Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  That kind of magnificence—that expertness of choreography and timing—would have been dismissed as fancy. There was no customer base in Ann Arbor for handblown sugar glass. The company’s service captain was so disabled by palsy that to watch him ferry a sloshing and rattling silver tray of crystal champagne flutes around to the guests at certain black-tie events was excruciating enough and as much of a challenge as he could take on, even if some event organizer had called, improbably, inquiring about the possibility of Russian Imperial Service. I dressed for work every day in clean check pants and my own clean chef jackets, as I had my whole life, and with some regularity I sharpened my knives and even those minuscule expressions of professionalism, of respect for the trade, made my new co-workers bristle with what they perceived as excessive self-regard. They wore T-shirts and blue jeans and dirty aprons. It’s possible that I now found myself in an unspoken, undeclared polite mutual disapproval with both of my new tribes, Town and Gown, but I will never know for sure because no one would ever say something as straightforward as “I don’t like you.”

  I missed my expressive, volatile New York tribe—not because I like conflict and aggression, but because it is abundantly clear where you stand with the guy who leaps onto the hood of your car and calls you a stupid bitch.

  When the initial exuberance of landing in Michigan began to wear off, I thought I started to hear all kinds of disapproving tones and implications of distaste in that constant pallid refrain, “Oh, that’s nice,” that everyone recited through empty smiles. It was meant to soothe, to go along to get along, to mask the heavy odor of one’s true opinions, but it had the opposite effect on me. I stayed awake at night, paranoid, and wondered how I was going to be sure anyone was telling the truth. One night, I slept in my car in my own driveway. Paralyzed by something I’ll never be able to name. I just pulled into the drive, killed the ignition, reached for the door latch, and suddenly couldn’t go through with it. I slumped back in my seat until I woke up the next morning, very early, and finally allowed myself to move onto the porch, get out the key, and go into my little empty apartment.

  I went crazy for an opinion. I was starved for opinionated opinion. That I had so many, and offered them in such abundant mouthfuls, made me feel eleven feet tall and garish.

  Misty found no end of hilarity in this when I reported it to her the following day.

  “You nut!” She laughed. “You slept in your car? Oh dear.” Misty had a taciturnity of impressive measure. I’ve never met a person who could not talk the way Misty could not talk. My extroverted East Coast demeanor was met for the first six months in that catering kitchen from across the prep island with her shy and vaguely grunted, “un-hunh” and her six-word halting sentences. But there was something, something I had not at first picked up on in Misty and I was not deterred. She did not spook me.

  She set up her board each day at one corner of the large prep island, and I looked forward to finding a place across from her, and eventually we started to exchange a few words over the easy pace of the prep day. The conversations, while punctuated by pauses in the walk-in or loading into the van—were evolving from grunts to full sentences, and what she knew about food and cooking was immense. If I mentioned something uncommon I’d cooked or eaten in Turkey, where I’d lived and worked for a period in my early twenties, she knew of it and didn’t even hesitate. “Oh, Manti? I’ve read about that.” When I admitted that I loved the pine-sap taste of the retsina I’d had in Greece during that same period, she chuckled, and revealing that she knew exactly how it is always served, added, “in those cute copper cups?” Through conversations about food, it was possible to gain glimpses of her.

  Because Misty didn’t talk or emote or express anything such as gladness to see me or passionate interest in our conversations or satisfaction with my work even though we had actually been working together for some eight months, I had to rely on other signals that we were maybe becoming friends or at least that she was glad to have a set of capable hands with her in the kitchen. Misty kind of laughed at something I said! Misty let me make the menu and do all the prep for the edible flower dinner at the Arboretum! Misty offered to give me a tour of downtown Detroit!

  She did in fact offer to give me a tour of downtown Detroit, and one weekend night in the dead of winter, with her wildly talkative husband in tow, we crossed 8-Mile and drove into the city. I was not quite comprehending what we were driving through and could not stop staring at the ruin—mile after mile of burnt-out homes, boarded-up storefronts, all the husks of an abandoned city—inexplicably desolate on a Saturday night. Nestled in every so often, we saw a well-maintained home, the glowing lights of inhabitants, little patches of life eked out of what, especially in the dark, looked like nothing. Even when we got to the hub, it was deserted. All these gorgeous buildings and no one on the street. I was used to Greenwich Village on a weekend night where you have to fight the throngs to even get down the sidewalk. Bill narrated the entire experience from the front seat in a kind of free associative poetry-slam manner, rolling his own cigarettes from pouch tobacco, and bringing everything he had to the mic—which included his own upbringing in Dearborn, his formidable knowledge of Allah and the Muslim world, a long thesis on automobile versus train travel in Amerikkka—and Misty deftly downshifted when we hit ice patches and occasionally tapped her husband on the knee and said, “Easy, William.”

  We ate a forgettable dinner in Greektown, had a great drink at The Rhino Club, and enjoyed each other. I think. In my paranoid condition, it seemed more than possible that she was just being hospitable to the unraveling out of towner who had just slept in her car in her own driveway as she might be to, equally, some neighbor’s homesick Swedish au pair.

