My father was a Bordeaux lover. He also drank a lot of Rhône wines—he was a huge fan of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. My dad was not subtle, in his life or his tastes, so he liked big, hearty wines that could overwhelm. But he also appreciated Burgundies. If they never quite claimed his heart, he admired them and respected their quiet superiority.
He preferred red wine but he would happily sip a good white. He drank Loire whites quite often—Sancerre and Muscadet were the everyday whites—but here he preferred white Burgundies. He liked cold Chablis and we always had bottles of Puligny-Montrachet and various other Montrachets. When I was in high school, my dad opened a bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet before dinner one night and he gave me a sip. I remember being struck by how smooth and silky it was. My dad was pleased that I liked it. He said it was the Moby Dick of wines—it was the Great White.
When I started drinking wine—not the gallon jugs of Gallo and Almaden I swigged in college, but as my taste became more sophisticated and I began to understand the real pleasure inherent in good wine—I started drinking Bordeaux because that’s what I knew. I bought relatively cheap vintages. Of course, I couldn’t afford Petrus (I couldn’t even afford a glass of Petrus, never mind a whole bottle), but I found second-, third-, and fourth-tier vintners and began to discern different levels in tastes. Around the same time, I began cooking, too, enjoying the sensation of making my own meals and feeding others. I also had an actual girlfriend, Cindy, so it was fun to play at being domestic. I liked to make a reasonably fancy dinner—no salmon coulibiac yet but a good roast chicken, perhaps, and even a cake—and open up a real bottle of wine, a Chianti, always a fail-safe red, or a bottle of nonvintage Château Palmer. My taste level at that time was basically to go for anything that had a label with a nice drawing of a French château on it.
I have never developed a great palate, which drives me a little crazy because now I actually know a decent amount about wine; it’s one of the few things I have the patience to study. I can discourse too long on the best years and different types of grapes. But I don’t have the ability to fully grasp all of the complex levels of tastes. I’ve gone to wine-tasting classes and the teacher will say things like, “Okay, what do you feel on your tongue? And what do you taste as it hits the back of your throat?” People will say things like “dirt, it’s very earthy at the start” or “cherries” or “jasmine” or “it goes from blackberry at first to almost rose-like” and he’ll be nodding, pleased, while I’m sitting there thinking, “I taste wine. How the fuck is anyone tasting jasmine?”
I appreciate a wine’s nose, though. I’m decent at sensing the change in smell that occurs. It’s one of my favorite things about wine, in fact, the way it changes. The aroma can be huge when the bottle is opened, then it can die down quickly, then reemerge the longer it is exposed to air, then disappear completely. So, too, can the taste of a great bottle of wine change during the course of drinking it: it can start strong and weaken the longer it’s not drunk. Or it can start very small, even bland, and then fifteen minutes later the taste is enormous, exciting, as if the wine is fighting to show you it deserves to be imbibed.
Over the years, I have made a few wine-tasting trips with a small group of friends who are serious wine people. One of them, Don Zacharia, a.k.a. Zachy, sells wine for a living; I’d go so far as to say he’s a legend in the wine business. Another of them, Len Riggio, has a world-class cellar; much of what I have learned of the great, great wines—the wines that normal people like me almost never get a chance to drink—comes from his generosity.
Ten or so years ago, we had a little foray to Bordeaux and Burgundy—the two wine experts and their wives, Christina and Louise, Janis, and me. We got to experience things that were once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for wine lovers: a private dinner at Château Margaux (with liveried footmen!); a hearty lunch with the grape pickers in the Petrus fields; a private tasting at Latour. That tasting was in a glass building, in the middle of the vineyards. Six glasses were put in front of each of us and we were told that we were having a surprise, blind tasting. It turned out that they had obtained all of our birth dates from our passports and thus knew how old everyone was. We were served wine from each of our birth years, most of which happened to be great vintages. It was unreal. Zachy was born in 1931 and the owner of Latour said that they only had two bottles of that vintage and no one at the vineyard had ever tasted it before.
