She was the first black person I ever met, and it’s probably the main reason I’m fairly color-blind when it comes to humans. She did not seem angry about her lot in life, and I suspect she would have shared that anger with me, or at least I would have sensed it.
Trotty had a medium dark-brown complexion and several large moles on her face. I never knew her to have a date with a man. I know that, when she wasn’t living with us, she shared an apartment in Harlem with her aunt Martha, who was two years older than Louise. When I was young, I was absolutely incapable of understanding how her aunt could be only two years older than she was, and I was fascinated by the math.
I was also fascinated by the fact that Louise never learned to read. She could write out very simple names or phrases, sometimes with baffling misspellings, but couldn’t string together a complex sentence on paper. I offered several times to try to teach her, but she would never engage in that discussion. I remember that she once got angry at my persistence, so I dropped the subject, never to bring it up again. I don’t know whether her resistance was out of embarrassment or fear or some sense that there’d been a miscarriage of justice, or perhaps it was just resignation that she was too old. I never thought it was anything she should be embarrassed about. It was just something she couldn’t do.
She and my mother had an uneasy truce over the years. They never had the relationship that Louise had with my dad or with me (my brother was older and far less interested in having an extra mother—he was mostly concerned with avoiding any extra punishment). There was a minor rivalry between my mom and Trotty, I suppose, for the affection of the men/boys in the household, but there was also a friction that resulted over control of the kitchen. My mother was trying to make healthy food that tasted good. Louise made fried chicken and icebox pie and meat loaf with mashed potatoes that tasted all the better for their unhealthiness. There was never any open hostility, not at all. They liked and appreciated each other. They just didn’t love each other the same way my dad and I loved Louise and she loved us.
The truce became a lot easier when my mom was sick and laid up in bed. She then became like a daughter rather than the wife of one of Louise’s surrogate sons. Each day after I made my daily milk shake and delivered it, Louise would check the glass to make sure that my mother drank every last bit. If she didn’t, Louise would talk to her the way a parent talks to a recalcitrant seven-year-old, explaining that it was for her own good. Then she’d tell me, quite sternly, that the next day I had to add more coffee ice cream or more chocolate syrup because that’s the way my mom liked it.
The truce turned shaky again when we moved to California. Louise never liked it there; she had no friends and felt isolated living up above Coldwater Canyon in my parents’ new and large house. She couldn’t take the bus into Harlem to see her aunt Martha on weekends. She was unhappy, and that probably made her not so much fun to be around for my mom. She spent a lot of time alone in her bedroom, downstairs, next to the kitchen. On Saturdays, she and I would often go to the movies together, one of my parents dropping us off in Beverly Hills or Westwood or Hollywood and picking us up when the film was over. On weeknights, I would still go into Louise’s room and watch one of her corny TV shows with her. I liked keeping her company and watching her enjoyment.
We moved to Los Angeles in 1964 because my dad got a job writing and producing a sitcom, The Bing Crosby Show. It was no longer viable for him to make his six-month commute. My mom had been ready to make the move for several years, but they waited for Eric to graduate from high school and head off to college—they didn’t want him uprooted twice. I was ambivalent about the move. As much as I liked West Nyack, I didn’t really mind putting it behind me. On the other hand, I didn’t take to Los Angeles right away. I hated the Dodgers and the Rams and was never taken in by the supposed glamour of the place. On my first day of school in my new sixth-grade class, I wore my San Francisco Giants team jacket, alienating just about every boy in the school.
Life was quite different there, no question about it. For our very first L.A. Christmas, Bing Crosby came to our house for a big party. His musical director, John Scott Trotter, had, without telling my parents, arranged for a group of carolers to show up. They sang holiday songs in the seventy-five-degree winter wonderland and then—honest to god!—Bing Crosby sat down at the piano in my parents’ living room and sang “White Christmas.” After dinner, he went into the kitchen, kissed Louise’s hand in a courtly fashion, and told her the meal was delicious. Louise didn’t just swoon—she fainted dead away.
Trotty moved back to New York when I was fifteen. She went back to living with her aunt Martha and worked for my cousin Nikki, looking after her two young sons.
