Kitchens of the Great Midwest

by J. Ryan Stradal

  Eva insisted on preparing the Caesar salad at the table, which seemed to Octavia like an ostentatious demand for someone at their first Sunday Night Dinner Party, but Robbe confirmed that this was the way the first Caesar salad in history was prepared, so Octavia let it slide.

  Eva rubbed the sides of the wooden bowl with bisected cloves of Porcelain garlic and prepared the dressing, a mixture of Koroneiki olive oil, warm coddled free-range brown egg yolks, Worcestershire sauce, freshly ground Madagascar black peppercorns, one freshly diced Porcelain clove, and a bit of Meyer lemon juice. She placed single whole romaine leaves on everyone’s plates and drizzled the dressing over them, topping each with four homemade sourdough bread croutons.

  “Wait,” said Sarah Vang, who until this point had watched in awe. She was tiny and had cute clunky hipster princess glasses but canceled out her demure appearance with her loud, squeaky voice. “Where’s the anchovies and the cheese?”

  Robbe leaned forward over the table. “Caesar Cardini’s original Caesar salad didn’t have cheese or anchovies,” he said.

  “Obviously, Eva knew that already,” Octavia said. She saw Eva smile to herself briefly.

  “Well, I know it’s not everyone’s favorite version of the Caesar,” Eva said, “but yeah, it goes back to the 1920s.” Octavia saw that Eva looked at the floor as everyone took their first bites.

  “Oh my God,” Elodie said. “This is insane.”

  “Damn,” said Sarah, licking her fork.

  “Wow,” said Robbe, his jaws full of romaine and croutons, his lips shiny with thick Koroneiki oil. “It’s official. She’s coming to every dinner.”

  Everyone else concurred. Eva smiled and thanked them softly.

  Remembering Eva’s snotty tomato lecture and previous sharp talk about Mitch Diego, Octavia wasn’t buying the humble act. Inevitably, one day Eva would overreach and expose her inexperience and vulnerability in devastating fashion, and Octavia would decide then whether to swoop in and rescue her, but until then, she was forced into the exhausting task of helping her village correctly raise this arrogant child.

  “It’s a real nice salad course,” Octavia said, at last. “I imagine it’s easy to make a great salad with such expensive ingredients, though.”

  Robbe looked from Octavia to Eva. “Those aren’t expensive ingredients. I would know. Did you see her make it? It’s freshness, proportions, timing, am I right?”

  Eva shrugged and nodded.

  “I almost forgot the wine,” said Elodie, rising, and returned from the kitchen with an open bottle of Vermentino. “Don’t finish your salads yet!”

  For most of the table, it was too late.

  • • •

  Although Sarah Vang valiantly initiated a heated argument about the quality of food trucks, offering as her sole evidence the popularity of a single gourmet food truck in Los Angeles, the conversation kept looping back to Eva’s ridiculous salad. With each course that came out that night, somebody made some reference to why the dish wasn’t prepared at the table or where were the Madagascar peppercorns. Octavia’s famous summer heirloom tomato casserole barely even got a mention.

  By the time Lacey Dietsch’s unappealing Jell-O salad came out, which looked like congealed aquarium water with the dead goldfish shredded on the surface, no one was hungry for anything except more chatter about that stupidly basic Caesar. Then something happened that made Octavia want to cut herself; on her way to the bathroom, she glanced into the kitchen and saw Robbe kissing Eva on the cheek. It was on the cheek, but it was a kiss, and Robbe had his eyes closed, and Eva did too.

  Eva did not deserve this. Robbe had had a dining room full of attractive, smart, tipsy women—women close to his age, who had accomplished something with their lives—at his place for the last three months, and this smart-ass tomato girl is who he chooses? Worse, now Eva would be driving home tonight imagining herself cooking meals in Robbe’s kitchen, making pie from the apples in his backyard, lounging with a cocktail on his white midcentury modern sofa, making love in his four-poster bed, the feel of his smooth lips lingering on her face until the moment her eyes closed on the memory.

