedule but continued to whine about my constant suffering and threw a tantrum over any Sunday plans Aaron suggested that didn’t include a nap. My day off consisted of cooking him a huge dinner so that he’d have leftovers while I was gone. My case was classic. I was a martyr.
I knew this, could hear myself saying the words “wish I could, have to work,” and rued them, but at the same time I kept a list of excuses running in my head. Here’s the funny thing about a cook’s martyrdom: It really does begin with a generous impulse. Even though I spent my nights hunched over tiny tasting-menu-size plates, at night I dreamed of making giant pots of soup and serving it to the masses. Because of this, the martyr feels justified in her crabbiness. She’s pulling these double shifts out of a deep desire to feed the people. But housed inside the shell of a cranky, overworked cook with a sore back and a perma-rash between her perpetually moist fingers, that originally decent nugget of generosity comes out as the most unrelenting and aggressive kind of altruism, in spools and spools of never-ending spaghetti. And no amount of logic can stem her ever-growing rock collection of hard knocks.
Aaron was getting plenty sick of the way my work flooded our life, but to his credit, he never suggested I quit. My insomnia was killing us both, though. When I couldn’t get to sleep on Sunday night, my only day off each week, he wanted to either take me out to a bar and feed me shots of Jameson until I passed out or clock me on the head. I was willing to do either if something would just knock me out. Something in our relationship, and in our life, had to break—and finally did. The day came that Aaron’s commitment to plan A proved him right.
I knew he had had an important studio visit that day, but I didn’t expect him to call me on the kitchen phone at the restaurant. Shorty answered and handed it over with disapproval: “For you.”
Aaron breathlessly told me what had happened. Zach Feuer, the art dealer, showed up at his studio with a friend, who happened to be Maurizio Cattelan, the famous artist. They were enthusiastic about the work and each bought a carving on the spot—and then called up two of Cattelan’s main collectors, who came over and bought up the rest of Aaron’s studio. Aaron would have a solo show at Zach’s gallery in Chelsea in the spring, and the collectors were going to show his biggest carving at their own museum during the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in December.
He finished his spiel and I tried to take it all in.
“Oh my god, oh my god! Do we go to that?” I said, meaning Art Basel.
“Yes, are you kidding?” he shouted. “Ask for time off!” And we hung up.
I keened all over the line, making Shorty think that something horrendous had happened.
“Aaron just sold out his studio. I need to go with him to Miami next month.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know, four days?”
He scoffed. No one requested that kind of time off. Ever.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” I said. No way was I going to miss being with Aaron when things were happening for him. It had been too hard a struggle.
The next day Aaron came into our bedroom as I was waking up and dropped two hundred dollars on the bed. Zach had paid him in cash.
“Why don’t you go buy yourself some jeans,” he said in his best Merle Haggard drawl.
“Little lady?” I finished his thought, sat bolt upright, and clutched the money. I realized then the insanity of my sense of economic security, which has never had any correlation to hard facts or numbers but rests solely, as it has since junior high, on whether or not I can afford to buy a cool new pair of jeans.
Aaron’s full-time art-making and regular sales transferred some of the family focus from my career to his, to my relief. What he did all day—carving wood, painting, strategizing—was stressful, a pendulum swing between the poles of doubt and the thrilling highs. It was a weird job, unrecognizable to those back home, but it seemed to fit Aaron’s personality.
Within a month we were floating in the ocean in Miami, the day after walking down the marble staircase with Zach at the Versace mansion, a gaudy Versailles-like backdrop that tilted the entire moment into campiness. It was the height of the art boom. The art market at this time defied economics as surely as it defied the down-to-earth Midwestern practicality into which we’d been born—and we were feeling its crazy buoyancy. As I kneeled in the waves, it occurred to me that no one in Park Rapids, not even my young self, could have envisioned this scene for us. As the salt water soaked my burn-slashed forearms, I could think of nothing to say but the most pedestrian of straightforward utterances. The weight of Aaron’s belief system that had brought us to this place, where we were both floating in an ocean, taking a well-deserved break from doing exactly the kind of work we both wanted to do, was so much larger than that, but words sometimes fail.
“Good job, Aaron.”
I no longer cared if we had a—quote/unquote—normal life. Security was overrated. I’d take this one.
—
It came as no surprise to me that in the spring of 2003 Aaron didn’t see his steady art-making as more reason to stay in New York, but more reason to leave. He called the Two Inlets Mill and started getting quotes for building a new studio in Minnesota. I knew
I’d have a hard time stopping him. The seeds we’d planted in that place years before had grown their inevitable roots, and he wanted someday to be able to work from there.
