Kitchens of the Great Midwest

by J. Ryan Stradal

  “What’s the name of the band?” she asked, standing up.

  “The Lonesome Cowboys.”

  “Cool, maybe I’ll check you guys out sometime,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “What are your plans tonight?”

  “Going to make French onion soup with my dad,” she said. “Catch you tomorrow.” And with that, she was gone.

  • • •

  That night when he got home, Prager found this recipe in a cookbook in his dad’s kitchen:

  French Onion Soup (Serves 8)

  ¼ cup unsalted butter

  5 medium onions, thinly sliced

  1 bay leaf

  ½ teaspoon dried thyme

  2 tablespoons dry sherry

  3½ cups beef stock

  1½ teaspoons kosher salt

  ½ teaspoon black pepper

  8 slices of French bread, toasted

  1½ cups Gruyère cheese

  Heat the butter in a soup pot over medium heat until it is melted. Add the onions, bay leaf, and thyme. After 15 minutes, or as soon as the onions begin to brown, reduce the heat to medium low and cover, stirring frequently, until the onions assume a deep brown hue, about 30–40 minutes. Take care to not overcook the onions; patience is essential for perfect caramelization. Stir in the sherry.

  Increase the heat to high, stirring vigorously, until all the sherry has cooked off. Stir in the beef stock, bring to a boil, and then simmer for 20 minutes while partially covered. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Remove the bay leaf before serving. Place eight ovenproof bowls on baking sheets. Fill each bowl with soup, top the bowl with one thin slice of toasted French bread, and gently cover each with 3 tablespoons of cheese. Bake in an oven at 450°F until the cheese is melted and becoming just a bit brown. Use Gruyère from Switzerland, or you’ll be wasting your time.

  • • •

  It was so beautiful, and strict, and complicated! Prager could never conceive of making such a meal. That someone his age would make this, a hot girl he liked, no less, made him feel inadequate and lustful.

  • • •

  Will Prager’s father, Eli, was in the living room, watching the first Monday Night Football game of the season, while Prager sat on the kitchen floor, about ten feet away, on the linoleum, still poring over the recipe. Eli was shorter and skinnier than his son, but somehow took up more space in a room; his scarred face, long biker beard, and the sharp greasy smell from his motorcycle shop had the effect of wet wood tossed on a campfire, and no one blocked his path, even at home.

  “Hey, Dad,” Prager asked, “can we make French onion soup sometime?”

  “French onion soup?” Eli asked. “What the hell you want that for?”

  “I don’t know, something different,” Prager said. “But what’s the deal with Gruyère from Switzerland? This recipe is super anal that the cheese has to be from Switzerland.”

  “Who the hell knows? That cookbook’s from the early seventies. I don’t think farmers in Wisconsin made that kinda cheese back then.”

  “Who got this cookbook?”

  “The damn thing belonged to your mother,” Eli said. He sometimes talked about her as if her death were a jackknifed semi on the road ahead. Will viewed it more like the giant crack in their concrete driveway; he felt it, saw it, and walked over it every day, but it was too big and strange to fix.

  “Then we should keep it,” Prager said.

  His sister, Julie, jogged into the kitchen and took a protein shake out of the fridge. She was in her usual summer outfit of cotton T-shirt with the neck and sleeves cut off, sports bra, and running shorts. It had been six months since their mom’s death, and Prager was a little worried about how his little sister was handling it. She and their mother hadn’t been getting along when their mom died. Since then, Julie had quit the softball team, which was weird, and now only did cross-country running, and hardly had friends over anymore. People kept asking Prager if his sister was depressed, and he wasn’t sure what to say. She was a thirteen-year-old girl, the most puzzling and mutable creature in the known universe.

  “Dad, you make anything, or are we on our own for dinner?” Julie asked.

  Eli didn’t look up from the game. “If you want to order something, knock yourself out.”

  “God, Dad,” Julie said. “You can be so indolent.” She was super into big words all the time, for no reason.

