Comfort Me with Apples

by Ruth Reichl

  Pulse the flours and salt together in a food processor. Add the egg yolks and oil and process just until mixture forms a ball of dough. Divide the dough into 6 pieces and form each into a disk. Wrap each disk of dough in plastic wrap and let stand at room temperature for 1 hour.

  Dust 3 baking sheets with some semolina flour.

  Unwrap 1 piece of dough and roll it out on a lightly floured surface with a floured rolling pin until paper thin, making a rectangle about 11 by 13 inches. Cut the dough crosswise with a pizza wheel or sharp knife into 11- by 1/2-inch-wide strips. Carefully transfer the pasta, overlapping strips slightly, to a sheet pan to dry at room temperature, gently turning occasionally, for about 2 hours. Repeat the rolling and cutting with the remaining dough.

  TO MAKE THE SAUCE

  Cook the onion, with salt and pepper, in 4 tablespoons of butter in a heavy skillet over moderate heat, stirring, until softened. Add the garlic and parsley and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Cover and keep warm.

  Combine the water, ham, asparagus, and remaining 4 tablespoons of butter in a large heavy saucepan and simmer, covered, until the asparagus is crisp-tender, about 2 minutes. Stir in the onion mixture and season with more salt and pepper. Keep sauce warm, covered.

  TO ASSEMBLE THE DISH

  Cook the pasta in an 8-quart pot half full of boiling salted water until just tender, about 1 minute, and drain in a colander. Return the pasta to the pot, add the sauce, and toss to combine. Season with salt and pepper.

  Serves 4 to 6.

  WARM SALAD

  You don’t need a garden to produce this salad. You don’t need sun-warmed greens and homemade goat cheese either. But they help.

  1/3 cup olive oil

  1/2 pound sliced bacon

  1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

  1 clove garlic, minced

  8 cups assorted bite-size greens, such as curly endive, escarole, or baby kale

  2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, or to taste

  4 ounces fresh mild goat cheese, crumbled

  salt and pepper

  Heat the oil in a large heavy skillet over moderate heat until hot but not smoking and cook the bacon, turning it occasionally, until crisp. Use tongs to transfer the bacon to paper towels to drain, reserving the fat in the skillet. Crumble the bacon. Add the walnuts and garlic to the skillet and cook, stirring, over moderate heat until the nuts and garlic are golden. With a slotted spoon, transfer the walnuts to a large salad bowl and season them with salt.

  Add the greens, bacon, lemon juice, and goat cheese and toss. Drizzle some of the hot drippings from the skillet over the salad and toss again, adding salt and pepper and more hot drippings and lemon juice to taste.

  Serves 4.

  RASPBERRY ICE CREAM

  Charlene didn’t use quite as much lemon as I’ve put into this recipe, but I think that the lemon juice brings out the sweetness of the berries. Like all ice cream, this tastes best just after it is made.

  4 cups fresh raspberries

  2 1/2 cups sugar

  1/4 cup eau-de-vie de framboise

  3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

  4 cups chilled heavy cream

  Purée the raspberries in a blender until smooth. To remove the seeds, force the purée through a fine sieve into a 2-quart heavy saucepan. Stir in the sugar and bring the mixture to a boil. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the sugar is dissolved. Continue to boil the mixture until a candy thermometer registers 220°F (about 15 minutes).

  Transfer the mixture to a large bowl and cool, stirring occasionally, to room temperature (the mixture will thicken as it cools). Whisk in the eau-de-vie and the lemon juice, then slowly whisk in the cream, gently but thoroughly.

  Freeze the mixture in an ice-cream maker. Transfer the finished ice cream to an airtight container and put it in the freezer to harden.

  Makes about 2 quarts.

  11

  DALÍ FISH

  Barbara Lazaroff told me a dozen different stories about her past. I never knew which ones to believe. On Tuesday she claimed to be a chemist. On Wednesday she said she had gone to college on a music scholarship at the age of fifteen. She once told me she had been an inhalation therapist. On another occasion she’d talked about her life in the theater. And I could not begin to count the times she’d mentioned that she was going to be a doctor. This beautiful woman turned heads wherever she went, but she yearned to be respected for her mind. She went on endlessly about her accomplishments; unfortunately, she seemed to forget, from one day to the next, what they were. Was any of it true?

