Comfort Me with Apples

by Ruth Reichl

  In the Napa Valley the sky was very blue. We were the only people at the pool. We read, we ate, we drank a great deal. We even made love. We hardly spoke.

  Driving home, Michael broke the silence. “I have to tell you something,” he said. “I can’t do that again. Not now. Not ever. If you want to adopt, you’ll have to do it with some other guy. I won’t risk my heart like that again.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  We were in the hot dry valley between the mountains and the coast. The sun beat down on the parched land. The road stretched before us, relentless and straight. It seemed to be going nowhere.

  14

  BARCELONA

  My watch said four A.M. In Los Angeles it was dark. Even the freeways would be deserted, with only an occasional headlight picking out the contours of the road. But in Barcelona the sun was still up, and I had to get through one more night without Gavi. I threw my suitcase on the bed and splashed water on my face. Halfway around the world, this trip had seemed like a perfect escape. Now the idea of spending a week in Barcelona with five famous American chefs just seemed like piling jet lag onto misery.

  “Hello, I’m hungry,” said Alice, peeking around the door. After years as America’s most famous chef, the woman who was called “the mother of California cuisine” was still pretty and petite. “Did you just land? Me too. I ate all the food on the plane, even that terrible tired spinach, but it wasn’t much. It’s three whole hours until we’re supposed to meet the others for dinner, and I can’t wait. Let’s go out and see what we can find.”

  It was April, and the air was crisp when we left the hotel, the city too delicious to resist. Rococo buildings were piled onto the sidewalk like pastries on a plate. We walked down the Rambla Catalunya, through lanes of double lime trees and past stalls selling lilacs, lilies, violets, and roses. “Isn’t it beautiful?” said Alice, who filled my silence with a running commentary. “And just smell.”

  In spite of myself I wrinkled my nose and inhaled the city. We walked beneath the beautiful wrought-iron street lamps of the Passeig de Gràcia and turned to twist through smaller streets where each block wore a different perfume. One had the scent of salted fish, the next frying dough, and just beyond that we discovered the ripe yeasty aroma of cheese. And then, halfway down a block, the warm smell of roasting nuts came out to ambush us.

  “Look!” said Alice, pointing to a little spice shop on the far side of the street. In the window stood a woman holding a scoop filled with toasted almonds. She smiled, and Alice pulled me across the street.

  Inside the shop, saffron, cinnamon, and mint mingled with the aroma of the nuts. The woman gestured, inviting us to come closer as she raked the almonds into a huge pile. Alice and I plunged our hands into the warm mound until they were covered all the way to the wrists. I closed my hand, retracted it, and put an almond in my mouth; the fragrance swelled to fill my entire head.

  We munched on almonds as we walked, and then Alice discovered new treats: olives, anchovies, ice cream. “I’m really worried about this dinner,” she confided. “We’re supposed to cook a meal for absolutely everybody who counts in the Barcelona food world, to show them how American cooking has matured. But these collaboration dinners are always difficult. Doing one in a foreign city, with people you haven’t worked with, products you don’t know, and no time to practice is insane. I can’t believe any of us agreed to it!”

  “Yes,” I said absently; just in front of us a little girl was toddling down the street with her mother, and my mind was in Mexico, with Gavi.

  We walked and fretted; by the time we reached the restaurant in the city’s ancient port I was too tired and full to go on. “I’ll just meet you guys in the morning,” I said, turning back to the hotel. Alice grabbed my arm. “You’ll wake up when the food comes,” she promised, pulling me inexorably through the door. “You don’t want to miss this.”

  “Yes, I do,” I muttered, but I was already inside the worn wooden room. In here, it seemed, nothing had changed for centuries. Chefs in starched white jackets tended a wood-burning oven, separated from the diners by a long zinc-lined bar. Three huge vats of wine roosted beneath it; on top a block of ice slowly dripped onto the wooden floor.

  Our fellow travelers were seated at a long table piled with plates of seafood. Mark Miller and Jonathan Waxman looked cool, cosmopolitan, and slightly bored, as if they had been sitting in the restaurant all their lives waiting for the rest of us to arrive. Bradley Ogden, on the other hand, had the eager-beaver air of the American tourist; it was his first trip to Europe, and his eyes darted around as if he were afraid something important would happen while he wasn’t watching. Lydia Shire, a comfortable-looking woman with a frank, open face, pointed something out to him. His mouth dropped in astonishment.