When Aaron talked to others about our place back home out in the middle of nowhere, he framed it with sweeping arm gestures, as if it were a utopian kingdom, the absolute center of the universe. I’d heard his spiel a million times before. Imagine this, he’d say, spooling out his long arms. It’s a crossroads of four great American landscapes. We’re basically sitting on the source of the Mississippi, the watershed of the nation. Drive north and you hit the boreal forest; drive east, the hardwood forests; drive south and there’s the edge of the glacial deposit. Drive an hour west and you hit the beginning of the prairie that stretches all the way to the Rocky Mountains and that’s where the West begins. And where else do you have four such strong, distinct seasons? Every six weeks the wind changes and you have to get ready for something new. It keeps you going. It never lets you rest. We don’t have just four seasons; we have more like eight.
In truth, the cold arrived in October and stayed until May, so I think he was forgetting to mention that winter reigned during at least five of those mini-seasons; Old Man Winter was the king of them all.
The next morning as we bungee-strapped straw bags onto our bikes in preparation for our weekly brunch-and-farmer’s-market Sunday routine, Aaron paused in the premature, weightless Brooklyn spring. The air felt as temperate as blood, as the 110-degree water you need to bloom yeast—in a word, heavenly. Aaron shook out his bare arms in a motion that implied zero resistance, a total lack of gravity. Compared to Minnesota’s plunging shifts between dry-ice winters and humid, suffocating summers, this lovely New York spring was too long and pleasant for him by far. Every seasonal change, he got restless like this. I could see it in the way his jaw twitched in the warm morning air, the way his eyes followed the garbage swirling in the curb hollows. His outlook defied common sense, but it was perhaps common to exiles who pine for difficult pasts. Back home, weather was temperamental, addictive, and central to conversation. Nature vindictively doled out blasts of winter and then apologized with the sun; we northerners walked collectively on a pile of eggshells, attuned to its moods. Surviving the petulant weather gave us a shared resilience.
Most people thought that living in Brooklyn presented similar collective challenges to overcome—the hordes of people, the steamy subway air, the inconveniences of doing one’s laundry in laundromats and of walking a mile toting heavy grocery bags that dug channels into your palms—but Aaron overlooked all that.
Sensing that he was getting ready to complain about this present glorious sunshine, I preempted him. “It’s a perfect day.”
He quipped, flopping his arms, “It’s an almost nonexistent day. It’s like there’s no temperature at all.” Squinting into the bright, untroubled street, he leaned hard into his pedal and restated his devotion to our place in the woods with brief, auspicious finality.
“I need weather,” he said, sounding a lot like one of the Norwegian-American farmers from whom he was descended.
6
TWENTY-FIVE PIES
I made Aaron stay put and tough it out. But I agreed to tentatively consider the idea of the studio back home, which he read as my consent to keeping the dream of our homestead alive. After finishing out my time at 66, I started looking for another job. I wanted to get back to a fine-dining kitchen, something with the intensity and intimacy of Danube.
Cru, a posh downtown restaurant with a book-length, instantly legendary wine list, fit those requirements—not coincidentally because the kitchen was staffed almost entirely with former Bouley and Danube cooks. The chef, Shea Gallante, former chef de cuisine at Bouley, assembled a tight seven-person crew of highly skilled haute-cuisine geeks, many of us bespectacled, most of us in our early thirties. The Austrian sous chefs back at Danube would have dubbed us “old,” but I preferred to think of us as “veteran.” As we prepared to open the restaurant, doing everything from painting the downstairs prep kitchen to curing the new copper pots, we felt like a small reunion band—a feeling that grew stale as our prep lists lengthened, our hours swelled into the high-eighty-hour-a-week range, and Shea stubbornly decided not to hire anyone he didn’t already know and trust until we got reviewed by the New York Times.
Tall and driven, with a pomaded, gill-like hairline, Shea was like a star quarterback, pushing his team toward the avant-garde. And once again, as at Danube, all of the smaller size 36 and 38 jackets were quickly snapped up. By this point I was beyond cooking in gaping sleeves. When I asked Shea to order more small jackets, he said under his breath, “What are we, a kitchen of midgets?” No, Chef, I thought, just a bunch of nerds and one short woman.