  “Who cares?” said my editors when I pointed this out. “We want you to write about Wolfgang Puck as he opens his new restaurant. We want all the dirt. Spend as much time as you need. You should spend weeks making yourself a nuisance.”

  “But Barbara is his fiancée and business partner,” I protested. “Chinois is her restaurant too.”

  “He’s the famous one,” they replied. “He’s the one we care about. You’re going to have to be into everybody’s business, but concentrate on him.”

  I tried. I followed America’s favorite chef as he went in and out of markets. I tagged along as he went to duck farms, to fruit stands, and to the wholesale vegetable district. I was with him while he tested new equipment. When the American Express representative came to beg for his business, I was there. I learned that Wolfgang gained weight when he worried about money, and as the delays stretched endlessly on I watched Chinois very nearly make him fat.

  At first Michael liked the idea that I was going to Los Angeles to write about the opening of the city’s most eagerly anticipated restaurant, but each time it was delayed he became a little more impatient. “You’re flying to Los Angeles again?” he would cry. I couldn’t blame him; Chinois was supposed to open in March, but by August the restaurant was still under construction. “You’re not seeing Colman again, are you?” Michael asked as I headed to L.A. one more time.

  “Of course not,” I replied.

  He gave me a searching look. “Maybe you’re hiding another rendezvous with a criminal?” he inquired.

  I blushed; this was a sore point. When L.A.’s chef du jour, Joachim Splichal, started cooking at the private Regency Club, I did my best to finagle an invitation. The magazine’s publisher invited me to join him and his friend for lunch and I was ecstatic. I accepted before he told me the friend’s name. “We’re having lunch,” he said, “with H. R. Haldeman.”

  What am I doing here? I thought, sitting in a staid room filled with suits. The conversation was dull; the food turned to sawdust in my mouth. Sitting across from that beefy blond man, I remembered watching the Watergate hearings on Channing Way’s grainy television and felt sick to my stomach.

  “Good,” said Michael when I told him. It was all he said for an entire week, and it was another week before he looked at me with less than loathing.

  But I was not concealing lunch with the enemy, and I had no clandestine dates. Still, Michael was right; I did have a secret.

  During one of my trips to L.A., an editor at the Los Angeles Times had tracked me down and asked me to come in for an interview.

  “I won’t beat around the bush,” Robert Epstein said when I arrived at his office. He was thin, with wiry gray hair, attractively pocked skin, and an ironic air; he looked so much like Richard Boone that every time I glanced at him the theme from Have Gun Will Travel played in my head. “We’re looking for a new restaurant critic.”

  “I hate L.A.,” I said. “I’d never move down here. Why don’t you call Colman Andrews? He lives here and he’d be perfect.”

  “Yes,” Robert Epstein agreed, “we’ve thought of that. But he fills in for our critic from time to time and we’re looking for a new voice.”

  “Not mine,” I said.

  Robert Epstein acted as if I had not spoken. “Take your time,” he said blandly, “we’re in no hurry. We’re offering you the best job in America. The Times is the most powerful paper on the West Coast. You won’t
turn this down.”

  Although his assurance was irritating, I was intrigued. New West’s new owners had changed the magazine’s name to California and given me a contract, but at thirty-five I was still a freelance writer. I had no health insurance and no pension and my expense account was twice the size of my meager earnings. This was the first time I had ever been offered a full-time job that paid real money and provided benefits. And there was one more consideration: I was surprised and flattered that the editors of the Los Angeles Times considered me to be in the same category as Colman. They obviously did not realize that he knew more about food than I ever would. How could they possibly think I had enough experience for this job?

  “You know more than you think you do,” said Colman when I called to ask for advice. Over the years our relationship had mellowed into a slightly competitive friendship, and I still loved spending time with him. “Of course you should take the job,” he continued. “Why wouldn’t you?”

  I could think of lots of reasons. I didn’t want to leave my friends. I didn’t want to leave our little red cottage. I hated L.A. I was scared. And even though Michael and I had been living together for two years, I was not divorced. Just thinking about living in a different city than Doug took my breath away.