  Yes, Octavia could obviously see what Eva saw in Robbe. Aside from the money and the superficial aspects, he was quite literally a gateway to a more sophisticated, adult world. Were people Eva’s age having dinner parties like this one? Hardly. The Sunday Night Dinner Party was, except for poor Lacey Dietsch, a carefully curated assemblage of experts who were at the top of their respective games. Not even Maureen O’Brien was ever invited, and not because she was petty and unattractive—it was because she didn’t do any one thing well enough. Eva must’ve understood what a privilege it was to receive Robbe’s invitation. And now that she’d also been handpicked from among more worthy adversaries for the affection of the most desirable bachelor Octavia could ever dream up, well, that girl must be melting like sugar on his tongue.

  What Robbe got out of it was harder for Octavia to figure, and it would be a while before she realized that he hadn’t chosen Octavia or Elodie or Sarah because to choose an equal would be a sign of maturity, and this boy did not want to grow up, at least not yet. Octavia hoped Eva would be his last roll in the hay before he finally realized that these young girls had nothing to offer but ignorance and demands.

  Octavia, who had grown up in Minnetonka around people with both money and taste, who had degrees in English and sociology from Notre Dame, whose dad was a corporate lawyer and stepmother was a model turned pharmaceutical sales rep, was meant to marry a man like Robbe Kramer. She didn’t even want a better life than the one she grew up with; she didn’t need to be wealthier, just comfortable, with a husband like Robbe who valued the same lifestyle. She would be happy, she knew, being his plus-one to political fund-raisers and charming the less intelligent wives of his prospective business partners. She’d even learned to play golf, knew how to make twenty-seven cocktails, and could watch a Minnesota Vikings game and understand it without asking questions. She knew how to be around rich men, and it was heartbreaking to see Robbe waste himself, for now, on some wide-eyed, guileless little no-name kid.

  “Think I’m going to call it a night, you guys,” Octavia said.

  She badly needed to decompress after that dinner. When she went home, she did something she’d never done before; she took a few hits off her housemate’s bowl. That April, Octavia wanted to move somewhere closer to her job in Uptown, so she rented the second floor of a house from a divorced twenty-nine-year-old woman named Andrea who worked for a theater company and smoked up while watching HBO. From the first-floor kitchen, which they shared, Octavia glanced into the living room and saw that Andrea had left her weed and pipe on the coffee table, for the first time since they’d lived together.

  It was clearly meant to be. It was like her housemate knew.

  • • •

  The following week ended up being just about the worst five-day stretch of Octavia’s adult life to that point. There was a random drug test at the children’s educational nonprofit where she worked, which she failed, because she’d done drugs for the first time in years just thirty-six hours before, and was immediately put on administrative leave without pay, which pretty much meant that she was fired. As a result, her dad cut her off financially, saying he wouldn’t give her another check until she checked into Hazelden and tackled the drug addiction he claimed he’d always suspected she had.

  “You fucking bastard,” she said to her dad on the phone, and hung up, tears in her eyes.

  To his credit, he’d left her alone after that, but now with no job and no money from home, Octavia Kincade was financially screwed.

  • • •

  She was still in enough of a foul mood that when the e-mail came around asking for everyone’s menu contributions for the following Sunday’s dinner, Octavia waited for Eva to respond, which she did, with “Sweet Corn Succotash.” Octavia pressed
delete on that e-mail.

  Octavia believed that morality was a learned social construct, as was responsibility, humility, and even generosity. Humans were born evil, as little sociopaths intent purely on slaking their own impulsive desires, and many never learned to be good, or evolved traits like empathy or compassion, instead remaining selfish, destructive small children for life. Eva Thorvald, that unrepentant, arrogant crowd-pleaser, was the most devious of all the small children Octavia knew and, ergo, would only be corrected into a life of humility through being broken.

  • • •

  Octavia arrived at Robbe’s house at the exact same time she always did, a green ceramic bowl under her arm, and walked in, without knocking, as usual.

  “Oh, hey,” Robbe said, entering from the kitchen. “You’re early.”

  “What’s that in the bowl?” Eva asked, following him. She had beaten Octavia here somehow.

