My Mother's Kitchen

by Peter Gethers

  It didn’t actually take three weeks. But it did take most of the afternoon. What no one tells you is that to properly shell fava beans, you either need Superman’s strength and stamina or about a hundred people working for you who don’t mind spending a good chunk of their healthy adult years trying to get little green beans out of hard green pods.

  The beans were shelled by four o’clock in the afternoon. I was a sweaty, nervous, exhausted, bloody (well, just around my fingernails) mess by the time I got to step 2 of the recipe. I called my friends to tell them to come at eight instead of seven and begged Cindy to tell her mother that I was dead and she should just go home now to L.A. so Cindy wouldn’t have to deal with the dinner’s unpleasant aftermath. Cindy talked me down and we did our best to actually cook the dinner in time to eat before the chimes of midnight struck.

  It must have turned out okay in the end. I don’t remember anything particularly disturbing that came out of Cindy’s mom’s mouth. My friends insisted everything was delicious and I’m pretty sure I got drunk.

  Cindy and I did break up a few years afterward. She dumped me on Valentine’s Day. I always figured her mother would have thought that was a nice touch.

  What follows is not the recipe I made for Cindy’s mom. It is, however, a recipe I have made since. One of the joys of living in the twenty-first century in Manhattan is that it is now possible to buy fresh fava beans that have been pre-shelled. It’s a life changer.

  Fava Bean Puree Recipe

  Yield: 1½ cups

  Total time: About 1 hour (from Chowhound, adapted from Chez Panisse Vegetables)

  INGREDIENTS:

  3 cups fava beans, removed from their pods (from about 3 to 4 pounds of favas in their pods)

  6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling

  2 medium garlic cloves, minced

  ¾ cup water

  1 medium thyme sprig

  1 (6-inch) rosemary sprig

  2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

  freshly ground black pepper

  salt

  DIRECTIONS:

  1. Prepare an ice water bath by filling a large bowl halfway with ice and water; set aside.

  2. Bring a large pot of generously salted water to a boil. Add the shelled favas and boil until the bean inside the outer skin is bright green and firm but not hard, about 1 to 2 minutes. Drain the favas and immediately place them in the ice water bath until cool. Peel the light green skin from each bean to reveal two bright green inner halves. Discard the skins and place the beans in a medium bowl.

  3. Heat 4 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large frying pan over medium heat until shimmering. Add the garlic, season with the salt, and cook, stirring occasionally, until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the favas and stir to coat with oil. Add the water, thyme, and rosemary and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for 10 minutes more. (Add more water as needed, a tablespoon at a time, to keep the beans from sticking to the pan.)

  4. Remove and discard the thyme and rosemary sprigs. Transfer the fava mixture to a blender and blend on low until coarsely chopped. Transfer a third of the chopped fava mixture to a small bowl. Continue to blend until the remaining fava mixture is finely pureed. If the puree is too thick, add water a tablespoon at a time to reach the desired consistency. Transfer the puree to the bowl with the reserved chopped favas. Stir in the lemon juice and the remaining 2 tablespoons oil. Season with salt and pepper and drizzle with additional olive oil if desired. Serve warm or at room temperature.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I had my first great bottle of wine the day my father died.

  When my mother was in her fifties and sixties, a period when many people start winding down and preparing for retirement, she went in the opposite direction, immersing herself in the food world, working at a level and pace she had never reached or even attempted to reach before. My dad relished her labors and took enormous enjoyment from her success; his pride was palpable. He also matched her culinary skills with his taste in wines. He had inherent good taste in many things: he always found wonderful and eccentric houses; he had an eye for antique furniture; he had a decorator’s visual sense (which certainly aided his directorial efforts); and he was the snazziest dresser I knew. But most of all, he reveled in his taste for and knowledge of wine.

  In the 1960s and early 1970s, most people in America were not drinking French wines. But my dad built a small wine cellar in our basement and stocked it mainly with Bordeaux, Burgundies, and Rhônes. He was buying Latours and Petrus for ten and twelve dollars a bottle. He also developed a taste for good Spanish wines, which were all of six or eight bucks. During my teenage years, my parents were drinking Château d’Yquem as their nightly dessert wine. It was under ten dollars a bottle, but my dad wasn’t really conscious of the price—he went with what he liked. It just so happened that what he liked was quite good and, at that time, cheap. As the years went by, the prices went up. Château d’Yquem can now sell for thousands of dollars a bottle. A bottle of Petrus, if you can get it at all, won’t go for less than seven or eight hundred dollars. My dad was not afraid of spending money on the things he liked and he would really splurge when he could share. Not to show off—he just wanted people to love what he loved.

  My parents had a rather perfect decade after my mom began her career in food. My father became an even more successful director as well as screenwriter and producer and he enjoyed that leap as much as my mother enjoyed hers. He shot a TV movie in Paris and a miniseries in England and my mom went with him for both shoots. They also traveled for fun. One time they spent a week on a river barge going through Burgundy, stopping at various vineyards for dégustations (tastings) as often as they wished, going into country restaurants for dinner where, even in those small villages, my mom would drop a name or two that resulted in star treatment—this was my father’s idea of heaven.

