Getting the Pretty Back

by Molly Ringwald

  “I’m right. I know. I’m Greek. It’s not over, I promise you.” He banged on his steering wheel for emphasis. “I give him a week. Maybe less.”

  Somehow I found myself reassured by the cabbie’s insistence. Even if I couldn’t totally believe it, I was immensely comforted by the kindness of strangers. Especially in this case, when he was a Greek stranger with an “evil eye” dangling from the rearview mirror. I gave him an extra big tip, which he tried to refuse.

  “Efharisto,” I said thanking him with one of the few Greek words I knew.

  “Parakalo,” he replied. “Less than a week!” he called out through the window as he drove off beeping his horn at me.

  As it happened, my cabbie was right. He did come back in less than a week, but in the meantime, I had done some soul-searching of my own and decided to snap out of it. I am not one for wallowing, at least not for an extended period of time. My pride won’t let me do it. I decided that the only way I would be happy was to move on and let him go. It was a variation of the “If you love someone, set them free” theory of love (with thanks to Sting for indelibly planting this in our collective brains).

  In our first conversations after getting back together, I promised not to bring up the baby word for at least two years. (I might have fudged that a little, but it was an honest pledge at the time.) He promised not to get overwhelmed by the onslaught of female emotion and to let me know when I started to freak him out. I in turn promised not to freak out when he freaked out. We went back and forth, batting promises to each other in an amorous equivalent of table tennis, and nine years and three kids later, we are still promising each other everything.

  ORIGINS

  In the beginning

  there was the word

  typed out on a borrowed electric keyboard,

  a pageantry of autobiography and flirtation,

  anecdotes about pinecones, the aesthetics of fictitious brotherhood,

  primitive royalty.

  In the beginning

  there was ice cream, plucked from the lowboy freezer

  of a twenty-four-hour delicatessen on a forgotten Manhattan street corner

  on an unforgettable night.

  We should have been tired. Scared. Timid.

  Instead we were wide awake and bold,

  bumping against each other with all the oblivious,

  willful glee of tectonic plates.

  Mountain ranges rattled.

  Buildings shook.

  The chassis of the smallest cars suffered further indignities.

  In the beginning

  the future was as unfathomable as the spectral meddling fingers of God,

  that is to say, wholly imaginary, brazenly unknown,

  How much could have gone wrong.

  Sometimes I amaze myself thinking about

  the thousands of missteps that could have led us,

  like blindfolded assistants crossing the knifethrower’s stage,

  right past each other.

  It’s so easy to miss our finest trajectory.

  We could have been nothing more than

  receding footfalls,

  conjured up years after the performance has ended,

  a flash of darkened curiosity.

  My pulse flurries and furies at the thought.

  We know so little.

  Chemistry is a blur.

  Geography is an embarrassment.

  And I routinely forget the age of the Earth.

  Even in retrospect our ignorance is tremendous.

  So how, then, could we possibly have known

  about each other?

  Maybe there’s more.

  Under the skin

  is the muscle

  and under the muscle

  is the bone,

  and under the bone…what?

  Thought?

  Space?

  Intention?

  Tell me where music comes from

  and I will tell you what love is.

  Every song contains within it

  the expanding and great-hearted enormity

  of the universe, a phenomenon that quietly mirrors

  in its complexity

  in its beauty

  in its grace

  and in my gratitude

  the outrageous splendor of your love.

  —PANIO GIANOPOULOS

  JULY 6, 2008

  Chapter Six

  NEVER WEAR SANDALS IN THE KITCHEN

  A FRENCHMAN ONCE MUSED TO ME PHILOSOPHICALLY, “IT IS HARD FOR ZEE WOMAN TO HAVE A GOOD RELATIONSHIP WITH HER ASS, SINCE IT IS ALWAYS BEHIND HER.” Not to say that I don’t care about my ass. I do. Marginally. Probably not as much as some people do. But then I get a grip and remember my priorities, and for this I turn to French women rather than men.