  Colman was there too, and for a moment I was surprised to see him. Locked inside my own sadness, I had forgotten that it was he who had organized this tour of Barcelona. He had become an authority on Catalan cooking, and he seemed pleased to have us assembled on his turf. I remembered, with a little jolt, that the last time we had shared this continent we had been in love. It seemed so long ago.

  “Taste this,” he said, barely pausing to say hello. Alice and I sat down, and he passed us each a wooden fork and a small terra-cotta casserole.

  “What is it?” asked Alice. The aroma of garlic was so intense it began to wake me up. I shook my head, trying to clear it, and gazed down into a pool of golden oil containing whole cloves of garlic and what looked like small straight pins.

  “Taste,” he commanded.

  Alice and I obediently stuck our wooden forks into the oil and fished out a pin. I put it in my mouth; it was blazingly hot and startlingly tender, with a gentle sweetness tinged with salt. The garlic was subtle, no more than a lingering aftertaste. I had absolutely no idea what I was eating, but it was so delicious that I chased the elusive pins around the dish until there were no more. I looked questioningly at Colman.

  “Angulas,” he said. “Baby eels.”

  “They were a surprise,” said Bradley.

  “There will be a lot of surprises on this trip,” promised Colman.

  “I hope our dinner doesn’t turn out to be one of them,” murmured Bradley, but Colman wasn’t listening. He was pointing to the platters on the table, saying, “The seafood here is really good,” with such a proprietary air that one might have thought that he’d personally snatched these specimens from the ocean. The food on the table actually looked more vegetable than animal, like it had been cut from a garden and not fished from the sea. The tiny squid were the size of blueberries; they were tinged with black and, when I stretched a finger out to touch them, felt as soft as peaches. Grilled sardines were stacked head to tail, like so many logs piled onto the platter. Baby octopuses, their tentacles tightly curled, had the air of prickly little roses basking in the sun, and cuttlefish were tangled into a sofrito of tomatoes and onions, looking like bittersweet growing in a meadow.

  Colman picked up the nearest platter and pointed to a small, soft, almost transparent filet with brownish ridges running down the flesh. “Anybody know what this is?” he asked.

  “An espardenya,” said Mark.

  “Right,” said Colman. “But do you know what that is?”

  “I’ll take a wild guess and assume it’s a fish,” he replied.

  From Colman’s face I knew that Mark was wrong, but I couldn’t imagine what else the filet might be. So I just took a bite. It was supple and slightly sweet. “It’s good,” I said. Bradley reached for the platter.

  “It’s a slug,” said Colman.

  Bradley quickly redirected his hand to the grilled shrimp.

  “A slug!” said Mark. “I have to taste that.” He speared a filet and bit into it. He chewed for a moment and announced, “I like it.”

  Awake now, I drank some more wine. It was midnight in Barcelona, and I was eating slugs. And then, unbidden, unwelcome, a thought floated toward me: What time is it right
now in Mexico? A shadow crossed my heart.

  It was late when we finally left the restaurant. As we walked out the door I stood looking down the cobbled street, thinking how tired I was. It seemed weeks since I had been in bed. “I think I’ll turn in,” I said.

  Alice gave me a sharp look. Did I imagine that she kicked Mark? Perhaps. But I did not imagine that Mark said firmly, “On Bradley’s first night in Europe? Impossible! This is Spain. It’s early. The bars will be open for hours.”

  And I certainly did not imagine the nighttime tour of the city, through endless cocktail bars, where beautiful bartenders shook exotic liquors into fabulous potions. We tried drinks with names like pampa, Americano, sidecar. And then, somehow, we were hungry again.

  “I know just the place,” said Colman, reaching into his inexhaustible knowledge of the city. He led us around a corner and down a flight of stairs into a dark, medieval basement where thick wooden beams hugged small, low tables.

  We ordered champagne and local specialties: slices of bread rubbed with tomatoes and drizzled with olive oil, ham made out of duck breast, olives, and anchovies. “Try this,” said Colman, offering a platter of sliced, fried meat.

  “What is it?” asked Mark.