In Burgundy, we had a private tasting at Romanée-Conti, sampling ancient vintages of La Tâche—I was swooning.
We had a remarkable afternoon at Domaine Ponsot, one of the great, small Burgundy wine producers. The winery is in the town of Morey-Saint-Denis and they began producing wine in 1934. Laurent Ponsot arranged for us to have lunch in his cave. He told us a bit of history about his farm and regaled us with an amazing story about his role in an FBI sting—the domaine’s wines were counterfeited (a Ponsot vintage was being sold at auction for a lot of money—only it was a year in which they did not produce any wine!) and Laurent showed up at the auction, in person, to denounce the sale and help the FBI capture the counterfeiter. Sipping his extraordinary Ponsot Clos de la Roche and Clos Saint-Denis, wolfing down cold chicken and cheese and warm baguettes and olives, I made a silent toast to my dad. He is the only person I’ve ever met who would have enjoyed the experience even more than I did.
Something happens almost every day of my life that makes me realize that I miss my father. It is never the sense that I need him; it is never when anything bad is happening. I miss him at moments like when I’m sitting in Monsieur Ponsot’s cave, laughing and marveling at the wine I’m sipping.
Admittedly, sometimes I do well up with tears at those times, but these moments are never sad for me. They are moments that make me appreciate the pleasures in my life. And they make me appreciate even more that my parents prepared me so well to understand and grab the opportunity to partake of those pleasures.
ÉPOISSES, THE GREATEST CHEESE ON EARTH
In the early 1980s, when my parents came back from their barge trip in Burgundy, my mother tried to describe the taste to me of a cheese she had sampled. It was called Époisses and she said she had never had anything like it.
The cheese was not available in the States at that time and wouldn’t be for quite a while. Then, Janis and I were invited, maybe fifteen years ago, to a friend’s apartment for dinner. The friend is a French woman, Jeannette Seaver, who has the annoying, inherently French ability to effortlessly make a perfect meal. That night, she called around five p.m., said she had just decided to make dinner, and were we free? We were. We got there at seven thirty to find that she had prepared a cold soup, a roast duck, a tarte tatin, and several other courses that would have taken me a week to prepare properly. I kept saying, “Seriously? You really started cooking at five?” Jeannette pooh-poohed me and said, “Of course not, that’s just when I called you. I started at five thirty.”
After the meal and before the tarte, she brought out a plate of cheese and a baguette. The cheese, she said, was Burgundian and it was called Époisses. It took me a moment, but I recalled my mother’s excitement when she tried to describe the taste of Époisses to me more than a decade earlier. Before I took my first bite, I wondered if this food could possibly live up to its hype. It’s like going to see Hamilton after everyone in the world tells you it’s the greatest play in the history of Broadway. It has to be disappointing, doesn’t it?
No, it doesn’t.
Époisses is the Hamilton of cheeses.
It must be served when ripe, which means starting to ooze onto the plate on which it sits. It has a medium-thick rind and when you cut past that rind—and the rind is to be eaten, do not think of discarding it—inside is a creamy, runny, very, very strong-smelling delight that I might go so far as to say is the best single food I can think of. It is perfect when slathered on a piece of thick bread—that is probably where it is at its best—but it also is delicious if, say, dripped over a cauliflower and then baked. Or, without overindulging,
used in an omelet with bits of ham or onion. Or try it—again, don’t use a crazy amount—if you want to have the absolutely perfect grilled cheese sandwich. Just keep in mind: it is potent.
After my mother had her stroke, I will sometimes bring her a ripe Époisses from Citarella. It is not the neatest food to eat, even with two good hands and full motor skills. But my mother slaps it on bread as best she can, and after every bite looks as if she has been let into heaven.
On one trip to Burgundy, I stopped into a small roadside café—it was Christmas week so not many places were open—and one item on the menu was a thin steak that they said was topped with Époisses. This was irresistible. I ordered it, picturing a steak with a butter-size pat of the strong cheese on top. Wrong. Out came a steak—the same cut used in a real French steak-frites—swimming in melted Époisses. The cheese was actually dripping over the side of the plate onto the tablecloth. I don’t know whether I’d recommend this to too many people. All I can say is that some people fall asleep fantasizing about Penelope Cruz or Emily Ratajkowski or, if you’re of a certain age, Jane Fonda in her Barbarella costume. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that, too often, I fall asleep dreaming about an Époisses-covered steak.