  But I still wasn’t sure, even by the following spring, and when she invited me to her home for a meal, I took it as a declaration and was thrilled.

  Her collected pack of six stray dogs all came racing out and barked their heads off when I pulled up the driveway and stood, pretending not to be afraid, behind my car door. She came out and calmed them all, getting down herself on all fours and kissing and hugging some of them more intimately than I have ever seen her interact with a human person, including her husband, either then or in the fourteen years since that I have continued to know her. I hardly recognized her.

  Their home was a hundred-year-old brick house with rough-hewn beams exposed in the basement, surrounded by farmland and part of a land conservancy started by Bill and some friends and neighbors. There was a hand-me-down working John Deere tractor in the driveway and the spring night air smelled of tilled earth. There were budding fruit trees scattered around the fields, flower beds surrounding the house, and there, sprawling out behind the shed, was an organic garden just two mules shy of a farm. She had her own duck prosciutto hanging between the racks in her refrigerator. Shell beans from the year before had dried in their pods in bushels in the garage.

  At this first dinner, she had brined a capon, and then roasted it on a tightly sealed grill by indirect smoky heat. It was possibly the most delicious thing I had eaten all year. We sat on the sun porch, surrounded by all the dogs and cats and houseplants that she devoted herself to, and she poured us some rosé wine, an excellent Bandol. Another glimpse of herself.

  “Misty, nobody drinks rosé but my mom! Americans think it’s déclassé.”

  “Un-hunh,” she nodded. “We had this one in France. We liked it.”

  I walked around her warm, beautiful house, snooping everywhere with the same disoriented fascination as meeting someone’s identical twin for the first time. Her pantry shelves had dried anchovies, salt-packed capers, homemade vinegar, and homemade brandied Michigan cherries. Her kitchen cabinets were filled with heavy Le Creuset pots and clay earthenware from Mexico. There was a whole room packed to the rafters with cookbooks. Bill recited half-remembered poetry and filled in the half he couldn’t recall with whatever he could make rhyme. Misty drank the wine and spoke in full paragraphs and laughed fu
ll-throated laughter and I could not believe this whole other person before me. I began to feel the stirrings of a remote past, a someone I had been a thousand lifetimes and fluorescent-lit kitchens ago, and suddenly I found myself digging deep, way deeper than the PVC ring molds and the Silpat mats and the propane brûlée torches of my entire adult life, to find the language to keep up with her. I had to remember the exhale of Bandol rosé while my mother talked to my father after dinner, not the edible gold leaf in champagne flutes. When Misty put clafoutis on the table for dessert, I had to remember that I knew the taste of the almost muddy, sweet, ripe black fruit of that mulberry bush by the mailbox of my childhood home.

  Meanwhile, I was starting to have misgivings about going to the writer’s workshop. It wasn’t that it was too hard for me; once I got a grasp of the words everyone was using, I, too, could make my halting way through Derrida and Lacan; I, too, could understand language as a subjective construction. It had been like a year of Friday crossword puzzles, cautiously undertaken in pencil, but I was getting it. My misgivings were about something else; something less defensive than protecting myself against my own inadequacy. At our final meeting of the semester I arrived late, having come from work, reeking of roasted bones, onions, molasses. As a group, we had decided to meet for the last time at someone’s house instead of the grad lounge and to make a party of it, and I was not very much in the mood.

  It was a textbook student pad—scented votives, framed posters, a futon folded up into a couch—and everyone was sitting in a deep hush when I arrived. There were folks on the floor, three on the futon in stockinged feet—everybody had removed their shoes so as not to damage the Salvation Army throw rug. I quietly push open the door, let myself in, silently wave and signal my apologies—one of the students is reading her work, and continues while I settle in. After a year of Monday nights with these guys I still barely know them.

  The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up … then down … then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It’s a tired reading style. I’m sick of it. It attaches more importance to the words than the words themselves—as they’ve been arranged—could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name. Which is not what I came to graduate school for; I want to forever admire poets. I arrived believing there was meaning and purpose in this work, that this work gives more than it takes, that it helps out. But the longer she goes on in that self-important sing-song way from the candlelit corner where she is perched on a purple and gold pillow, her black eyeliner thick and greasy, stopping on occasion to explain a few of her references—for those among us who may not know the term “chiaroscuro” or who are not familiar with the “tropes” she is exploring in her prose, the more I fear it’s no more a contribution than arranging salmon roulade in a ring mold with tiny dots of pistachio oil garnishing the plate. I feel wholly condescended to when she is explaining her work, but backpedal slightly on my position as soon as I realize that, in truth, a year ago I did not know the word trope. Before I packed up the Volvo and arrived on that Michigan campus I would not have been able to use it in a crossword puzzle.

