by Jane Kramer
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For Wicky
INTRODUCTION
Right now I’m trying to decide what to cook for dinner. Yesterday I finished revising the last chapter of this collection, and whenever I finish a book—or a long piece of reporting or even a tough review—I take a few days off and celebrate by getting reacquainted with my kitchen, my husband, my family, and my dog. This is not to say that I’ve neglected any of them, and certainly not my kitchen, only that, as my daughter, Aleksandra, complained when she was a child in Paris, still answering to her baby nickname, Wicky, “Mommy, you’re here, but you’re not here.” She meant, of course, that wherever we were, a good part of my head was still at my desk, locked in a battle with words, a battle I occasionally won by plunging into a magic circle of concentration, which in those days was bounded by a pack of Marlboro Lights on one side of my computer and a bag of chili taco chips on the other, with me in easy reach of them all. The cigarettes are long gone from my life, the taco chips, too. And mirabile dictu, Aleksandra Crapanzano grew up to become a writer herself. A screenwriter and a food writer. A multitasker, as her generation of brainy, beautiful Brooklyn women call themselves (I call them “jugglers”), always on deadline with a screenplay, plus a weekly food column in The Wall Street Journal and a second cookbook in the works, not to mention materfamilias to a household, with a husband and an eleven-year-old boy of her own, and even a dog like the Bouvier des Flanders she got for Christmas, in Paris, when she was her son’s age. More to the point, we have finally made peace in the kitchen—where she had glowered through an adolescence of scullery (I prefer “sous-chef”) servitude to a mother referred to in her stove mode as “the Fürher” or on the good days, merely “Sergeant Kramer.” I knew she was trying to outcook me, which is to say outclass me, in my own—well, our—kitchen, and to suggest that we were anything less than fiercely territorial about our rights at the stove would be, pace Kellyanne Conway, an “alternative fact.”
Wicky bided her time. She was thirteen when the moment came. I was stuck in Germany on a story, my plane canceled, and, without a word to her father, she took over the kitchen and went to work preparing an exceedingly elaborate meal for him and the two friends from Stockbridge whom I’d invited to dinner, thinking I’d be back. By all reports, he came home from work ready to make his excuses and order in, only to discover the dining room table set with our best china and wedding silver, and our daughter in the kitchen, macerating mangoes and strawberries, à la Marcella Hazan, in an exceedingly pricey bottle of Sauternes that she had talked our local wine store into delivering by calling up and pretending to be me. There was an asparagus soup from Simone Beck’s Simca’s Cuisine, with tarragon simmered in white wine, waiting on the stove; a salad of Bibb lettuce in a champagne vinegar dressing on the counter; and in the oven, a roulade of chicken from an old copy of Gourmet—a truly complex dish involving boneless chicken pounded thin and rolled around alternating layers of spinach and bell pepper purée to produce, when sliced, a beautiful swirl of white, red, and green. Thus, on my return from Germany, we entered the second phase of our competitive cooking life. Call it the wary collaborative phase. Or Venus and Serena.
It didn’t take long for Wicky to morph into Aleksandra or to claim parity in the kitchen. For one thing, she baked. She loved baking and was never daunted by the timing and precision involved in making a perfect cake or a flaky, buttery crust that didn’t stick to some impossibly fluted baking dish, whereas I have only recently mastered the task of rolling a sheet of frozen puff pastry for a potpie, and my go-to cakes tend to be Ballymaloe’s Tunisian orange cake, where bread crumbs and ground almonds are as close as you get to flour, or the River Café’s pistachio loaf cake, where the addition of ground pistachios obviates even the need for crumbs. What’s more, while my daughter can often be right up there on what you could call the anxiety meter (“Mommy, remember to phone as soon as you arrive,” she says whenever her father and I take a trip, meaning anything from the nine-and-a-half-hour flight from Kennedy to Fiumicino to twenty-five minutes on the F and C trains from Boerum Hill to Central Park West), she is remarkably serene in the kitchen, where my anxiety spikes but hers dissolves into a kind of blissful and commanding competence that can always stretch a meal to include anyone who happens to call on a Sunday morning when she is at the stove, with eggs scrambling on one burner, pancakes on another, bacon on a third, and therefore a couple of burners still available for a pot or pan. I have been to known to panic at the thought of just a few unexpected guests, except in Italy in the summer, where my hospitality is relative to the capacity of my pasta pots—and mine are big.