  “If you don’t like it, you can skedaddle,” Eli said.

  “What are you doing for food?” Julie asked Will.

  “I’m gonna heat up a microwave burrito,” Prager said. “Then I’m gonna eat it over the sink like a total baller.”

  “You’re so frickin’ lazy it kills me. You won’t even wash one stupid plate.”

  “Nope,” Prager said, watching the three-minute digital timer start its countdown.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about Eva for some reason. Her face. Her awesome, beautiful height. The things she said and the way she said them. Damn. Will Prager liked a girl. And her thing was cooler than just being a Goth. It was food.

  • • •

  Hanging out by the vending machines before school the next day, Prager asked his drummer, Vik Gupta, where to take a girl out to eat in Minneapolis, if she’s into food. Vik’s dad was a tenured professor at UW–River Falls and took his family to some real nice places.

  “Let’s see. I liked Goodfellows,” Vik said. “Café Un Deux Trois. Hutmacher’s. Locanda di Giorgio. But they’re all très cher.” The French sounded fine coming from Vik. He was one of those guys who wore a tie to school, and the Nils P. Haugen Senior High standards of taste only required that you wore a shirt with no swear words on it. “Who’s the girl?”

  “She’s new, her name is Eva Thorvald.”

  “New blood,” said Vik. “Go big, Prager, blow her away. A first date calls for the most opulent luxury.”

  “Well, that’s kind of the opposite of what I’ve been doing my whole life,” Will said. “I thought you didn’t want to set the bar too high right away.”

  “You’re single now, right? That means that all of your previous plans have failed. Do you like this girl?”

  “I think the most ever.”

  “Then you, sir, have no choice.”

  • • •

  It took forever for fifth period to come around. She looked even more amazing than he remembered. She had almost the same outfit on except a Nick Cave shirt this time.

  “How was the French onion soup?” he asked. He had figured this out with his last girlfriend—women love it when you remember shit they tell you, and love it more when you repeat it back to them. But in this case, he was genuinely curious about the soup.

  “Oh, it was OK, thanks for asking,” Eva said.

  “Just OK, huh?”

  “Yeah. My dad bought me blue cheese by accident instead of Gruyère, because it was cheaper. So it wasn’t exactly how it’s supposed to be, I guess. The cheese really overpowered the broth.”

  “You know, for French onion soup, the Gruyère from Switzerland is the best.”

  “Wow,” she said. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Will had thought for a long time about how he was going to phrase his next question, the big one. He wasn’t dealing with his freshman ex-girlfriend anymore; this girl was a sophisticated junior, and she was seriously into food. He took a deep breath. “How’d you like to go on a culinary adventure?”

  “With you?”

  Killer Keeley rapped Prager’s desk with a ruler. “William,” he said. “Front row.” Damn, Keeley picked a crappy time to get his groove back.

  “Yes,” Prager said, looking back at Eva as he moved up four desks.

  “Sure, sounds fun,” she said, and her smile scattered every other thought in his mind. He spent the rest of the class entranced, watching Keeley’s mouth make noise, as
he luxuriated in the hopeful blood shimmering through his veins.

  • • •

  Eli was eating Fritos out of the bag and reading the sports section when Will walked into the kitchen and leaned against the counter.

  “Dad, I really need to use the car Friday.”

  Eli didn’t look up. “Why, what’s happening?”

  “I got a date with a girl.”

  “Ah, that’s funny, I have a date that night myself.”

  “You have a date?” This was the first Will had heard of his dad dating anyone since their mom died. It had never even occurred to him that his dad would ever date anyone again, much less have sex, or even want to.

  Considering how his mom died, hurled from the back of his dad’s Harley Panhead, in an accident that left Eli with just a sprained ankle, and also considering that Eli had not been on a motorcycle since then, it seemed to follow that his dad would be in a state of perpetual mourning, and this course of action had Will’s and Julie’s approval. Anything else felt like hateful treason.