I moved back to New York when I was twenty-one and, of course, saw her whenever possible. It wasn’t often enough. By this point, her eyesight was starting to fail and she didn’t love going too far from her apartment. We did speak on the phone at least once a week. The discussions tended to be about baseball (she’d become a Mets fan). And I saw her around her birthday every year—it was on September 23—as well as every Christmas. For both occasions, I’d take her out to a Chinese restaurant in the Times Square area. She would order a large portion of shrimp fried rice and that’s all she would ever eat. I’d give her a bottle of bubble bath or perfume, and, in return, she’d bring a big shopping bag of her fried chicken. I definitely got the better end of the deal.
I went up to the Harlem apartment where she and Martha lived two or three times; I took the subway up. The apartment was clean and comfortable, with few frills. There was a warmth to it that didn’t come from the furniture but from its inhabitants.
When she was ninety-one, Louise took ill and went into the hospital. I went to visit her with my mom and Janis, who had met Louise once before at my apartment, and my friend Paul, who knew her when we were kids together in L.A. but who had by that time moved east with his wife and kids. Louise had always been plump but she was now skin and bones—she must have lost fifty pounds. Nonetheless, when she saw us, she lit up. Her smile was huge.
She was in a room with two other elderly black women and she said, by way of introducing us, “This is my family.” Taking my hand, she said, “This is my son, this is one of my sons. His brother’s my son. Their father was my son, too.” Pointing to Paul, she said, “And this is another son.” Then she turned to her roommates and said, “Ask them if I met Bing Crosby.” The women told us that Louise talked constantly about the time she spent in Los Angeles, especially about all the famous people she met and how Bing Crosby had liked her cooking and kissed her.
We stayed about an hour and reminisced with Louise—she seemed to remember every stupid thing Paul and I had ever done when we were kids, and the stupider we’d been, the more she enjoyed the remembering. She talked about how much she loved my dad and how she still couldn’t believe he had died before she had. She cried a few tears thinking about him. We talked about her fried chicken and her chocolate pudding and how she used to let me lick the spoon. She remembered trying to fatten my mother up when she was sick and she told everyone in the room that my mom had become a famous chef and Louise said how proud she was of my mom. We all kissed her and said we’d see her soon.
One of the women stopped me on our way out and said, “Did she really meet Bing Crosby?” and I said, “I swear. Everything she told you was true.” The other women were very impressed and Louise lorded it over them, I am positive, until the day she died, which was just a week or two after our visit.
At her funeral on West 145th Street in Harlem, the minister delivered a touching eulogy and there was some lovely singing from a small choir. My mom, Paul, and I went to have lunch at Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Too, a venerated Harlem soul food joint. There, my mom told me that my dad had been paying Louise’s salary until the day he died and that, ever since then, my mom had been sending her a weekly check for the same amount. She felt that she not only owed it to Louise, she owed it to my dad, who said that for m
any years Louise had been his lifeline.
Trotty
Then we had fried chicken, meat loaf, icebox pie, and chocolate pudding. It was delicious. But not as good as Trotty’s.
Chocolate Pudding Recipe, adapted from the Taste of Home Website
Louise did not, of course, cook from recipes or write any of her recipes down, since she did not know how to read or write. So I searched the Internet and tried various pudding recipes, attempting to replicate hers. Some of them were too good, if that makes any sense—they didn’t taste plain and simple enough. Some used chocolate that was too dark or too fancy. Everything Louise made was simple. They were recipes for people who didn’t have much money and I think their simplicity (and sincerity) is why everything she made was so delicious.
This is the recipe I stumbled upon that comes closest to the chocolate pudding Louise Trotty used to make. It comes from the Taste of Home website. I have changed only one thing: the author of the recipe puts M&M’s on top, which is totally antithetical to the simple hominess of chocolate pudding (not to mention repellent). I left the M&M’s line out of the recipe. Trust me: don’t even think about it. Trotty would sometimes whip up a bowl of cream and use that as a topping, but I’d recommend just eating it the way chocolate pudding was meant to be eaten—either right out of the pot, still hot, with a big wooden spoon, and getting it over way too many parts of your face, or chill it in small, individual bowls and be civilized.