  The decade became less than ideal, however, when, in 1986, my dad discovered he had lung cancer.

  He had been a compulsive addict of a smoker. When I was a child, he used to smoke five packs a day, usually lighting one cigarette with another before the first one was out, so he never had to miss a moment of blissful inhalation. He would wake up in the middle of the night just to smoke a cigarette or two before going back to sleep.

  When I was around seven years old, television commercials began running that warned of the dangers that tobacco engendered. Because I saw how much my dad smoked, these commercials scared me. Before my eighth birthday, my dad asked me what I might be thinking about as a present. I said that I wanted him to stop smoking—that would be the perfect gift. So on my eighth birthday, my dad stopped cold. He never had another cigarette for the remaining twenty-eight years of his life. But the damage had been done.

  Soon after the cancer was discovered, he had part of a lung removed and seemed well on the road to recovery. But there was a huge difference between the way my mother and my father dealt with illness. My mother has had thyroid cancer, breast cancer, and cancer of the uterus, all of them life threatening, and she sloughed them all off. She didn’t even bother taking painkillers after her mastectomy! When diagnosed with a melanoma and told she wouldn’t live out the year, she absolutely refused to accept it. After her recovery, having spent months in bed, she would never so much as take a nap in a bed again, refusing to acknowledge any potential weakness. My mom had two strokes and after the second one was told she wouldn’t walk or speak again. She believed none of that, fought against everything with a fierceness that came from within and that I had never seen and never expect to see again in anyone else, and she triumphed over all of it.

  My dad, when told he had cancer, immediately decided that he was dying.

  I saw him reasonably often during the period after his lung was operated on and before the cancer came back with a roar. There was a frenetic quality to his behavior after that initial diagnosis. He threw money around even more generously than he ever had before. He bou
ght me things I didn’t really want. There was a kind of desperation to his behavior as he tried to cram a lifetime’s worth of activity into whatever time he had left.

  During this period, the thing that probably brought him the most joy was that Eric and his wife had a son, Morgan. My dad went wild over his grandson. He lavished affection on him, made up songs about him, bought him piles of gifts. Some of his manic indulgence and over-the-top behavior was due to my dad’s conviction that he was dying—and dying quickly. To some extent, his behavior stemmed from his guilt and complicated emotions about his relationship with Eric. He once said to me, “Having grandchildren is God’s gift to us for not killing our own children.”

  We had several long talks during this period. He wanted to inhabit his role as a father as fully as possible and jam as much fatherly wisdom into my head as he could. He talked to me at great length about my mother.

  During one of these conversations, I found out exactly why he had been so supportive of her new career and her new life that came with it.

  “It’ll make it much easier for her when I’m gone,” he told me. “She has a whole new circle of friends. She has a whole new family,” he said, “a whole separate world now, a lot of people who love her and who will look after her. And whom she loves in return. I know your mother. I knew that as soon as she started working at Ma Maison, she’d carve out a separate existence for herself. It’s why I loved to see it happen and pushed her so hard to make it happen. She’ll be fine without me and that’s the most important thing to me.”

  It was a strange and emotional conversation to have because I knew he was right. My mom, who everyone thought was so dependent on my father, would be fine. If things were reversed, if my mom had died before my dad, I don’t think he would have been fine. He was too dependent on her quiet strength and support.

  Despite the successful first operation, the cancer did indeed come back, riddling his entire body, cracking bones as if they were eggshells. By November 1989, my dad was in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, loaded with morphine and waiting to die.

  I flew out from New York. Eric was living in L.A. and, along with my mother, had absorbed most of the burden of the final few weeks. When I got there, my dad had a few moments of lucidity but not many. He marveled over the wonderful, psychedelic colors that were on the walls of his hospital room (the walls were completely white; Eric and I told him we were happy he could finally appreciate the reason we used to take drugs back in the sixties and seventies) and he got all excited that Pete Maravich was playing basketball in his hospital hallway (Pistol Pete had died the year before; we said nothing about that to my dad, but Eric pointed out to me that it couldn’t be a positive sign).

  It was at Cedars-Sinai that I saw the indelible image of my dad, half awake, half in a morphine stupor, desperately sucking in an icy root beer through a straw, the cold sweetness of his favorite nonalcoholic drink reassuring him that he was still alive.

  While my father drifted in and out of lucidity, my mom, Eric, and I could do very little but wait. And try to provide as much solace as we could to each other.

  On Thanksgiving Day, Wolfgang came to my parents’ house and prepared a Thanksgiving turkey, with all the trimmings, for my mom, Eric, and me. We ate it at the massive eighteenth-century Spanish wooden table that dominated my parents’ dining room. It was a tasty, if joyless, celebration. The empty seat at the head of the table was impossible to ignore, although Wolf’s effort to provide some holiday cheer was a huge comfort to my mom.