CHAPTER EIGHT
One of the things that happens, which people rarely want to admit, is that when a parent or a spouse dies there is, along with the sadness and the ache of loss, a liberating kind of freedom. For the rest of one’s life, the question becomes how one deals with that freedom.
My dad’s death did not unmoor me, it only made me aware that I had to be a bit more vigilant in my life choices since I had lost 50 percent of the moral overview I greatly valued.
My brother felt true sorrow. But he also could now throw off what he felt to be a somewhat oppressive and restraining yoke. He was free to do what he wanted to do, not what he felt my father wanted him to do.
My mom grieved and lived with a layer of sadness that never truly left her—but she also leapt into an independent life where she was now her own key decision maker.
She and I grew closer. Our relationship became one of deep affection and mutual respect and we spent even more time together because we wanted to, not because we had to. In the same way she had once assumed a part-time father role, playing football and baseball with me when I was young, now she took up the mantle of moral checkpoint. She was far less vocal than my dad; rather than thundering, she tended to raise an eyebrow or perhaps say, “Is that the smart thing to do?” But her perspective was always clear and pointed.
Everyone told my mom not to make any rash decisions the first year of widowhood and she didn’t. She remained in the large house, spent much time working in the kitchen at Spago (her preferred safe haven), wrote new cookbooks, did some teaching. But things changed around her. Some of her friends—at least people she thought of as friends—stopped calling. Mostly they were couples who valued the male part of the coupledom more than the female. But some were women, also widowed; many of them also stopped calling. I told my mom that some people simply didn’t know how to deal with death. It made them uncomfortable and so they retreated. My mother, in full “animal” mode, had one response: “Fuck ’em.” She never forgave those who carelessly or deliberately hurt her.
Increasingly, she struck out on her own. Some friends were carryovers—those who demonstrated that they were worth carrying over; my mom made it her choice rather than theirs—and many were new, people who met and valued my mother as an individual. Most of these newbies were connected to food: chefs or chefs’ agents or restaurant owners or people selling cookware. Sometimes they were just food lovers: students of hers or regulars at Spago. My mom believed that an appreciation of food was a window into character and that became a shorthand method she used to open herself up to trust people.
She thought seriously about starting her own business—a cookie store; she made superb and unique cookies, thick and chewy as mini-brownies. However, the friend she was going to partner with died suddenly, in her sleep, and that put a damper on the new business. To a degree, my mom spent this period drifting. But this was the period in which she was allowing herself to drift, even being urged to drift.
Two years after my dad’s death, a major earthquake hit L.A. My mom’s house was up in the hills, and a big chunk of her hillside above Mulholland Drive disappeared in moments. She had no electricity for a week or two, which frightened her and made her feel trapped and vulnerable. She decided it was time to sell the house, which she did quickly, and she moved to an apartment that was walking distance from Spago. It was her first attempt to stop the drift.
She began to spend time away from Los Angeles, still mourning my dad but also appreciating her freedom. The first summer she was on her own, she rented a house in Sag Harbor, the town where I have a weekend house. It was great to have her there. She gave weekly cooking lessons to my friends and me: we learned how to make garlic soup and pie dough, and this was the first time I ever saw how to properly clean a mushroom by peeling off the top skin rather than trying to wash the pesky little things. Janis and I would also wake up in the morning and there would be fresh ginger scones that my mom had baked, sitting on the kitchen table, along with a jar of freshly made strawberry jam. It was a summer of homemade morning muffins and group dinners that honed my cooking skills and my palate and helped my mom come to stand on her own and begin to make peace with her new existence.