One final observation on this whole chocolate pudding thing. The recipe calls for ½ cup of baking cocoa. When re-creating this, I remembered that, when we lived in West Nyack, Louise used Hershey’s cocoa and that was fine. In L.A., my mom had gotten a bit fancier (as did her pantry) and she started using Droste Dutch-style cocoa. I did a little research and found out that there is an actual difference between Dutch-style and regular cocoa powder.
Cocoa powder is—who knew?—the solid remains of fermented, dried, and roasted cacao beans. The beans are cracked, then ground into a paste made of cocoa solids suspended in almost flavorless cocoa butter. When the butter is extracted, what’s left are crumbly solids, which are then ground into a fine powder. So cocoa powder is basically the essence of a cocoa bean’s chocolate flavor, without any extra fat, sugar, or liquid to get in the way. This is what’s called natural cocoa powder and it’s what most of the brands of cocoa are that you find in U.S. supermarkets—Hershey’s, Ghirardelli, etc.
Dutch process cocoa powder does not actually have anything at all to do with Holland, dikes, Hans Christian Andersen, or those doors that open from the top and bottom. The Dutch process simply makes cocoa less acidic and gives the powder a noticeably darker hue than the natural powder. It also—you can try it yourself—tastes earthier and woodsier. There are various scientific differences, too—Dutch process cocoa isn’t acidic so it doesn’t react with alkaline leaveners like baking soda—but 1) none of that is relevant to chocolate pudding and 2) I don’t have a clue what any of it means. What I can tell you is that I prefer the Dutch-style when making this pudding. They both taste like Trotty’s recipes, only for me one tastes like age seven and one tastes like age thirteen.
ABOUT THIS RECIPE:
Yield: 6 to 8 servings (NOTE FROM AUTHOR: OR 1 SERVING, MAYBE 2, IF YOU’RE A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD BOY)
Total Time: 10 minutes prep time plus chilling
INGREDIENTS:
1 cup sugar
½ cup baking cocoa
¼ cup cornstarch
½ teaspoon salt
4 cups milk
2 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
(NOTE FROM THE INDIGNANT AUTHOR: THIS IS WHERE I HAVE REFUSED TO TYPE IN THE WORDS “M&M’S OPTIONAL.”)
DIRECTIONS:
In a heavy saucepan, combine the sugar, cocoa, cornstarch, and salt. Gradually add milk. Bring to a boil over medium heat; boil and stir for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the butter and vanilla. Spoon into individual serving dishes. Chill until serving.
When I told my mom I was trying to re-create Louise’s chocolate pudding, her face lit up instantly and all she said was, “Oh my.”
The dessert turned out perfectly, and it is extraordinarily easy. All you have to do is measure, pour, have the dexterity to turn on one of the burners on the stove, and stir. It takes ten minutes, tops.
Note, however, the final line of the recipe: “Chill until serving.” That had no relevance for me. I wanted to re-create my fondest memory of this dish: licking the warm pudding off a wooden spoon that had just circled the inside circumference of the still-warm pot. So after I dished out most of the dark brown pudding into individual serving bowls and stuck them in the fridge, I carried the pot over to my mother who was visiting me in Sag Harbor. She sat at the dining room table, expectantly. I scraped a medium-size wooden spoon around the edge of the pot, capturing a nice portion of the pudding and a tiny bit of the skin, which was already beginning to form. I held the spoon up to my mom’s lips and the pudding was suddenly gone in one fell swoop.
There is something that inevitably happens between parents and children if the parents live long enough: a reversal of roles. The child often becomes the parent to the parent. It is not always a pleasant process, nor is it something to which either side looks forward.
This tasting of the chocolate pudding—yes, it felt almost like some kind of royal ritual: the Tasting of the Chocolate Pudding—was a role reversal. There I was doing for my mom what both she and Trotty used to do for me. I was carefully circling the spoon around a large, deep pot, then holding the spoon out toward her mouth so she could sample the warm, chocolaty concoction. But this interaction was not painful or awkward. It was a moment in which my mother and I both happily and of our own free will returned to our respective pasts through my ability, as an adult, to re-create that past. Magically, there was my mom, forty years old and unmarred by time, delighted as she experienced what her ten-year-old son had so delightedly experienced. And there I was, licking my own spoon after scraping the warm pot, once again an untroubled boy, blissfully unaware that real troubles could even exist.