  “Sweet corn succotash,” Octavia said.

  “Ha, that’s funny. I made that too.”

  Robbe looked annoyed. “Didn’t you see the e-mail?”

  Octavia shook her head. “I never got the e-mail.”

  “Well, if you don’t get it, you need to text me or call me,” Robbe said. “Now we’re gonna have a shitload of succotash.”

  “I may just dump mine in the trash right now,” Eva said. “After your awesome tomato hot dish last time.”

  Octavia didn’t recall Eva praising her heirloom tomato dish last week; in any case, it was much too late for her to put on a show of false humility. “I’d hate to see you do that,” Octavia said. “After witnessing your magic Caesar.”

  “I have an idea,” Eva said. “Let’s put each of them in bowls of Robbe’s so we can’t tell who made which one, how’s that?”

  “Whatever floats your boat,” Octavia said, though secretly she liked the idea.

  • • •

  The problem was, you could tell one from the other at a hundred feet; one had diced organic red pepper (Octavia’s) while the other had French-cut Blue Lake string beans (Eva’s). The corn in Eva’s was also whiter.

  “Why did you do yours with green beans?” Octavia asked Eva in the kitchen as their succotash was being transferred, for no good reason now as Octavia saw it, to their more anonymous new homes.

  “I often use okra. But green beans are in season locally.”

  “What kind of sweet corn did you use?”

  “I think it’s Northern Xtra Sweet bicolor.”

  “Oh, nice.” Octavia smiled. In her research over the last two weeks, she’d learned that Northern Xtra Sweet was an extremely common variety of corn; you could get it anywhere. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Oh, I drove to Mr. Xiong’s farm down in Dakota County this afternoon and got some right off the stalk.”

  “Just today? Before you got here? How’d you pull that off?”

  “It wasn’t a long drive. What kind of corn is in yours?”

  “I got heirloom Golden Bantam. From a woman who sells herbs at the St. Paul Farmers’ Market.”

  “Wow, never heard of it,” Eva said. “Who’s the herb vendor?”

  “Anna Hlavek. But she doesn’t sell it to the public, you have to ask.” Octavia had the inside track; she’d heard about it from a friend of hers who’d dated Anna’s son Dougie the year before.

  Octavia knew she had won this round. With American cornfields at close to 90 percent GMO corn, and all of the numerous crosses and hybridizations and so-called improvements made to corn even before genetic intervention, Anna Hlavek at the farmers’ market was growing something almost unheard of: an open-pollinated corn variety that hadn’t changed a bit in more than one hundred years. From what she was told, Anna had inherited the seed stock from her grandfather, who’d bought it from a catalog when Burpee first introduced Golden Bantam 8 Row back in 1902. This was the exact corn Octavia’s great-grandparents ate at their farm near Hunter, North Dakota—old-fashioned plump, firm, milky kernels that burst in your mouth and were so sweet, it could’ve been served for dessert. No one, not even Eva with the fancy ingredients, could’ve gotten hold of this sweet corn; you had to know someone to make sure you were getting the real deal, and Octavia, as luck would have it, did.

  “Can’t wait to try it,” Eva said.

  • • •

  The seating chart had devolved a bit from the week before. Adam Snelling still sat across from Sarah Vang, but now Eva sat across from Robbe and Octavia sat across from Elodie. Octavia did get to sit next to Robbe, however, which in a lot of ways was really better than sitting across from him. Lacey, meanwhile, sat at the tail with her baby, facing no one again.

  “Why do I always have to sit down here?” she asked. It was rare for her to complain; Octavia felt that Lacey should be happy just to be there, and figured that she had been.

  Everyone stared down the table at her. “It’s just the way it turned out,” Robbe said.

  “Can someone switch with me?” she asked, and looked at her friend, the woman who had invited her. “Octavia?”

  Octavia shook her head. “I need to be here, I’m handling one of the early dishes.”

  Robbe shook his head. “You don’t need to be anywhere, Octavia.”

  She was stung that he didn’t seem to want to be next to her as much as she wanted to be next to him, but put on a smile. “It’s easier to distribute from over here. Her dishes always come at the end.”