  “Yeah, a woman I met at church.”

  That was another thing, much less devastating, but dumbly annoying: Eli had started going to early services at a Lutheran church after the funeral. Prager totally didn’t get this at all. Prager’s grandpa on his dad’s side was a nonpracticing Ashkenazi Jew named Frank who had had the misfortune of marrying a devout Lutheran woman named Greta who raised all of their kids, including Eli, strict Missouri Synod Lutheran. And even though Will wasn’t technically Jewish because neither his mom nor his grandmas was Jewish, being raised Jewish would have been a thing, and Prager knew he would’ve loved it.

  Eli, meanwhile, refused to recognize any of the traditions, mostly because he didn’t know them, so it was up to Prager to hold his own Passover Seder and observe the High Holy Days and set out a menorah on Hanukkah and get noisemakers for Purim. Eli neither encouraged nor prevented any of this.

  Prager, however, totally disapproved of his own dad’s religious practices, especially if it meant that he was using Lutheran Bible study class as a meet market.

  “Oh,” Prager said. “Where are you going?”

  “Just Luigi’s, downtown there.”

  “Oh,” was all he said. It was too much to take in.

  “You can have the car that night, if you don’t mind dropping me off.”

  “Oh,” Prager said. What an awful bargain; what a shadow cast over what could’ve been such an incredible night.

  • • •

  “Hey,” Eva said before fifth period the next day. “Just letting you know. My dad wants me home by nine at the latest.”

  “Oh,” Prager said. That was sure some overprotective dad bullshit right there. It just about killed having dinner in Minneapolis, unless they ate at six or something. What a better world it would be without people’s dads.

  “And he wants to meet you,” Eva said.

  “Up here, William,” said Killer Keeley, pointing at Prager’s head. “Now.”

  • • •

  Prager turned up The Current 89.3 as he drove his dad down Main Street toward Luigi’s. They were playing “Ashes of American Flags,” by Wilco. His dad turned down the volume without asking.

  “Hey, so who you going out with tonight?” his dad asked, unnervingly chipper.

  “Just this new girl.” Prager didn’t feel like talking. He felt almost like his mom was still alive and he was driving his dad to meet his dad’s mistress. He thought for a second about rear-ending the car in front of him, just to put the kibosh on his dad’s awful plans, but the fact that he had his own wildly anticipated date greatly overrode any impulse to sabotage his father’s.

  “What’s she like?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you about the woman I’m meeting. Her name is Pat. She’s a widow, her husband died three years ago. She’s got one kid, a little boy named Sam. And she’s younger than me, thirty-five.”

  “Sounds great,” Prager said. He hoped that his dad came across like how he really was, not how he was behaving tonight, all bright-voiced and interested, and would drive this woman, and all women, away screaming forever. There was reason to be hopeful for this. He stopped at the curb down the block from Luigi’s. “Is right here OK?”

  “Sure,” Eli said. “Well, good luck on your date, and we’ll swap notes in the morning, huh?” Eli raised his eyebrows in that hubba hubba motion. Mortifying.

  “See ya,” Prager said.

  “Love ya, kid,” Eli said, and walked to the front door, fifteen minutes early for his horrible date with the Lutheran widow.

  • • •

  Eva and her family lived in a stout tan-colored apartment building farther down Main, near the Knowles Center. The paint on the sides of the building was chipping and faded and the parking lot was mostly filled with cars that looked like they were abandoned at an impound lot: old, but none old enough to be cool. It was not the sort of place where you’d ever guess someone as amazing as Eva might live. Prager had probably passed this place a million times and never really noticed it. Now he was here, parking his dad’s Ford Taurus in the lot, his heart punching his sternum, walking across fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts to reach her door. There was an RC Cola vending machine outside the lobby under an overhang; someone had taped a handwritten sign to it that read BUSTED.

  “Hey, Will,” she said. He didn’t even see her standing there, watering plants on a first-floor patio. She was wearing a black babydoll dress, a German army jacket, and fingerless gloves. That outfit, and her smile, made him want to throw himself at her feet.