  Unbelievably, she’s reading from pages of pale green rice paper—they remind me of hundred-dollar bills—on which she has written by hand. We have computers, of course, in 1997. Her poem is not good but good-looking and well-dressed. She’s missed the point. She should be in bookbinder school. Blindfolded and spun around by her obsession with the handwritten word, the feel of paper, and the smell of ink, in this round of the game she’s pinned the tail far away from the donkey, right into the mantel. She still thinks that writing is about self-expression; I can just picture her, with a favorite calligraphy pen, sitting at her desk in front of the window where a spider plant hangs, a large tablet of expensive hand-wrought paper before her and a big bowl of milky sweet tea. And there in the weakening sunlight, she maps out a description of an old man’s hands—her own grandfather’s perhaps—with knuckles like like like … and ah, the metaphor comes, like pecans. Knuckles wrinkled and brown like toasted pecans.

  She finishes reading and looks up at the room, smug and afraid simultaneously. We remain silent, some people’s eyes are closed, though a couple of people sigh crisply, audibly, as if to say you have pierced my soul.

  I wish we could just read the words out loud and let the stories speak for themselves, but somehow, in just a year, we all know to sing-song, and to load the thing up with tropes, to spend whole paragraphs describing an old man’s hand, and to bow our heads and close our eyes when listening.

  Awww fuuuuuuck, I think to myself, trapped in this girl’s living room, in this middle state, in the middle of my crossing, now totally convinced that the route I have chosen is wrong. I will have to survive one more year of this if I want to walk away with the master’s degree from the Harvard of the Midwest. To my left, just out of reach, I notice the crudités—raw broccoli florets and those baby carrots washed in formaldehyde, and some bread and cheese. I’m starving. Our leader, who’s sitting in the apartment’s one comfortable chair, raises his head, and announces, “Perfect. Simply perfect.” The poet glows brighter than the ginger-cranberry candle she is sitting next to. Someone from the futon chimes in: “Truly. That moment with his hand on the back of the kitchen chair—I mean you really captured that moment perfectly.” I go for the cheese cubes and hope for a more generous mood. Elwood hauls his huge football player body up off the floor, where he’s been gamely sitting, and comes over to the cheese platter. Conspiratorially, he says, “I gotta go. I’ve got dandruff.” And my mood instantly lifts to discover someone else here who’s struggling with this shit.

  In the fall, I went to another—much larger—dinner at Misty’s house, and I met lots of her friends. She had me cut down the last of the rhubarb from the garden and grill the sardines outside by the light of car headlights, while Bill smoked pot and filled the birdfeeders, and I was proud and honored to be put to use. I would’ve walked into the cold stream barefoot if she’d asked me. I had sharp transportive flashes to every party my parents had ever thrown. Misty was inside, not quite ten years my senior but just old enough to not be exactly my peer, with a kitchen towel draped over her shoulder and in a bib apron, drinking a mojito with mint from her garden, as she arranged cauliflower and zucchini and onions into earthenware baking dishes. All of their friends—philosophy of religion professors, hairdressers, Ford engineers—surrounded her to watch and chat or wandered in the garden or stood by the charcoal fire where I was grilling and their voices and laughter drifted out over the Michigan landscape.

  At work we were cooking the required filet mignon with horseradish cream and super fudge chunk brownies but at her home, where I had become like one of her stray dogs picked up on a back road, she cooked all the dark and oily fishes like bluefish and mackerel and sardines. She served pork shoulder, pork shank, lamb tongue, lamb legs, and lamb sausages. She made true duck confit.

  When she emptied the garden and started the enormous labor of pickling, canning, and smoking enough to fill a room in the cellar with hundreds of Ball jars, dated in her handwriting with Sharpie marker, I sometimes helped. I was in the thesis stretch of my degree, so I had fewer classes and more time. We made cordials, cornichons with the tiny yellow blossoms sometimes still attached, and concord grape juice, except for the year that Michigan concord grapes were wiped out from Pontiac to Petoskey. We grilled thickly sliced bread and ate it right there in the moment—warm and charred—nothing like that air-blasted baguette that sat out on rolling racks under the fluorescent lighting at work—and we made, by hand and not in a robot coupe, toppings from olives or swiss chard or beans. We shucked many varieties—yellow steubens and tongues of fire and flageolets—of fresh shell beans from her huge garden. In the winter, we hauled what she hadn’t had time to shuck out of the shed, these last beans still in their pods, though drier, and merely cooked them longer. She combined meat and fish in the same dish. She deep-fried as regularly and with as little
hesitation as you or I might brew coffee. The cheeses she ate at home sat out unwrapped on the counter and stank and oozed, and always, always, she offered a well-made, well-researched cocktail.

  I had met a girl at work, a big butch Michigander who had never once lived out of state, and I was loving her so much that it made the weirdness of Michigan and the uncertainty of my whole enterprise there suddenly bearable and even sometimes a total blast. I also had made the crucial successful move to make some friends outside of the English department, and there were people in the school of environmental sciences and statistics, like my friend David for example, who were not anguished at all, whatsoever, and who played excellent pool, drank bourbon, and built large fires outside as a pastime. With him, I had more fun with language than I was ever going to have in that building with the oil portraits.