We both knew exactly what we were tasting as we partook of my re-creation of Louise Trotty’s chocolate pudding.
It was the delicious taste of youth.
JOËL ROBUCHON’S MASHED POTATOES
(PUREE DE POMMES DE TERRE)
My parents went to Europe together for the first time when I was around nine years old. While they were gone, Louise took care of my brother and me in West Nyack and what I remember most vividly from that three-week period is Eric coming home after going drinking with some of his sixteen-year-old suburban rabble-rousing friends and doing his best to enter the Guinness Book of World Records for most vomiting by a drunk teenager. Louise let him pass out and sleep on the linoleum floor in the entryway (after first smacking him with her shoe, of course). I also remember getting postcards from London, Paris, and Rome. These brief missives from my mom and dad definitely fueled my romantic imagination.
When my parents returned, I heard talk of theater seen and museums visited and friendly people speaking in languages other than English (or speaking English with a much nicer accent than ours). Mostly, or so it seems to me, I heard about the food. It was bad in England (no longer true at all), it was great in Rome, and it was best of all in Paris. My mother couldn’t stop asking the question, “How can a ham sandwich taste that good?” I was fascinated by their tales of amazing cheeses, and croissants that exploded with flavor when you bit into them, and something called chocolate mousse. My mom waxed poetically about the texture and deep chocolaty taste and how you could turn over a spoonful of the stuff and it would just stay there on the spoon. That all sounded pretty amazing, but what I really liked about the dessert was its name, which I assumed was “chocolate moose.” That I wanted to see. I was more than a little disappointed when my mom finally broke it to me that this particular delicacy was nothing more than French chocolate pudding.
My pa
rents went back to Europe a few more times after that first trip. In 1985, they spent a good amount of time in Paris because my father was directing a TV movie that he also wrote called Murder or Mercy? It starred Robert Young and was based on the true story of Roswell Gilbert who, after fifty-one years of marriage, murdered his wife, Emily, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the previous eight years and had often begged to die. Gilbert said it was an act of mercy but he was tried for murder and convicted. The case became a big part of the national debate about euthanasia and my dad was thrilled to cast Robert Young, conceivably the most liked and likable TV star between the 1950s and the 1980s, as Gilbert. My parents came back to Los Angeles from Paris with my dad raving about Bob Young and my mother unable to do anything but rhapsodize about the meals they had, in particular the mashed potatoes, at Jamin, Joël Robuchon’s first and arguably greatest restaurant. From her rapturous descriptions, it was as if she’d had an affair with the young Alain Delon instead of having eaten a bunch of smooshed-up potatoes on a plate.
Robuchon, like so many of the great European chefs, started cooking professionally when he was fifteen years old. It proved to be a good career choice since not only has he accumulated twenty-eight Michelin Guide stars for his many restaurants around the world, the most of any chef in history, but he was also named Chef of the Century by the French restaurant guide Gault et Millau in 1989. My mom clearly thought he deserved every accolade he earned. She could not stop extolling the virtues of his mashed potatoes.
By this time, my mom was already working with Wolfgang Puck, who had, three years earlier, opened the legendary Spago, overlooking Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The day she got back from Paris she went running to see Wolf at the restaurant and said, “Why can’t you make potatoes that taste like Robuchon’s?” Now, asking Wolf, “Why can’t you make something” as delicious as another chef’s version of the same dish is a bit like asking Stephen Sondheim why he can’t write a song as good as “Feelings.” Wolf’s slightly peevish response was, “I can. But nobody would eat them here.” My mom couldn’t believe her ears, so she asked why not. Wolf said, “Those potatoes taste that way because they are all butter. Nobody in America, certainly nobody in L.A., would ever touch them knowing how fattening they are.”
My Mother's Kitchen Page 10
