by Floyd Skloot
After fourteen hours at his chicken market, my father wanted a home-cooked dinner. And technically, that’s what he’d get: His dinner had been cooked at home. It hadn’t been prepared by his wife, nor at a time even close to when he ate it, but it had been heated and then reheated in the kitchen in our home.
My father would arrive in the apartment just after seven, put his hat in the hall closet and his cigar in the living room’s chrome standing-ashtray, then spend the next five minutes in the bathroom scrubbing his hands. I could hear him blow his nose and hack to clear his throat, getting rid, I believed, of the day’s load of feathers and chicken blood. That Nocturne for Faucet and Facial Orifices was the soundtrack to which my mother started and completed her day’s food preparation duties: removing whatever was in the oven or on the stovetop and setting it on the table.
Until 1957, when I was ten, we lived in a small, fourth-floor, East Flatbush apartment. Its rent, coupled with the rent on his market, was an ongoing source of worry for my father. I got the rents, I got the Mafia I’m paying, now I got these supermarkets taking my customers. Where’s the money supposed to come from? We were going broke, he said. But we had a maid. Just tell me one thing, all right? What is it you do all day that you need a maid?
I remember our maid vividly. Lassie Lee Price had a warm gap-toothed smile and vast brown eyes, was originally from Alabama, was now living in Brooklyn, and spent seven hours a day in our apartment, arriving at around nine while my mother still slept. Lassie cleaned floors and surfaces that hadn’t gotten dirty since she’d cleaned them the day before, changed the bedding, washed and ironed clothes, shopped for groceries, looked after me, and made lunch—which was also my mother’s breakfast—and dinner. Since she left our apartment around four, her final act of the day was to prepare a meal that would cook slowly and then sit until the family gathered at seven fifteen to eat it.
My mother had established that certain foods were to be served on certain nights. I know steak was Monday and chicken was Friday, but can’t remember the exact schedule for meat loaf or some form of ground meat, for roast beef, for lamb chops. Fish was eaten in restaurants. We seldom had soups and we never had stews or leftovers, which my mother deemed peasant food. I remember no cookbooks or discussion of recipes. Preparation was always straightforward: meat was roasted or baked or braised or simmered, any procedure that could take a long time; no sautés or stir-fries, no grilling or broiling, no frills, no fancy brown-then-bake maneuvers, no sauces or gravies. There were canned vegetables, baked potatoes, the occasional slice of bread. It remains inconceivable to me that Veal Italienne “Sklootini” could have emerged from our Brooklyn culinary environment. On a Monday, no less.
After my father sold his market, we moved to a rented home in Long Beach and lived on the main floor. The owners occupied a basement apartment during the summer. But little about the way we lived was altered by our move. My father still left home early and returned late, commuting to Manhattan, where he managed the factory floor of my uncle’s dress business. And, though Lassie was no longer with us, my mother still had a maid, hiring and losing or firing them until she found Hannah. Slender, brooding, given to vociferous whispers as she zoomed around the house, Hannah was a wizard of efficiency who got along with my mother by saying yez miz Sloot and ignoring all but the most basic instructions. There was, apparently, no arguing with Hannah’s results, only her process, and my mother kept Hannah with her until my father died, four years later.
Maybe Hannah was responsible for my mother’s recipe. I can’t be certain, but the cookbook was assembled right around the time she entered our lives. I can imagine my forty-seven-year-old mother coming home from a meeting at the synagogue and sitting in the kitchen to drink a cup of Maxwell House prepared by Hannah, complaining about the ridiculous idea of putting together a cookbook. She wouldn’t want to admit she didn’t cook, in case that reflected badly on her image as a cultured, refined cosmopolitan woman, the modern woman as an effortlessly gourmet chef. At the same time, she would also not want to admit she did cook, in case that reflected badly on her image as an aristocratic and worldly figure of privilege rather than a kitchen drudge. But if she did contribute a recipe, it would have to be something that stood out from the rest, that showed her to be a culinary sophisticate.
What’s the most elegant, epicurean meat? Veal! What’s the fanciest, priciest cut of veal? Scallops! What’s the most complex, polished cuisine? French! Italian! Ok, then, Veal Italienne “Sklootini”! How do you cook that? Probably just like that brisket you make, Hannah. Yez miz Sloot.
Rubber sole
From the moment I saw the recipe, I felt I had to cook it. As avid about cooking as my mother was about not cooking, I saw this as a chance to complete something for her. It would be a tribute to her intention, as I understood it, in submitting the recipe, in presenting herself as the kind of person who cooked such a dish. I realized it would also be a gesture symbolic of reclaiming the loving, fortifying, nourishing hearth that had never existed. But I needed some advice first, in case my assumptions about cooking veal scallops were wrong. After all, Beverly and I didn’t eat veal, seldom ate red meat of any kind, and had been following a gluten-free diet for the last year and a half.