There is a deep pleasure in seeing your child sneak up behind you, match you, and stride right past you, the way my daughter has. As anyone who reads this book will learn, my mother couldn’t cook and her mother couldn’t, either. In those days, there was no glamour in cooking if you didn’t have to, especially in New England, where the idea of “luscious” was close enough to “lust” to be far more shocking than inspiring. It amuses me now to see Providence—where generations of my mother’s family were born and raised on what was known generically (whoever you were) as “Protestant food”—referred to as a hot culinary destination. But if it’s true that certain gifts—cooking, gardening, music, to name a few—tend to skip a generation, then it stands to reason that if they skip two, the next two generations get to make up for it. My daughter and I are doing that now. We cook together on holidays and have come to terms on the subject of who does what best. She brines and roasts the crispest, juiciest, most tender Thanksgiving turkey I have ever eaten, the most ambrosial cranberry sauce and pies; I am the secret twelve-ingredient cornbread stuffing chef, and, I have to admit, produce a delicious bones-to-bourbon gravy. On Christmas, the baby Brussels sprouts with shallots, pancetta, and balsamic vinegar and, clearly, the bûche de Noël are hers to make. The Yorkshire pudding, parsnip purée, and rib roast with horseradish sauce are mine. We have not done battle in the kitchen for years. She still calls me Mommy. Her father and I still call her Wicky. Her husband (and friends and colleagues) call her Aleksandra. Her son calls her Mommy, Mom, Mother, Aleksandra, Wicky, or Woman, depending on the message he wants to send.
This book is for her, with love and pride. As for dinner tonight, I am still deciding what to make.
PART I
The Reporter’s Kitchen
THE REPORTER’S KITCHEN
AUGUST 2002
The kitchen where I’m making dinner is a New York kitchen. Nice light, way too small, nowhere to put anything unless the stove goes. My stove is huge, but it will never go. My stove is where my head clears, my impressions settle, my reporter’s life gets folded into my life, and whatever I’ve just learned, or think I’ve learned—whatever it was, out there in the world, that had seemed so different and surprising—bubbles away in the very small pot of what I think I know and, if I’m lucky, produces something l
ike perspective. A few years ago, I had a chance to interview Brenda Milner, the neuropsychologist who helped trace the process by which the brain turns information into memory, and memory into the particular consciousness called a life, or, you could say, into the signature of the person. Professor Milner was nearly eighty when I met her, in Montreal, at the neurological institute at McGill University, where she’d worked for close to fifty years, and one of the things we talked about was how some people, even at her great age, persist in “seeing” memory the way children do—as a cupboard or a drawer or a box of treasures underneath the bed, a box that gets full and has to be cleaned out every now and then to make room for the new treasures they collect. Professor Milner wasn’t one of those people, but I am. The memory I “see” is a kind of kitchen, where the thoughts and characters I bring home go straight into a stockpot on my big stove, reducing old flavors, distilling new ones, making a soup that never tastes the same as it did the day before, and feeds the voice that, for better or worse, is me writing, and not some woman from another kitchen.