Shea installed me at the fish station where, in addition to ripping and cooking thirty lobsters a day as I’d done at db bistro, I also made a fleet of tricky contemporary garnishes for the middle courses, most of which were on the longer tasting menu: sweet onion ice cream to go with the foie gras; liquid spheres of black olive juice to accompany the tuna tartare; a fragrant hazelnut praline to swipe beneath the lobster, its natural sweetness suppressed via a three-step caramelization process that relied on low-sugar sugars such as Isomalt. It was at Cru, finally, that I saw artistry and rusticity collide in the way I’d always dreamed of. Shea threaded cutting-edge techniques with traditional Italian-ingredient-centric garnishes, enrobing sweet farmer’s-market peas in reduced pea juice and blending pureed polenta with a heady amount of perfumed Italian olive oil. Our ingredients were tops. Fish came in on the morning flight from Japan, some still in rigor mortis. We paid top dollar for the world’s best chocolate, the best vanilla beans, the largest Umbrian truffles. We cooks shopped the Union Square Greenmarket before work on Saturdays. Shea ordered heirloom Carola potatoes from a farm upstate, kept them in a cool dark back room, and cooked them one by one for VIP tasting menus; he pushed the plain cooked potato through the wire mesh of a tamis until it stood up straight like straw-colored hair, then swooped it onto the plate, covered it with greenish olive oil, and sprinkled it with rough gray salt. The remnants I fingered out of the tamis on the way to the sink tasted as silky as butter. I had grown potatoes like these once, the very same variety, when we lived in Two Inlets, and I had squandered them.
When the New York Times review landed—a glowing three-star by Frank Bruni that immediately filled our reservation sheet—Shea still didn’t relent, and the overtime (for which no cook in New York City ever gets paid) marched on. To put the hours/numbers into perspective, there’s this: At the end of any regular night, empty bottles of Château Lafite Rothschild or Pétrus or Romanée-Conti regularly crowded the sideboard—bottles of wine that listed at tens of thousands of dollars each. After taxes, I took home less than $500 a week.
Not that I cared about the money. I’d long ago accepted that the economy of cooking did not compute to hours worked for dollars paid. My mind skips the details and instead recalls that time as a close-focus montage: the round blat of thick homemade almond milk on the toe of my shoe that I am too busy to stop and wipe away; the zippery shush of my muggy black work pants; the soft plundering of all the cooks’ rubber-bottomed orthopedic shoes on the tile floor; the polyester sheen of chickpeas pureed with wobbly chunks of cooked bacon fat; the cool fleshiness of the two fat Medjool dates I’d hidden in the breast pocket of my chef’s coat. Whenever I feel my energy lagging I reach for one, convinced that even one sticky date can give me a super-sonic boost.
As we cooks stand at our stations slicing shallots or filleting fish or searing short ribs, our chitchat bobs vigorously in the air. We’re pros; our verbal stream doesn’t pause as our hands continue to strip thyme from its stem, push lamb sauce through a fine chinois strainer, or cut carrots into brunoise. I have for my fellow line cooks the same fierce, teasing fondness I have for my own brothers—which makes sense, as we are members of an extended restaurant family, and as the sole woman there my role feels vaguely mater
nal. Clearly in their sleep deprivation they have forgotten my female origins, because these guys unleash all their freaky boyness on me. For instance, they quote movies all day long. (The women I know do not do this; we don’t quote dialogue or finish one another’s favorite remembered scenes complete with the action noises—not at age eight, not at twenty-eight, and not even if it’s Caddyshack.) They talk about their favorite songs as if they’re making a daily mixed tape. They guess one another’s first concerts. Mötley Crüe. Whitesnake. Red Hot Chili Peppers for the youngsters. “Amy,” Kyle the meat entremet speculates, “I bet yours was Heart.” Nope, AC/DC, but close. How could he know that my small-town-girl soul has always held a lighter in the air for Heart?
They talk about their girlfriends. A good one waits up and is a game companion for the unwinding process, including the requisite midnight snack; a tough one is already in bed and offers no sympathy.
“When I got home last night,” Rich the pasta cook says, each word heavy, “she made me a sandwich.”
“Aw, really? What kind of sandwich?” asks Kyle.
“Dude, it was great. It was piled with roast turkey and Swiss and spicy pepperoni and pickled peppers, with mustard and mayo, and she fried it in butter. It was three inches tall. The best sandwich I’ve ever had.” Says the guy who’s curing an inside barrel muscle of pork butt to hang in the downstairs walk-in cooler—homemade coppa, the most high-brow of lunch meats.
“Wow, that sounds so good,” Kyle says, honestly impressed, as he stands at his station plucking the tissue-paper skins from shrunken roasted cherry tomatoes and dropping the squishy peeled fruit into a pint cup labeled TAISINS—his nickname for tomato raisins. “I can’t believe she fried you a sandwich.”