In How to Cook Everything, award-winning food journalist Mark Bittman writes, “Back in the 1950s and 1960s, before we ‘discovered’ boneless chicken breasts, slices of veal cut from the leg—called cutlets, scallops, or scallopine—were the only thin, tender, boneless meat widely available.” Though veal is lean, “properly cooked, it will also be quite tender.” Recipes for veal scallopine I found in various cookbooks or online said to cook the flattened meat for one minute per side, then remove it from the pan, pour on the sauce, and serve. I didn’t find any recipes that called for browning veal scallops ten minutes per side, then adding ingredients for a sauce and cooking for an additional ninety minutes. It seemed that you might cook certain veal steaks or chops that long, but not flattened, tender scallops. Cut into two- or three-inch pieces.
Beverly checked online and found a recent article from a Washington, D.C.-area magazine, Flavor, dedicated to “cultivating the capital foodshed.” Focused on the boom in pasture-raised, rose-colored veal, cultivated to replace the inhumanely confined, milk-fed animals whose treatment had driven consumers away, the article mentioned Marcel’s Restaurant in Washington’s West End, where the chefs were experienced with veal. So I called to speak with Chef Paul about my mother’s recipe.
“I would never do that,” he said. “If it’s good, tender, pounded? No way. No more than four minutes, total.”
I asked what he would do with two and a half pounds of veal scallops. He told me to be sure the meat was flattened, and I could hear him begin pounding some hard surface by the phone as he spoke. “Flour it, sear it, maybe with some garlic, and put the meat right on your sauce. Serve it over spinach, that would be nice.”
Just before hanging up, I asked Chef Paul what would happen if I followed my mother’s recipe. “What will happen? You’ll ruin it and you’ll waste your money.”
I began to wonder if duplicating my mother’s recipe was a bad idea. My point wasn’t to show that her ideas about cooking were as misguided as her ideas about matchmaking, and I didn’t need to cook Veal Italienne “Sklootini” to demonstrate that anyway, given how Chef Paul reacted to the recipe.
I called my friend Roger Porter for advice. He teaches English at Reed College here in Portland and was a food critic for the city’s daily newspaper, the Oregonian. Roger listened to the recipe and assured me the meat would fall apart. He thought for a moment, then said, “But you should cook it, and expense be damned.” He offered to split the cost and cook the dish with me. And eat it, if possible. But our schedules didn’t match up, and I was still wavering about whether to follow the recipe, so Roger suggested I call Robert Reynolds, founder of the Chef ’s Studio, a culinary training school in Portland that specializes in French and Italian cooking classes for bot
h professionals and amateurs. “He’s the most interesting chef in town.” As a final comment, Roger advised me to think of my mother’s recipe as “a deathbed command. Her last horrific gift to you.” That didn’t actually help.
After Robert Reynolds heard my story and my mother’s recipe, he said, “You could call it ‘Rubber Sole.’” He then told me to throw the results away and take my guests out to dinner. He also thought the recipe wasn’t particularly Italian: “It has less to do with Florence than with Prague.”
Then Robert made a point that changed everything: it wouldn’t be possible for me to duplicate my mother’s recipe because I wouldn’t be using the same kind of meat. Milk-fed veal, which my mother would have bought in the late 1950s, was white meat. The veal I would buy now, imported from Canada by Whole Foods, is red meat, and completely different in taste, texture, composition, and appearance. “It’s young beef, not veal, and they don’t compare. You’re spared. You can’t re-create her dish, so you might as well make something good instead.”
He recommended even less cooking than Chef Paul had: thirty seconds on one side, twenty-five on the other. “Then slip it into your sauce to keep warm.” If I absolutely had to try my mother’s approach, he advised, I should use a cheaper white meat like pork or chicken breast. “But, what would be the point?”
Condensing the universe
Three nights before my mother’s one hundredth birthday, I served Veal Italienne “Sklootini” to Kerry and Nigel Arkell, friends for more than a quarter century, who have long demonstrated willingness to forgive me for any culinary disaster. Once they’d heard about the recipe’s appearance and my discussions with the experts, they volunteered to eat any version I chose to cook.
They arrived with a bottle of claret, a salad, and homemade kale chips, and gathered around the kitchen island. My first thought was that this way of visiting, and this comfort around the cooking zone, was something I treasure, and now I understood more about why that was so. Then I thought it may have been something my mother, in some unexplored recess of her mind, had yearned for but could never pursue because of her class anxieties or aristocratic pretensions or fear of mess. And perhaps that was behind her impulse to submit the recipe for a dish that combined—potentially—basic, homey, one-dish comfort and a certain level of European stylishness: Veal Italienne “Sklootini.”
I’d made the tomato sauce early in the afternoon and let it simmer for ninety minutes, borrowing the cooking time from my mother’s recipe but keeping the veal out of it. The sauce used all my mother’s ingredients except the mystery bay leaf, whose use was ignored by the recipe too, but I substituted fresh for canned mushrooms and fresh Italian parsley for dried flakes. It also included a few additions: onions as requested by Beverly, olives as desired by me, basil in honor of Nigel—who is from England and whom I called Basil the first time we met—and red wine because I couldn’t imagine tomato sauce without it.