  “Fine,” Robbe said. “Well, sorry, Lacey.”

  Lacey nodded and sighed. She used to have a perfectly nice place to sit, across from someone and everything—at least until fancy Eva showed up—and was probably doing the math in her head just then, figuring that out. “You know, I’m gonna go,” she said, and stood up.

  “All right,” said Octavia.

  “Why?” asked Adam Snelling. Adam was super nice like that.

  “You guys don’t like my food, you make me sit here at the end of the table by myself, you never talk about anything I know, and you never even ask me any questions about myself.”

  “You shouldn’t wait to be asked,” Robbe said. “I don’t.” This, from Robbe, passed for empathy.

  “Well, see ya later,” Lacey said, and stomped to the kitchen, coming back out with the Tupperware bowl of ambrosia fruit salad she’d made with canned fruit cocktail and Cool Whip. Her baby daughter had started to cry from all of the jostling and Lacey had to shout over the child’s wail. “Have a good dinner party,” she said, standing in the open doorway. “Bye.”

  After she closed the door, hard, the remaining six diners sat in silence for a moment before Robbe stood up and cleared Lacey’s wineglass and silverware.

  “I think in the future when we invite a new person, we should run it by the whole group first,” he said as he walked into his kitchen.

  Eva, the newest person, and invited by Robbe’s decree—not run by the group at all—had the nerve to speak up. “I know someone who I think might like to come,” she said.

  “Looking forward to hearing about them,” Robbe said, setting the two white bowls of succotash on the table.

  • • •

  Octavia tried Eva’s first. She hated to say it, but it was exquisite. The green beans and corn were each just slightly firm, the bacon was fragrant and not too salty, and the nearly diaphanous white onion pieces were in that Goldilocks zone of piquancy, neither overbearing nor nominal.

  Then Octavia tried her own. Her corn was firm and starchy; she didn’t know when Anna picked it—Octavia had just bought it the morning of the day before—but the kernels hadn’t kept their sugar. Some of them even felt like loose teeth in her mouth. She looked around the table and saw people spitting into their napkins.

  “I’ll have more of the one with the beans,” Elodie said, and Adam quickly concurred.

  That bitch Anna Hlavek. It should be required for
a sweet corn vendor to post the exact date and time of their harvest to avoid these awful mistakes. Eva, of course, had used corn that was probably only four or five hours old at that point; that had made all the difference, not what damn varietal it was.

  “Whose was whose?” Sarah asked, with her loud, disharmonious harpy voice.

  “I brought the one with the red pepper,” Eva said. “It was really good a day ago. I don’t know what happened.”

  Before Octavia could even gather her thoughts, everyone started talking.

  “The sugars in sweet corn can turn to starch really fast,” Sarah said. “You’re still so amazing for someone your age. So amazing.”

  Eva nodded. “Thanks. I know I still have a lot to learn.”

  “This might actually be my favorite thing you’ve ever made,” Elodie said, looking at Octavia. “This could win awards.”

  Adam nodded and smiled, mouth full.

  “Octavia is back, ladies and gentlemen,” Sarah said.

  Robbe, who’d seen the women transfer their succotash into his bowls, said nothing. He just stared at the side of Octavia’s head, the way someone stares at a theater curtain in the moments before the play begins.

  “Thanks, everyone,” Octavia said, watching as Adam gathered everyone’s plates, mounds of her Golden Bantam succotash sitting, lightly touched, on every one.

  • • •

  The next day, Robbe insisted on meeting Octavia for drinks at Horseless Carriage, his favorite old-man bar, for 5:00 p.m. happy hour. Though Octavia was busy updating her résumé—she was going to leave off her previous employer altogether and just tell people that she’d been volunteering with children the last two years—she obviously agreed to meet him.

  When she arrived, he was halfway through a martini already, sitting under a backlit sign advertising a Prime Rib Special, playing with his cell phone. The place smelled like stale popcorn and Bar Keepers Friend, and the handful of other people there were hunched over pull tabs at the bar or watching baseball on silent TVs.