Doing my best to ignore Giuseppina’s look of bemusement, I moved over to the stove. The butter was just about melted. Giovanna said that she always added the sugar by eye. Her exact words were, “I have not a weight.” So she mixed the sugar in and just did her best to make the correct distribution. The next instruction from her: “Don’t touch.” All you have to do at this point is let the sugar and butter caramelize over medium-low heat.
Next: Giovanna allowed me to squeeze a lemon over all the apples. This prevents them from turning brown and makes sure they’re as beautiful as possible for the finished product. As Giovanna said about this process: “When you peel the apples, it’s like the sun on your skin.” The lemon works as sunblock on naked apples.
Remove from the heat when the mixture is caramelized. This is also done by sight: when the thing is bubbling and brown and looks kind of gooey, but before it’s burnt, it’s done.
Put the apples in the pan—and here is Giovanna’s clever trick that differs just a bit from Martha’s recipe: she cuts off the bottom of each apple so it’s flat and she stands them all up in the pan rather than laying them down. First they go around the edge of the pan, forming a perfect circle, then you form another circle within that one, then another, until the pan is completely filled with upright apples. It’s like a bunch of little apple soldiers standing at attention.
Turn the heat back on to medium. When the bottoms are brown, turn them over and brown the other side. Do it carefully, one apple at a time. When both sides are done—tops and bottoms should be nice and brown, but be careful not to burn them—remove the pan from the heat. The apples have to cool before you put the crust on or the crust will melt and sag into the mixture. That’s a big no-no.
I get nervous making crust. Giovanna kept saying it was easy and for her it was. The crust has to be done in advance because it needs time in the refrigerator. You can do it two or three hours ahead of the filling, but it’s probably better to do it the day before so you don’t screw it up.
It’s confession time: I didn’t make the crust with Giovanna. She did it the day before and stuck it in the fridge. She wasn’t worried about screwing it up, she was just too busy to do it the day of the luncheon. When I got home to New York, I did the Martha version just to make sure it’s doable by people like me. It is. She’s Martha Stewart—what did you expect?
When the apples are cool, cover them and the skillet with the dough, rolled out as Martha instructs. Then, in the oven it goes. Keep it in until the dough looks like a nice, brown crust.
Giovanna’s Tarte Tatin. See what happens when you stand those apples up?
Take it out of the oven and let it cool. Eventually, you’re going to turn the thing over so the crust is on the bottom. There are two ways this will fail: If the tarte isn’t cool. Or if you don’t have enough apples in the pan (think of them as columns holding up the crust when you do the inversion). You turn it over by putting a round platter tightly on top of the dough, take a deep breath, utter a quick prayer if you’re a spiritually minded person, and flip. You should have a perfect tarte tatin: browned apples standing on a lovely crust.
Serve—whipped cream can be a nice addition—and take your bows.
NANCY SILVERTON’S CHALLAH AND BOULE
I have been lucky enough to work with several actual geniuses over the course of my career. Not just really smart people but geniuses. People who have a vision unlike others in their field; people who produce things on a different level from others in their field. I’ve edited books and written screenplays with Roman Polanski. Genius. I’ve edited books by Stephen Sondheim and worked with him on a show that I cocreated. Genius genius genius. I’d add Robert Hughes, whom I’ve also edited, to this short list. And if I can add the word “eccentric” before the word “genius,” I would have to include Bill James of Baseball Abstract fame. And Nancy Silverton definitely belongs. She is a genius baker.
Because of my mother’s friendship with Nancy, I’ve known her for ages and have watched her rise in the food world with considerable awe. She was the original pastry chef at Spago. The Los Angeles restaurant she ran with her then-husband Mark Peel, Campanile, was innovative and superb (never more so than when Nancy instituted Grilled Cheese Sandwich Night every Thursday). She now oversees three magnificent L.A. restaurants, all in the same building: Osteria Mozza, Pizzeria Mozza, and Chi Spacca. But of all her successes, the one I found to be the most intoxicating was the La Brea Bakery, which she started in 1989. Nancy’s bread baking is beyond compare. I still dream about the chocolate cherry bread she used to sell when the bakery was at the front of Campanile.
You can delve into the pleasures of Nancy writing about wheat and bread texture and all sorts of other doughy topics on your own if you read Nancy Silverton’s Breads from the La Brea Bakery, which I believe is the best book ever written about bread and bread baking. But I’m only going to discuss her starter, as well as her boule and her challah, my mother’s two favorite breads.
So about Nancy’s starter: I find it absolutely impossible to make. Every time I’ve tried I’ve totally screwed it up. I consider this a major failing on my part.
Fortunately, good old Abby Levine, he of the successful salmon coulibiac preparation, really knows what he’s doing when it comes to baking bread. He makes it all the time, although he tends to use the ingenious and almost fail-proof no-kneading method, perfected and made famous by Jim Lahey, founder of the Sullivan Street Bakery. For my mom, however, I told Abby that I needed serious support on the bread front and that I wanted to go old school and use Nancy’s starter and recipes. Foolishly, he agreed.