I knew nothing about stockpots as a child. My mother was an awful cook, or more accurately, she didn’t cook, since in her day it was fashionable not to go anywhere near a kitchen if you didn’t have to. Her one creation, apart from a fluffy spinach soufflé that for some reason always appeared with the overcooked turkey when she made Thanksgiving dinner (a task she undertook mainly to avoid sitting in the cold with the rest of us at the Brown Thanksgiving Day home football game), would probably count today as haute-fusion family cooking: matzo-meal-and-Rhode-Island-johnnycake-mix pancakes, topped with thick bacon, sour cream, and maple syrup. Not even our housekeeper and occasional cook could cook—beyond a tepid sherried stew that was always presented at parties, grandly, as lobster thermidor, and a passable apple filling that you could spoon out, undetected, through the large steam holes of an otherwise tasteless pie. I don’t think I ever saw my father cook anything, unless you can call sprinkling sugar on a grapefruit or boiling syringes in an enamel pan, the way doctors did in those days, cooking. (I use the pan now for roasting chickens.) The only man in my family with a recipe of his own was my brother Bob, who had mastered a pretty dessert called pumpkin chiffon while courting an Amish girl who liked pumpkins. My own experience in the kitchen was pretty much limited to reheating the Sunday-night Chinese takeout early on Monday mornings, before anyone else was awake to eat it first.
I started cooking when I started writing. My first dish was tuna curry (a can of Bumble Bee, a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, a big spoonful of Durkee Curry Powder, and a cup of instant Carolina rice), and the recipe, such as it was, came from my friend Mary Clay, who claimed to have got it directly from the cook at her family’s Kentucky farm. It counted for me as triply exotic, being at once the product of a New York supermarket chain, the bluegrass South, and India. And never mind that the stove I cooked on then was tiny, or that “dining” meant a couple of plates and a candle on my old toy chest, transformed into the coffee table of a graduate-school rental, near Columbia; the feeling was high sixties, meaning that a nice girl from Providence could look forward to enjoying literature, sex, and cooking in the space of a single day. I don’t remember whom I was making the curry for, though I must have liked him, because I raced home from Frederick Dupee’s famous lecture on symbolism in Light in August to make it. What I do remember is how comforting it was to be standing at that tiny stove, pinched into a merry widow and stirring yellow powder into Campbell’s soup, when I might have been pacing the stacks at Butler Library, trying to resolve the very serious question of whether, after Dupee on Faulkner, there was anything left to say about literature, and, more precisely, the question of whether I’d find anything to say in a review—one of my first assignments in the real world—of a book of poems written by Norman Mailer on the occasion of having stabbed his second wife. I remember this because, as I stood there, stirring powder and a soupçon of Acapulco Gold into my tuna curry, I began to accept that, while whatever I did say wasn’t going to be the last word on the poetics of domestic violence, it would be my word, a lot of Rhode Island still in it, a little New York, and to my real surprise, a couple of certainties: I was angry at Norman Mailer; I was twenty-one and didn’t think that you should stab your wife. Mailer, on the other hand, had produced some very good lines of poetry. He must have been happy (or startled) to be taken for a poet at all, because a few weeks after my review ran—in a neighborhood paper you could pick up free in apartment-house lobbies—his friend Dan Wolf, the editor of what was then a twelve-page downtown alternative weekly called The Village Voice, phoned to offer me a job.
I bought a madeleine mold, at a kitchen shop near the old Voice offices, on Sheridan Square. It was my first purchase as a reporter who cooked—a long, narrow pan of shallow, ridged shells, waiting to produce a Proust—but though I liked madeleines, they didn’t collect my world in a mouthful, the way the taste of warm apples, licked from the cool tingle of a silver spoon, still does, or for that matter, the way the terrible chicken curry at the old brasserie La Coupole in Paris always reminded me of Norman Mailer’s wife. The mold sat in my various kitchens for twelve years before I moved to the kitchen I cook in now and tried madeleines again, and discovered that, for me, they were just another cookie—which is to say, not the kind of cookie that belonged in the ritual that for years has kept me commuting between my study and my stove, stirring or beating or chopping or sifting my way through false starts and strained transitions and sticky sentences.