  Over the two or so weeks I was there, I made a lot of runs from my parents’ house to Spago to pick up take-out food. Or a small truck would arrive at the house, Wolf and Barbara regularly sending pizzas, pastas, and desserts. Food became not just their way of sharing our grief, it was their way of helping us—and them—to overcome the sadness.

  Food had always been their way of communicating with my family, and it was a language my mother understood better than most.

  In the hospital, at the end of November, the doctor approached the three of us and said that although we were not officially having this conversation, all we had to do was to let him know when we wanted him to increase the morphine drip and end my dad’s life. He made it clear that my father was not going to get better and the only thing he really had to look forward to was pain. My mother and brother both said they were not capable of making that decision; they could not accept the responsibility for ending my dad’s time here on earth. I said that I could and would make that call. I would have no remorse and no guilt. I would want someone to do that for me. I did not believe in an afterlife, but I also did not believe in unremitting pain. My dad was no longer my dad. I could pull the plug.

  I didn’t have to. My father had made it very, very clear that he did not want to die in a hospital. He wanted to die at home. He was vehement about that. So, not long after the doctor let us know that the end was near, we brought him back to the house he loved, set him up in home hospice care, and waited.

  The hospice nurse was quite wonderful. She explained to all of us, in great detail, what would happen, preparing us for my father’s death. She told us death was not to be feared. She told us what would physically happen to him the moment he died and the moments afterward. She encouraged us not to be afraid to touch him.

  On December 4, 1989, my father died at the age of sixty-seven. He and my mother had been married forty-six years and had been together for fifty-four, counting their teenage courtship at camp.

  Janis had flown out for my dad’s final days and she, Eric, my mother, and I gathered at the long bar in my parents’ house. I went down to my dad’s wine cellar in the basement, rummaged around—something I’d never really done; choosing wine was my dad’s job—and I emerged with what I suspected would be a great bottle of red. I’d never tasted La Tâche but I’d heard my dad talk about it. I decided this is what he’d want us to do. And it was definitely what I wanted to do.

  I later learned that the bottle’s vintage, 1962, was one of the best for La Tâche, which I have come to believe is the greatest red wine in the world.

  I poured four glasses and we began drinking and crying. The next half hour or so was spent pretty much like this:

  I would cry and say something about what a wonderful man my dad was. Then I’d take a sip of La Tâche, my tears would dry up, and I’d say, “Wow! This is really good!”

  My mom would cry and try to say something about my dad but really couldn’t manage to get out more than a word without more crying. Then she’d take a sip of the wine and her head would lift up and she’d say, “Your dad would be very happy we were drinking this.”

  Eric would cry, tell a story about our father, then: “Oh my God! This wine is unbelievable!”

  And Janis, who was being strong for all of us, but obviously shared in the emotional drain, mostly kept patting my mother’s hand, telling her she’d be all right, and then saying, “I’ve never tasted anything like this in my entire life!”

  I have never experienced a more perfect definition of mixed emotions.

  My dad’s body was picked up and taken to the crematorium, and a few days later we had my dad’s memorial service at my parents’ house. It was made clear that the evening was meant to be a celebration of his life, not any kind of religious ceremony or even anything filled with sadness or regret. A celebration is what we wanted and a celebration is what we got.

  Wolf catered the evening, so the food was extraordinary (he didn’t come himself—he was too emotional and couldn’t handle it). My dad’s wine group, WOW, took care of the refreshments. Each of them brought one or two bottles of superb wine, something so good even my dad couldn’t have criticized it. There were a few La Tâches and Romanée-Contis and Grands-Échezeaux, spectacular Burgundies all. But my dad was a Bordeaux guy at heart so there were some incredible Latours and Margaux and Mouton Rothschilds and Haut-Brions and, my dad’s all-time favorite, Petrus.

  People drank a lot and marveled at the
food and told stories about my dad that had me roaring with laughter. Even my mom was laughing through her tears. Really laughing. Not just with relief but with gusto.

  I stayed around a few more days but then, as happens, I had to return to real life: my job, my friends, my relationship. I had to return to the living.

  Before I left, though, my mom and I went out to lunch. We were driving down Melrose Avenue and we were talking about my dad. It was a sunny day and things seemed to have started to return to normal. Suddenly, my mother burst into tears. She began pouring her heart out about the relationship she’d had with my dad.

  “Your father loved me so much that he put my life ahead of his. No one ever realized that but I knew it. He told me that was his definition of true love: that he valued my happiness more than he valued his own.”

  “I know he did,” I said. “He told me, too. He also told me that he knew you’d be all right.”

  “I will,” she said. “I will be all right. I think that’s why I’m crying right now. I know I’ll be okay. And that seems so sad to me. And not really fair.”

  I joined her with a few tears of my own—I’m a serious crier—and then we just started laughing hysterically. Laughing at our emotions, laughing at our fears, laughing because we both felt silly crying and because laughing seemed to be the right thing to do.

  Then we went to lunch.

  LA TCHE AND BTARD-MONTRACHET