  There is a quote, often attributed to the great style icon Catherine Deneuve, that goes something like: “At a certain age, you must choose between your face and your ass.” Given the fact that Ms. Deneuve is a classic Parisian, the Mecca of Michelin-rated cuisine, how could she not choose the former? When I moved to Paris, I made the same choice—I didn’t even have to wait for my forties. I was pretty clear in my twenties what mattered to me. When I die, I don’t intend to have it written on my grave “She was skinny.” I would much prefer “She mastered the soufflé” or “Her hollandaise never separated.”

  I have always been interested in food. My own mother is a chef and compulsive cookbook collector. The first French words I learned were bon appétit, which is how my mother signed cookbooks that she gave me as a child. This is because her idol, Julia Child, signed her autographs this way. I grew up with a mother who cooked everything from scratch. Mostly this was for budgetary reasons, but I also think that she developed a great sense of pride from what she could create in the kitchen. The house always smelled of baking bread. We never went to school with store-bought bread, so of course for a short time during our adolescence, we were convinced that we were missing something. My sister, Beth, once wailed to my mother in the supermarket bread aisle, “You don’t love me. You don’t want me to grow twelve different ways,” referring to the Wonder bread slogan of the time.

  My siblings and I would stare longingly at our friends’ Wonder bread bologna sandwiches at school. Miraculously, we found that our friends were always more than willing to make a trade for our fluffy sandwiches with homemade bread and fresh preserves.

  Even now, there is no scent that I find more comforting than the smell of bread baking. For this reason, the whole Atkins fad just passed me by. How could I give up something that I loved so much? It isn’t just the fact that bread tastes delicious. It’s also one of my most basic and fondest childhood memories. A good friend of mine who came from a troubled home spent many days at my family’s home. She said that just walking into my home and smelling the freshly baked bread filled her with a sense of well-being, that there was someplace she could go to where everything was right in the world.

  The most remarkable part is that my mother didn’t even know how to cook when she first got married, a skill that was pretty much a prerequisite to matrimony when my parents met in the late fifties. Apparently the very first meal that she attempted—which wasn’t really a meal at all—was sticky buns. It was such a success that my father was convinced that someone else had made them. He kept trying to get her to “fess up,” but she insisted that it was she who had created the delicacy. It was the beginning of my mother’s long love affair with food and then subsequently, and through association, mine.

  The first time I visited Paris I was thirteen years old. At that time I was under the misconception that everything you ate there was a culinary masterpiece. I thought that you could drink wine from a tap and it would be ambrosia. Admittedly, my palate wasn’t as refined as it is today—having lived there for a good length of time later in life, I am able to confidently state that it is just as easy to have a bad meal in Paris as it is anywhere else in the world. But the good ones are incomparab
le.

  Whenever anyone finds out that I lived in France, I always get the same question. What were you doing there? The answer: eating incredible food and learning French…so I could keep on eating more incredible food. I think I always suspected that food could taste like that, but to live in a city where on any given night you could go out and eat something as simple as steak frites with a tarte tatin for dessert and feel like it was the most delicious thing you’d ever eaten never lost its novelty. And the most amazing thing? I never gained weight. The only time that I put on a few pounds was, surprise, surprise, when I returned to the United States for visits. I’m pretty sure that the reason for this is the quality of the ingredients there and the lack of processed foods.

  THE FIVE BIGGEST MISTAKES HOME COOKS MAKE

  Let’s admit it, cooking can be a daunting prospect. But it’s also hugely rewarding—and there’s no better time than now. What with the proliferation of farmers’ markets and the slow food revolution, not to mention the seemingly endless recession, if you’ve ever had any interest in cooking at home, here’s your chance. Not all of us have the time to drop it all and go to chef’s training, of course, so I’ve asked my friend Taite Pearson, a longtime professional chef, for some behind-the-scenes tips and tricks for beginners.

  MISTAKE 1: FEAR OF EXPERIMENTATION

  Many people say “I can’t cook” or “I only know how to make…blah blah blah.” Cooking is an adventure. Be brave. Use ingredients you have never used before. It is likely that even your mistakes will bring you joy in the kitchen and pleasure at the table. A phrase I always try to keep in mind when cooking is “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment” (Barry LePatner).