  “Oh, hey,” he said, not taking off his sunglasses. “I guess we’d better skedaddle.” Did he just say that? God, he was a dork sometimes.

  “Hey, come in for a sec, my dad wants to meet you.”

  He was hoping she’d forgotten this part.

  • • •

  The man introduced as Jarl Thorvald sat in a poofy navy blue lounge chair, watching the game show What a Life and drinking Old Style out of a can tucked in a bright blue beer koozie. He stood up after Eva and Prager closed the door behind them. Prager’s first impression was that he hardly looked like Eva at all; this guy was short, fat, bald, and wearing a half-buttoned short-sleeved shirt, a loosened blue tie, and stained sweatpants. He did not look like a man capable of cooking, or even eating, French onion soup with blue cheese, let alone with Gruyère from Switzerland.

  “How do you do?” Jarl asked, after they were introduced from afar. He buttoned his shirt to the top and straightened his tie.

  Prager took in the small, dim apartment as he walked over to the living room. Even with the porch drapes closed and only the kitchen light on, he could see how underfurnished the place was; the living room had no couch, just a lounge chair and a folding chair, a black TV and DVD player on a cheap particleboard stand, a glass table in the dinette with two padded folding chairs that was stacked with sports magazines and beer cans, and nothing on any of the walls except a giveaway wall calendar from a local bank. It looked like the apartment of a man who lived alone; there was no evidence of a teenage girl anywhere.

  “So I hear you’re in a band,” Jarl said, and took another swallow of Old Style. His beer koozie said KEEPIN’ IT REEL and had a picture of a fisherman on it. “What kind of music?”

  “Sad country ballads,” Prager said.

  “You like Jimmy Buffett?”

  Weird question, Prager thought. Jimmy Buffett wasn’t close to what he would call country. He thought that Jimmy Buffett was music for people who hated music. But he looked at Jarl there, the father of the object of his affection, considered the man’s decisive way of phrasing his opinion, and said, “He’s OK, I guess.”

  “OK? He’s the most influential musician of the twentieth century. That’s what he is.”

  Not even close, Prager th
ought. Not even in the top one thousand. Maybe he was somewhere in the fourteen hundreds, between Poco and Edison Lighthouse.

  “So, your parents OK with you being a country musician?”

  “Yeah,” Prager said. “My dad doesn’t mind, and my mom, she, uh, she passed away, but I like to think that wherever she is, she’s a fan.” Prager nodded and pursed his lips. He didn’t talk about her often, but when he did, he badly wanted to bring her up in conversation like he was over it, so he could put other people at ease.

  “We should go, Dad,” Eva said.

  “Oh yeah, that’s right,” the old man said, exuding the enthusiasm and authority of a school custodian. “Be back by nine.”

  “I know.” Eva kissed Jarl on the cheek and led Prager to the front door.

  “Hey,” Jarl said. “Where are you two going?”

  Eva looked at Prager, as if to say, Better tell him.

  “Steamboat Inn, down in Prescott,” Prager said. It was the nicest restaurant he could find nearby. He’d wanted it to be a surprise.

  • • •

  Eva looked at Prager as he unlocked the passenger-side door for her.

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

  “It’s sad, but it happens,” he said, repeating the line he always said in this situation, staring past her at the grocery store across the street.

  “My mom died too, two years ago,” Eva said.

  “Really?” he said. “Of what?”

  “Lung cancer. Yours?”

  “Motorcycle accident.”

  “Come here,” she said, and hugged him, right there in the parking lot, in front of everybody letting their kids out of minivans and hauling bags of groceries and driving by in sports cars. When, after at least ten seconds, they let go of each other—him first—Prager looked at her. She now looked older, like a woman, a woman whose hand he could take and stride into the darkness with, because she was a woman whose darkness matched his own, and they could fix each other without even trying. They wouldn’t even have to talk about it.