My mom had always loved to travel, and more and more she began to indulge her adventurous streak. For her first big trip, she went with her niece Beth to New Guinea, where they walked with natives in the jungle and slept in straw huts. In full Auntie Mame mode, and for some reason I could never quite fathom, she also bought native-made penis sheaths as gifts for many of her friends back home. After that, mostly with Beth, occasionally with her sister Belle or her sister Lil, over the next decade or so my mom went to London (several times), France, Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, Bali, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg, Kenya, Tanzania, the Netherlands, Morocco, Tuscany, Rome, Sicily, Russia, Poland, Germany, Spain, and southern India. I heard much about the food in all of those places (India might have been her favorite eating trip, although I think she was ready for a change by the time she and Beth returned home). And over the years, it never failed to tickle her when I would say, “I’d love to go to such-and-such” and she’d wave her hand dismissively and say, “Been there.” She was proud of her adventurous spirit and enjoyed gloating about it.
After two years of L.A. apartment living, my mom decided it was time for another change. Despite the fact that it meant leaving many of her friends behind, she packed up and moved to New York. I found her a great apartment in the Village but she mysteriously resisted the idea of living downtown. She wouldn’t explain her stubbornness but she moved into an apartment on the Upper East Side and slid into city living as if she hadn’t been gone for thirty years.
New York City food and restaurant life was thriving in the early nineties. Many of my mother’s L.A. disciples—waiters who were now restaurant managers, managers who were now owners, sous-chefs who were now kings of their own castles—had migrated east. It didn’t take long for my mom to be as revered in the New York food scene as she was in Los Angeles.
One afternoon I came back from a business trip to London. I’d been gone for a couple of weeks and as I was going through my stacks of mail, I saw a postcard that announced the opening of a new restaurant on my block, two or three doors down from my apartment. It was called Blue Hill and the announcement proclaimed that they were open for a few weeks to just “friends and family.” They made it clear that “family” included anyone who lived near the place. I immediately called my mom and said she should come downtown around seven thirty and we’d go try out the new restaurant. Without hesitating, she agreed.
After we’d had a martini, a bottle of wine, and the incredibly delicious fixed tasting menu—that was all they were serving during their six-week-long trial opening, so they could perfect both th
e cooking and the service—I told my mom I was going to go introduce myself to and praise the chef.
I made my way to the kitchen, introduced myself to the chef, who also happened to be the owner, and whose name was Dan Barber (now considered one of the major, most influential chefs in New York—Blue Hill is where Michelle Obama insisted she and her husband go on their first dinner date after he was elected president). We shook hands. I said that I practically lived next door, told him how great the dinner was and that I was his new best customer, and then told him my name.
He cocked his head and said, “Gethers? Are you any relation to Judy?”
I nodded and said that she was my mom.
His eyes widened and he said, “She’s my idol.”
I said, “Well, she’s had a martini and some wine, so she’s propped up by the front door, but I can go back and get her, if you want.”
He very much wanted that. When my mom had made her way back to the kitchen, Dan told her that they’d met before—he had been on the line at Nancy Silverton and Mark Peel’s L.A. restaurant, Campanile—and he said that my mom’s Italian cookbook had been one of the things that inspired him to become a chef. He also talked about how everyone revered her in the L.A. cooking scene. My mom looked embarrassed—but thrilled—and told him how wonderful our meal was. Then she headed uptown and I went back to my apartment, still somewhat surprised by and pondering the fact that my mother was a great chef’s idol.
That was not an isolated incident when going out and about with my mom. We’d go to one of Danny Meyer’s restaurants and the server would bring a complimentary appetizer to the table, announcing, “Danny says you’re the queen of the cooking world and he wants you to try this.” Michael McCarty owns the eponymous Michael’s on East 55th Street, the hot publishing and TV spot for lunch in midtown. I’d go in there and Michael, who goes back to the days of the Ma Cuisine cooking school, would come over and say, “Please bring your mom in! I love her! She’s like my own mom!” She could get reservations instantly in restaurants that wouldn’t take me for three weeks. Chefs would try out new dishes for her to taste. Sometimes meals were free or the final amount was half of what it should have been. My mom dismissed all this treatment. But she loved it. And although she never would admit it, she understood that she deserved it.
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