  MISTAKE 2: INFERIOR INGREDIENTS

  When purchasing groceries, buy the best possible quality product you can afford. Buy seasonally correct and local whenever possible. Visit the farmers’ markets. The better-tasting the ingredients you start with, the better-tasting the final dish will be. What we buy and how we approach it affects those we nurture and the environment, and it just plain feels good to know where our ingredients came from.

  MISTAKE 3: POOR STORAGE

  Research and understand the proper way to store your foodstuffs. This will keep them at the highest quality until they are used, avoid contamination, and lengthen the life of pantry goods.

  MISTAKE 4: SKIMPING ON EQUIPMENT

  Every home cook doesn’t need a kitchen full of fancy gadgets, but the equipment we use will make cooking more enjoyable. Again, buy the best quality you can. All you need are a couple of really good quality pans (one sauté, one sauce), a great chef’s knife that feels good in your hands, and a paring knife. Add tools as you go and as your repertoire broadens. Splurge on something every once in a while. It will encourage you to spend more time in the kitchen.

  MISTAKE 5: EXCLUDING CHILDREN

  Include them in the whole process. enrich their lives with food. They are the future.

  In Paris, nothing is fast. When I first moved there, in my twenties, I used to go around to the cafés and try to order coffee “to go.” The café owners were always perplexed by this—the very idea of coffee “to go” mystified them. Why would anyone want to take their coffee with them, guzzling it midstride, when they could sit at a table instead and enjoy it at their leisure, while engaged in conversation with friends? They never had a proper cup, so I usually received the coffee in a little plastic cup unintended for hot beverages. And the amount of coffee in the cup was so minuscule that it hardly seemed worth the effort. They don’t drink their coffee in huge, oversize cups with Italian names. It was soon explained to me that in France the act of drinking coffee is a social thing. Enough time to share a few gossipy tidbits with your friends and maybe a cigarette (when everyone was still smoking in cafés) before heading off to wherever you are going. The French don’t like to multitask the way Americans are expected to. In time I stopped trying to take my coffee away with me. In truth, there was really no reason to. I had all the time in the world, so I used it. I started a morning ritual of ordering my coffee. Un double express avec un nuage de lait. And a croissant—ordinaire, s’il vous plaît. Ordering a croissant ordinaire means that you order it without the extra butter. You can tell the difference by the shape. Croissant beurre is shaped, well, like a crescent. Ordinaire is shaped like a fluffy crab, the tips curled toward each other. My morning indulgence was une orange pressée—une double. Which was really just a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice filled to the top of the glass. Otherwise, the café owner would fill the glass halfway with juice and deliver it with a pitcher of water and a bowl of sugar. Having a full glass of orange juice was an American habit I deliberately never lost, even though it was ridiculously expensive, costing nearly ten U.S. dollars. My French friends would stare at me as I gulped down my orange juice in the morning like some greedy emperor. If I really felt like shocking them, I would order another.

  “She ees so American,” they would remark. “Eet ees because she ees from Californie, sans doute.”

  BREAD

  France is the Mecca of all Meccas for bread lovers. The crusty baguette, with cheese and sliced ham, became a standby for me. In fact, I think the week I first moved to Paris, I ate ham and cheese sandwiches every day.

  Of course at the time I didn’t know that I had moved there yet. Initially, I went there for a film. I finagled it into my contract to fly my friend Julia there with me and we installed ourselves in the Palais Royal (home to the writer Colette, among other luminaries), expecting to return to the United States at the end of the summer. But in the back of my mind, I suspect there was some hint of what was to come. Before leaving Los Angeles, I had put my house up for sale, moved everything into storage, and then carted seven large suitcases with me to Paris. My unconscious clearly had plans of its own.