You can make Lahey’s great bread in one day. Start from scratch in the late afternoon and have it warm for dinner. Nancy’s sourdough starter takes fourteen days! Two weeks! And that’s before you even start baking. The upside to that is once your starter is grown, as long as you feed and maintain it, it will last the rest of your life. It’s kind of like Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors except not as funny and you eat it instead of vice versa.
DAY 1: GROWING THE CULTURE (FERMENTATION BEGINS)
(NOTE FROM ME, NOT NANCY: SO DO THE DRY SWEATS)
HAVE READY:
Cheesecloth
Scale
One 1-gallon plastic, ceramic, or glass container
Rubber spatula, optional
Plastic wrap, optional
Long-stemmed, instant-read cooking thermometer
Room thermometer
1 pound red or black grapes (pesticide free)
2 pounds (about 4 cups) lukewarm water, 78 degrees F
1 pound 3 ounces (about 3¾ cups) unbleached white bread flour
I am not going to go through every step of Nancy’s recipe. For one thing, it wouldn’t be fair to her to give away all her secrets. But I will tell you that, out of respect for Nancy, Abby and I followed the instructions perfectly. I was so excited during this process that I went out and purchased the same digital scale Abby uses and the same measuring cup, which has both American and European measurements on the side. I also bought the same digital thermometer, because I couldn’t believe how cool it was to actually know that the water we were using was exactly seventy-eight degrees.
Working side by side in Abby’s kitchen, we each made the starter. We did precisely the same thing at the same time. Then we sealed our starter into our gallon bowls at the exact same moment. I took my starter home. Abby kept his in his kitchen.
Nancy’s book provides day-by-day instructions for the remaining thirteen days of growth. By the time I got home from Abby’s, he had sent me an e-mail with those instructions, formatted to go into my e-calendar. So for the next many days, the first thing I did every day was check that calendar. Along with 8:00 a.m. gym and 12:30 p.m. Lunch with President Obama (okay, I made that one up, but I really do go to the gym) were such things as: Day Two: You will notice a few tiny bubbles in the mixture, and the bag of grapes may have begun to inflate. And: Day Ten: Begin early today, because this is the d
ay the culture becomes a starter—and the day you put it on a permanent feeding schedule.
Abby and I swapped photos on our phones every day, sometimes several times a day. We compared the odors emanating from our respective one-gallon containers to the best of our descriptive abilities. We discussed the nature of bubbles in late-night texts. It was a little like starting a new romance, except, even on its best days, the object of my desire had a “distinct, unpleasant, alcohol-like smell” and “a yellowish liquid top layer.” On Day Three, Abby was certain his had flopped. There were no bubbles and very little grape inflation. I, on the other hand, was brimming with confidence. My grapes were enormous—I boasted about them in several texts to Mr. Levine—and bubbles were aplenty. By Day Seven, my confidence had flagged substantially and Abby’s was on the rise. By Day Eleven, I was certain I had bombed out big time. Abby was questioning his starter but hadn’t lost all confidence.
On Day Fourteen, my starter was as dead as anything could possibly be. It was, as was I, a dismal failure. But Abby texted me a one-word verdict on his experiment: SUCCESS!
His starter lived to be baked another day.
On Day Fifteen, Abby sent me a photo of the boule he made from his starter. It was perfectly round and crusty and I could practically smell the enticing yeasty aroma through my phone.
Determined to succeed, I went back to the drawing board. I decided that it was the cab ride home from Abby’s, with my starter in tow, that had done me in. So I began again, in my own kitchen. I got my pesticide-free grapes, used my scale with the precision of a Nobel Prize–winning scientist, and pointed my digital thermometer at seventy-eight-degree water. This starter was my Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole and I was Roald Amundsen. That analogy turned out to be a bit flawed. I turned out to be Captain Robert Scott rather than Amundsen. The South Pole won. On Day Eight, after watching it refuse to bubble, expand, smell wonderfully yeasty, or develop into anything remotely like what Nancy described in her book or what Abby had inserted into my daily calendar, I threw my starter in the garbage.
My pathetic and pretty gross starter
But I love my digital thermometer
CHALLAH
Having proved a dismal failure with the starter, I was dependent on Abby to come through for my mom. I told her what we were doing—and was honest about our respective roles and successes and failures. Abby’s boule was mom-worthy. But challah was a different challenge.
Even Nancy, who thinks that all baking is easy, says that challah is one of the hardest shapes to make. I accepted the fact that I was out of my league. Unwilling to face failure again, I went with Plan B: begging Abby to do it for me.
Remembering how deftly and artistically he’d added the fish shape to our coulibiac, I knew he could manage the challah’s braid. I was correct: he made something that looked like the challah I used to get at Ratner’s take-out counter. But the taste?
Solid.
Not incredible, but good.