  Those same reasons, I knew, would cause Michael to be thrilled by this unexpected opportunity. We would be able to start out fresh, with no baggage. Unlike me, he thrived on change and with his drive and energy he would easily find a new job. When Michael wanted something, he made it happen. Telling him about the offer from the L.A. Times would be tantamount to accepting it. And so I said nothing and mulled it over, on my own.

  Meanwhile I went down to L.A. every few weeks and watched as Wolfgang created a new crossover cuisine. I stood at his elbow as he reinvented tempura, added glace de viande to classic Chinese recipes, and made dim sum out of goat cheese. I diligently took notes, dutifully recording everything that he did.

  But looking back I see that most of my notes concerned Barbara. I obsessively wrote down every word she uttered, as if I were trying to uncover the truth about her. I knew that it mattered, but it took me a while to understand why.

  * * *

  The office above Spago did not seem like a place where a famous chef did business. The room was quite small and very old, with inconvenient widows. It looked like your grandmother’s attic, and it was filled with funky desks and too many people screaming into too many phones.

  “Hello?” I called before I had even gotten to the top of the stairs. From where I stood I could see Wolfgang Puck leaning all the way back in a torn office chair; his feet were up and he was wiggling his toe through a hole in his sock. He was pudgier than he had been at Ma Maison, and he had traded his toque for a baseball cap with Spago scrawled across the front. He grinned at me and swiped a finger across his cute pug nose; he looked about fifteen.

  “I’m sorry,” he was saying into the phone, his Austrian accent very thick. “But what am I going to do? Tell fifty people with reservations they can’t come?” He hung up and said to the room in general, “That was David Bowie. He wanted to bring fifty people to dinner. I told him no.” The phone rang again and he picked it up, cradling the receiver beneath his chin as he casually munched on nuts. “Billy Wilder,” he explained, after hanging up. A few minutes later Itzhak Perlman called; could he have pizza with scallops? “Of course,” said Wolfgang. Celebrities did not scare him. He had been peeling potatoes at thirteen, but that was a distant memory. He had fed the famous, catered to them, studied them for so many years that when fame came knocking on his door it was no stranger.

  Barbara sat across the room, tugging at her long black hair with scarlet fingernails. She was addressing invitations for Spago’s annual Academy Awards party, and she was agonizing over the task. Wearing fake eyelashes, mascara, eyeliner, lipstick, and powder she looked as if she had dressed up to honor the job, as if the stars would see her right through the invitations. “Should it be Mr. and Mrs. Paul Newman?” she mused. “Who wants to be Mrs. Robert Redford?”

  Hanging in the air, unspoken, was another question. “Who wants to be Mrs. Wolfgang Puck?”

  * * *

  Their house surprised me: I had not imagined Wolf and Barbara living in a dear little gingerbread cottage with a pointed roof and a jumble of furniture. In a neighborhood bristling with signs declaring armed response, theirs didn’t even have an alarm. “Wolf never locks the door,” said Barbara. “We don’t even have water in the swimming pool. He wants to turn it into a duck pond. Come in, come in, I want to show you the kitchen.”

  She led me through the living room into a large kitchen stuffed with impressive equipment. “It was my first design job. When I met Wolf I said, ‘Magazines are going to want to take pictures of you cooking in your kitchen, and you can’t do it in a slum. How will it look?’ Then I wrote to all the companies and said that the kitchen was going to be in magazines, so they gave me stuff for free and half price and stuff. And then,” she announced jubilantly, pointing out the wok stove, professional range, and giant refrigerator, “it was in magazines.”

  Another career, I thought, looking around the room. My eye fell on a framed picture sitting above the stove. “That was when I was a model,” she said nonchalantly. I wrote it in my notebook, followed by a big question mark. “I only weighed eighty-five pounds,” she said, as if to assuage my doubts. “But now I have to change. Why don’t you come upstairs with me?”

  Barbara shepherded me into a cluttered bedroom, flung open her closet, and stood trying to decide what to wear. She pointed at the dresser and said, “Could you reach into that top drawer and find me some socks?” I pulled the drawer open and her cats, Greystone and Alchemy, jumped in and nosed around as I held up first one pair of socks and then another. There were dozens.