  After a while—and hundreds of baguettes—I started to notice a sign that was posted in dozens of French cafés. LE PAIN POILNE EST SERVI ICI. What is this Pain Poilâne and why is it so special that they want to advertise it everywhere? I wondered. Upon investigation, I learned that it is a sourdough country bread, made with stone ground flour, natural fermentation, and baked in a wood-burning oven. It has a slightly tart, but earthy, mineral-y flavor. The loaf is big and oblong, about four and a half pounds, and you can slice the bread in unusually big slices. It also has another advantage: it lasts for days, unlike the classic baguettes, which get rock hard after one day. Soon I started making the trek to the Poilâne bakery on the Rue de Cherche-Midi in St.-Germain-des-Prés to pick up my own Pain Poilâne and a little apple tart in puff pastry.

  One year, my mother came to visit me for New Year’s Eve. It was an exceptionally cold winter in Paris at the time. And somehow, cold in Paris just seems colder. Maybe it is the icy wet air traveling up from the Seine, or the big stone buildings, but it was dismally cold—the kind of cold that gives you a chill when you step outside to pick up the paper, a chill you can’t lose for the rest of the day. Since my mother was in town, I felt the need to show her around, show her all the places that I loved, all of the reasons I had chosen to move there. We walked around most of the afternoon until our feet were frozen, and then right before we headed back to my apartment in the Marais, we made a little detour to the Pain Poilâne bakery. As usual, there was a line outside of people waiting to get in. I hopped from foot to foot, shivering.

  “Mom, the line is too long! Let’s come back another time.”

  “Let me just look in the window a second,” my mother said, walking up to the glass and peering in at the various, beautiful loaves. She is a professionally trained chef, but her true passion has always been baking.

  Just then a hired car pulled up and a man in a long cashmere coat stepped out with a little girl. They strode into the bakery as if they owned the place.

  “Will you look at these, Molly?” my mother said as she pointed to one of the loaves on display.

  A few seconds later, the man suddenly reap
peared and asked my mother if we would like to tour the bakery. The man was Lionel Poilâne, and yes—he actually did own the place! My mother and I blinked at each other, completely surprised. Yes, of course we would! Poilâne took us downstairs to where the ovens were located. The room was as hot as a furnace. Three shirtless young men fed the famous loaves into the oven. My mom marveled at the oven. (I marveled at the men.) Monsieur Poilâne showed us around the rest of the bakery, and at our departure gave us a gift of some apple tarts. I never knew what made him invite us in, the reason for his generosity. All he said, by way of a reason, was that he could see that my mother was American, and that she was truly interested in the bread. He said that he wanted to send her home with a bon souvenir, which in French means a fond memory. And he did. It was the undisputed highlight of her trip. Not too long afterward, I read in the paper that Lionel Poilâne died in a helicopter crash along with his wife. The little girl that I saw that day now runs the entire Poilâne enterprise. I’ve always wanted to thank her father, for his bread, and for the bon souvenir.

  CHEESE

  Never cut the nose of the cheese! I learned this the hard way one Sunday afternoon in the French countryside. Every weekend my boyfriend and I would make the trek to the outskirts of Paris to have Sunday lunch with the family—come rain or come shine. These lunches, though invariably delicious, were also a bit uncomfortable for me. I found my high school French to be sorely lacking, and though most of the family attempted to speak slowly, or occasionally to converse in English for me, the meals were usually conducted in rapid-fire French, full of overlapping enthusiasm and in jokes. “In my country, I speak French,” his seventeen-year-old sister sniffed. I spent most of the time trying to follow the conversations, and then when my head started to hurt, I’d just kind of space out and have conversations with myself. My favorite part of the meal was inevitably the cheese plate (always served at the end of the meal, either in place of or accompanying dessert). Having grown up in America, where the most exotic kind of cheese was Roquefort, the different kinds of cheeses on the average Sunday lunch cheese plate were always a treat. The fresh and nutty Reblochon (its name, incidentally, comes from the verb reblocher, which means “to pinch a cow’s udder again”), a creamy Camembert, a tangy chèvre. I reached across the table to serve myself a slice of Saint-Nectaire when I became aware of a sudden, strange lull in conversation. And then a cacophony of French voices erupted.