I had water heated for the gluten-free brown rice pasta, a dish with rice flour to coat the veal, and a sauté pan ready on the stove. So there was little left to do except open the wine and drink a toast to my mother.
The final preparations were quick, hectic, and splattery, and I could feel my mother turning away until it would end. When the pasta was finished, I made a mistake, lifting the nestled strainer from the pot while it was still on the stove and sending a cascade of starchy water all over the place. My mother was now officially out of the room, unwilling to be in the presence of such mess. You see? This is why I didn’t cook. With the drained spaghetti in a serving platter, I poured on the sauce and turned back to the stove. The lightly floured veal got seared for longer than Robert Reynolds’s recommended fifty-five seconds but less than Chef Paul’s four minutes, and was still pink in the middle when I put it into the sauce and declared the meal ready to eat. My mother came back so we could drink a second toast to her and dig into Veal Italienne “Sklootini” 2010.
I wish I’d thought of adding an extra place setting and cup of wine to our table for my mother, as we did during Passover Seders to welcome the prophet Elijah. I could imagine my mother gazing at the heaped platter and nodding, then spreading her arms wide in one of her extravagant dinner-table gestures, declaring the food divine, and asking if we expected anything less. What I felt surprised me: a sense of harmony with my mother that would never have been possible in the life I shared with her. It was as though the act of cooking her dish had breached time, had allowed me to reach my mother in ways that had been unimaginable in her life or since her death. I thought of a sentence from one of my favorite cooking-related memoirs, Betty Fussell’s My Kitchen Wars: “Cooking connects every hearth fire to the sun,” she wrote, “and smokes out whatever gods there be—Along with the ghosts of all our kitchens past, and all the people who have fed us with love and hate and fear and comfort, and who we in turn have fed. A kitchen condenses the universe.”
Though I’d cut the recipe nearly in half, the four of us couldn’t finish all the food. Since Nigel would be on his own for the next few days while Kerry traveled to the Oregon coast, we sent the leftovers home with him. A few days later, I called to ask how Veal Italienne “Sklootini” held up over time.
“Very, very well,” he said. “I had it two nights in a row, it was good enough for that.” This surprised me, since I was sure reheating would toughen the meat. “No, no, I could cut it with a fork.” Then, after a pause, he said, “of course, it could just be another Brit happy not bothering to cook, but I liked it even better the next nights.”
My mother would have loved Nigel’s accent. She would have been pleased to hear that such a sophisticated man appreciated her recipe, exactly the sort of fellow she had in mind to impress. She might even overcome her shock at learning that he would eat leftovers.
Veal Italienne “Sklootini” 1958
olive oil
1 bay leaf
2½ lbs. veal—flattened & cut into 2- or 3-inch pieces
2 cans Italian plum tomatoes, pressed with fork until almost smooth
salt & pepper
oregano
parsley flakes
1 small can mushrooms (optional)
1 regular or 4 Italian green peppers (remove seeds & cut into slices)
Heat about 5 tbsp. of olive oil & 4 large cloves of garlic (minced) in a large skillet, until garlic is a light golden brown. Add veal & heat on both sides for about 10 minutes. Add 2 large cans of Italian tomatoes (pressed to remove end lumps), salt & pepper, a tsp. of oregano & let simmer for about 90 minutes. Stir several times. 10 minutes before serving, cut in the green pepper & a sprinkling of parsley flakes. You may also add a small can of button mushrooms at the end. I suggest that you make spaghetti, to serve an elegant Italian meal, as you will have enough extra sauce.
Lillian Skloot
Veal Italienne “Sklootini” 2010
(Gluten-Free)
olive oil
1½ lbs. veal scallops
small sweet onion sliced
4 cloves garlic
1 large and 1 small can crushed tomatoes
1 tbsp. tomato paste
1 green pepper, cubed
oregano
basil
fresh Italian parsley, chopped
¼ cup red wine
15–20 pitted Kalamata olives
12–15 fresh mushrooms, sliced
salt & pepper
1 package gluten-free spaghetti (such as brown rice spaghetti)
grated fresh parmesan cheese
Heat olive oil and add onion. As onion softens, add garlic and brown. Add green pepper. Add mushrooms and sauté till mushrooms have given up liquid. Add herbs. Add tomatoes and tomato paste. Then add wine and simmer, covered, for at least 90 minutes. Toss in Kalamata olives.
Prepare spaghetti. Add to platter and top with sauce.
Shortly before serving, heat olive oil in another pan. Coat veal scallops in rice flour. When oil is hot, sear scallops for 30–60 seconds, then turn and sear for a
nother 25–45 seconds. Remove from pan, place in sauce, and serve. Provide grated parmesan cheese on side.
Floyd Skloot