He was more critical than I. But he could afford to be; he’d succeeded in making the damn thing and he could calculate what he needed to do next time to improve the texture, the design, and the taste.
Me?
I could only dream.
PART FIVE
AFTER-DINNER DRINK
My Mom’s Favorite Dessert Wine: Château d’Yquem
All sorrows are less with bread.
—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
And Château d’Yquem.
—Judy Gethers
CHAPTER NINE
My intention, my sole goal while writing this book, was to cook with my mom, to share the breakfast and lunch menus with her as I went along, and to become proficient enough in the kitchen so I could make the dinner of her dreams. My plan for that dinner was to invite the people who were most important to her, and to whom she was important, and we would all share a dazzling sequence of marvelous dishes that had emotional resonance for many at the table. We would finish with a glass or two of d’Yquem. The evening would be spent enjoying and critiquing the food, as well as reminiscing about great meals, groundbreaking restaurants, and eccentric characters, laughing, crying, and celebrating a unique person and her extraordinary life.
I didn’t quite make it.
On February 1, 2016, my mom died.
Her death, and the final several months of her life, could not have been much more perfect or inspiring. Strange to say, her final months were even great fun, for her and for those around her. I don’t know how she made that happen but she did.
Many people assumed that my mother’s post-stroke period, which lasted seven years, would be the ultimate testament to her strength and courage. But it wasn’t. In some ways, it wasn’t even close. Her final and most remarkable stage began on October 26, 2015.
That evening, I was invited to a screening of a documentary about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The theater was uptown, about sixty blocks from my apartment. After the movie, I went to dinner with friends, then took a taxi downtown. At 10:45, with the cab two blocks from my apartment, my cell phone rang. It was Carla, the woman who runs SelectCare. She told me that my mother had had some tests done earlier that day and that the lab just called; they thought the results of the tests warranted a call at this late hour. My mother’s INR (internal normalized ratio) count—it measures degrees of anticoagulation—was insanely high. Normal was one or two. Three was high. My mother’s count was fourteen. I asked Carla what this meant and she said that if the results were accurate, my mom was in serious danger of internal bleeding, which would be life threatening. She wanted my permission for the SelectCare aide to take my mom to the hospital immediately so the test could be re-administered. If the initial results were incorrect, then my mom would just come right home. If they were true, the hospital could treat it with medication and return the INR count to normal.
The cab pulled up in front of my apartment and I told Carla that I needed five minutes to think. I said I’d call her back.
I went upstairs and quickly fed my cats. Before I let Mitch gobble down his delicious bowl of Minced Turducken, however, I picked him up and hugged him tightly to my chest and cheek. Harper did not love being held and squeezed—she was much more of a cuddler, and then only at moments of her choosing. Mitchum was always happy to let me do whatever I wanted with him, so now I used him for fifteen seconds of much-needed comfort.
I needed those five minutes to think because, just as my father had done twenty-six years earlier, my mom had made one thing very clear to me: she did not want to die in the hospital.
About two years earlier, she’d fallen and broken her pelvis. She was rushed to the emergency room, where Dr. Lachs met us. He explained that my mother had suffered the most painful injury imaginable. But my mom refused to acknowledge the pain because she knew that if she did, she’d have to stay in the hospital. I had a choice: 1) force her to stay against her wishes; the surgeons weren’t going to operate on someone so fragile but she might get some form of treatment and would probably spend another night in the hallway of the ER, or 2) get her the hell out of there and hope that she could survive and recuperate at home. I decided my mom was going home. I told her what was happening, promised she’d be leaving as soon as I could get an ambulance, and then, knowing that her pain tolerance was at a superhuman level, I said, “Okay, you’re going home no matter what the real answer is, but let me put it to you this way. I know you keep saying that you’re not in pain, but if it was me, would I be in pain?” She managed a thin smile and said, “Oh yes.”
She went home, refused to even take her pain meds, and, once again, despite what the doctors told me would happen, she returned to normal in six weeks.
After that little episode, I knew that the only way she was ever going to the hospital at this stage of her life was if the choice was taken out of her hands.
That night in October, the choice was removed from both of our hands. As I paced in my apartment and wondered what the right thing to do was—get her to the
hospital or let her stay at home and risk the likelihood that she would start bleeding and die—my cell rang again. It was Carla. My mother had started bleeding profusely from her anus. An ambulance was already rushing her to Lenox Hill Hospital.
I was back uptown by eleven thirty p.m. and stayed with my mom until four a.m. The first doctor who came by to see my mother was a young woman—she looked to be about fourteen to me—with tattoos and body piercings. I explained that I didn’t want any extreme measures performed that would keep my mother alive: no machines, no invasive treatment. Expecting an argument, I got none. The doctor said that she understood. I also said that if my mother was dying, I did not want her dying in Lenox Hill. I wanted her home. Again, the doctor said she understood. She calmly explained that all they were going to do was give my mom an intravenous injection to try to get her INR level down to normal. By that point, it was at eighteen.
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