  “The women who sell hosiery are always the most awful people, so I buy five hundred dollars’ worth at one time to get it over with,” said Barbara. “Stop, stop, those are good.” I was holding black-and-white striped socks that seemed like a strange choice to go with yellow polka-dotted shorts. I threw them across the room, barely missing the bird Wookie in mid-flight. Barbara pulled on the socks and screamed, “Ohmygod, we have to go. I have an appointment to look at art.” Blowing kisses at cats, dogs, and assorted birds, she made her exit. I followed in her wake.

  She drove down La Brea in her new BMW, talking nonstop and peering at the numbers on the buildings. “Rauschenberg wants to give me a piece, but I like showing young artists,” she said. “I have a very good sense of direction,” she went on, passing the gallery three times in succession. She finally spotted the building, and a potential parking spot right in front. “We just need to get that guy in the Jaguar to pull up a couple of inches,” she said.

  “I’ll ask,” I said, reaching for the door handle.

  “No,” she replied, “better let me.” She saw my face, understood what I was thinking, and added kindly, “I have a bigger mouth.”

  Men rarely refused her anything; she came back, smiling. The BMW purred smoothly into the space.

  I followed as Barbara swept through galleries, squealing each time she found something she liked. “I love it, I want it,” she said as she looked at an enormous red ceramic sculpture. “I like screaming art; otherwise you put it on the wall and no one notices it.” She turned to the dealer. “I have to have it. I’ve bought this piece.”

  “But you haven’t even asked the price!” I protested.

  “Don’t worry,” Barbara whispered in my ear. “Whatever it is, we can get it down.”

  She drove back to Spago, fast. I bit my nails and asked a question, hoping the answer would slow her down. “How did you meet Wolf?”

  “I was at a disco with a girlfriend,” she said, cutting off a car to our left. “I’m an excellent dancer, by the way.” I half-expected her to tell me about her professional career in dance, but this bit of information was not forthcoming. A horn blared angrily. Barbara accelerated an
d continued. “Wolf looked so cute dancing in his whites that I went over and asked him to dance. And then he asked me to come visit his cooking class at Ma Maison the next day.” The man in the next car was gesticulating angrily. Barbara ignored him.

  “I was living with someone, but I went anyway. I was late, and when Wolf looked up and saw me he dropped the stick of butter he was holding.”

  She finally slowed down and looked at me. “And you?” she asked. “Are you married?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “You’re either married or you’re not,” she said.

  “Well, I’m married to one man but I live with another.”

  “So you don’t plan to have children?” Barbara’s directness startled me. I was supposed to be interviewing her.

  “I do want children,” I said.

  “Me too,” she said. “I would be the most wonderful mother. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-five,” I replied.

  “You’d better make up your mind,” she said. “You don’t have much time.” She gave me a sidelong glance as she started up the hill. “I know, I know, I’m pushy.” She pulled into the parking lot and added, “But I’m usually right.”

  * * *

  The office at Spago was in complete chaos.

  “Charlton Heston on line one. He can come to the Academy Awards party!”

  “David Bowie on line two. Do we want tickets for the concert?”

  “Janet De Cordova, line three.”

  “The White House on line four! They want to know what you’re going to cook for the economic summit in May.”

  Wolfgang leaned back in his chair. He had no notes, no papers, and as he stared into space he seemed to be snatching the ideas from the air. “Tell them,” he said with casual authority, “American caviar and then . . . I don’t know. Maybe warm goat cheese toasts and my American lamb salad. Maida Heatter’s making cheesecake brownies for dessert. The Europeans will love it.”

  He looked up as if noticing me for the first time. “I know,” he said, “this is different from the food I used to cook at Ma Maison.” I blinked; he was answering a question I hadn’t asked, and it always took me a moment to get accustomed to his almost telepathic prescience. “But there didn’t used to be anything to eat here, and now everything has changed. With good ingredients you can cook it more simply.” He leapt out of his chair, as if I had reminded him of something, and started down the stairs. “Come with me to the kitchen; I am going to try out some things for the new restaurant. It’s so much fun because nobody really knows about it, so you can throw anything in and say, ‘Oh yes, it comes from a Far Eastern province. My uncle lived there.’ ”