The cookies I like to make when I’m writing are called “dream cookies.” I made my first batch in my friend John Tillinger’s kitchen in Roxbury, Connecticut, at one in the morning, in a mood perhaps best described by the fact that I’d just been awakened by the weight of a large cat settling on my head. The cookies were a kind of sand tart. They had a dry, gritty, burned-butter taste, and I must have associated them with the taste of deliverance from sweet, smooth, treacherous things like purring cats. I say this because a few years later I found myself making them again, in North Africa, in the middle of reporting a story about a tribal feud that involved a Berber wedding and was encrypted—at least for me—in platters of syrupy honeyed pastries, sugared couscous, and sweet mint tea.
At the time, my kitchen was in the Moroccan city of Meknes, where my husband was doing ethnographic research, but my story took me to a village a couple of hours up into the foothills of the Middle Atlas Mountains. It was a wild, unpleasant place. Even today, some thirty years, a couple of wars and revolutions, and an assortment of arguably more unpleasant places later, I would call it scary. The wedding in question, a three-day, her-house-to-his-house traveling celebration, was about to begin in the bride’s village—which had every reason to celebrate, having already provided the groom’s village with a large number of pretty virgins and, in the process, profited considerably from the bride-prices those virgins had commanded: goats, chickens, silver necklaces, brass plates, and simple, practical, hard cash, some of it in negotiable European currencies. The problem was that none of the young men in the bride’s village were at all interested in the virgins available in the groom’s village, whose own supply of goats, chickens, necklaces, plates, and money was consequently quite depleted. All that village had was an abundance of homely daughters—or, you could say, the bad end of the balance of trade in brides. As a result, the men in the groom’s village were getting ready to fight the men in the bride’s village, a situation that left the women in both villages cooking day and night, in a frantic effort to turn their enemies into guests.
By then I was close to being an enemy myself, having already broken one serious taboo: I had asked the name of somebody’s aunt in a conversation where the naming of paternal aunts in the company of certain female relatives was tantamount to calling catastrophe down on the entire family, and the women had had to abandon their cooking in order to purge the premises, which they did by circling the village, ululating loudly, while I sat there in the
blazing sun, under strict orders to keep the flies off a platter of dripping honey cakes. It hadn’t helped any that, in a spirit of apology (or perhaps it was malice), I then invited the villagers to Meknes and served them my special Julia Child’s bœuf bourguignon, which made them all quite ill. A few days later, I went to the medina and bought some almonds for dream cookies. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I was homesick. Certainly I was being spoiled, knowing that Malika, the young Arab woman who worked for me and had become my friend, would grind those almonds into a sandy paste as quickly as she had just peeled peaches for my breakfast—which is to say, in less time than it took me to check for scorpions underneath the two cushions and copper tray that were then my dining room. But I think now that I was mainly trying to find my voice in a country where some women couldn’t mention an aunt to a relative—where the voices of most women, in fact, were confined to their ululations. Once I heard that same shrill, fluty cry coming from my own kitchen and rushed in to find Malika shaking with pain and bleeding; she was sixteen, and had taken something or done something to herself to end a pregnancy that I had never even suspected. After that, I would sometimes hear the cry again and find her huddled in a corner of the room, struck with a terror she could not describe. No one had ever asked her to describe it, not even the man she’d married when, by her own reckoning, she was twelve years old.
I never finished the story about the Berber bride. I was a bride myself, and this posed something of a problem for my erstwhile village friends, who had wanted to find me a husband from the tribe and thus assure themselves of the continued use of, if not actually the title to, my new Volkswagen. In the event, one night, after we’d been trading recipes, the women sent me home with a complicated (and fairly revolting) “love recipe” to try out on the husband I already had, and it turned out—at least according to the neighbors who warned me not to make it—to be a bit of black magic whose purpose was, to put it discreetly, less amorous than incapacitating. I took this as a sign that it was time to come down from the mountains. I wrote a book about an Arab wedding instead, and I waited until I was back in my study in New York to finish it. The lesson for me, as a writer, was that I had to burrow back into my own life before I could even start thinking clearly about someone else’s, or come to terms with the kinds of violence that are part of any reporter’s working life, or with the tangles of outrage that women reporters almost inevitably carry home with their notes.