  “Try it,” urged Colman. Mark took a tentative taste. “Bull’s balls,” said Colman.

  Mark glared balefully at the platter. “I have to have something that I won’t eat,” he said, taking a big gulp of wine. Sputtering, he spat it out.

  “That bad?” asked Jonathan.

  “No,” said Mark, “but it’s not Baby Jesus sliding down your throat in velvet slippers.” Colman laughed. I said, “Can we go to bed now?”

  “No,” they replied in unison, “we’re going to look at the cathedral. They light it up at night. It’s beautiful.”

  “Don’t you guys ever sleep?” I moaned. “How are you going to cook this dinner if you stay up every night?”

  “We’re used to it,” said Jonathan. “Besides,” he added, as if he were about to make a logical case against sleep, “we’re in Spain.”

  It was light when they finally led me back to the hotel. I fell into bed so drunk, so tired that for the first time in weeks I slept without dreaming. It did not occur to me, until much later, that keeping me up had been an act of extraordinary kindness.

  * * *

  “We’re meeting for cocktails at ten.” It was Alice on the phone.

  “Cocktails?” I asked. “In the morning?”

  “Hurry,” she said. “If you get up now you can just make it.”

  Barcelona is rich in bars, and we began each day in a different one. “Why are we drinking sidecars at ten A.M.?” I asked one morning.

  “To try and forget,” said Jonathan, “that we have this horrible dinner hanging over our head.” He was joking, of course, but when I thought about it afterward it seemed like a premonition. At the time I thought only that I too was trying to forget, and that alcohol was helpful.

  Colman had arranged this trip with the firm determination of showing off everything Barcelona had to offer; our schedule was very full. We went to bakeries, wineries, and markets. We were endlessly eating. My body ached from lack of sleep. But the chefs seemed impervious to fatigue, and I was reminded of Wolfgang saying that he worked better when he slept less.

  Wolf was now so famous that the year before, when I’d spent a week following him around the country for a story on the life of a celebrity chef, the women at the Hertz counter in Cleveland had squealed at the sight of him and treated him like a major movie star. It seemed to make no difference to him; he still worked as if demons were chasing him. He was in another city every day, cooking charity meals, creating special dinners for wealthy clients, and looking for new places to build restaurants. But although he checked in and out of hotels he rarely rumpled the beds. He snatched his sleep sitting up on airplanes, waking after a couple of hours looking depressingly refreshed. And so when Jonathan said, “If the dinner’s a disaster it won’t be because we’re tired,” I believed him.

  The chefs wanted to see every site and sample every flavor. We spent hours in an olive store while the owner handed his wares across the counter. First the large obregòns, which are cured in oranges; next the tiny black, purple, and green extremañas; and then, triumphantly, the little grayish arbequines, which are the pride of Catalonia. Colman took us to visit champanerias, vinegar makers, the House of Salt Cod.

  “Write this down,” said Lydia. “I just ate salt cod with Roquefort sauce. If you had ever told me that I would do such a thing, I would have told you it was impossible.”

  “Write this down too,” said Mark. “Salt cod fried with honey. I can’t believe I even tasted it.”

  “And this,” said Alice. “It was good.”

  “But not that good,” said Jonathan.

  Surrounded by their noise and banter, sated by a surfeit of food, I gradually became less numb. Sometimes two or three hours would pass when I did not think of Gavi, and most nights, when they finally allowed me to drop into bed, I slept dreamlessly. I was slowly coming back to life; I knew it would be a long time until I could be happy, but I was beginning to understand that such a time might come.

  * * *

  For years Barcelona had been forced to speak Spanish; now, freed from the tyranny of language, the city reveled in its own Catalan tongue. If you stopped someone to ask for directions to the Mercado de San José, he would look at you blankly, as if he had no idea what you could possibly be talking about. Ask for La Boqueria, on the other hand, and you got directions not only to the market but also to the nearby sidewalks designed by Miró.

  An ornate Art Nouveau roof covers the market. It dates from the last century, but if you look around the edges you find ancient marble columns, the remains of earlier markets in much earlier times. La Boqueria is so rich in history that it feels like a great temple of food, and we all found ourselves becoming quiet as we entered its doors.

  Inside, light filtered dimly down from the high ceiling, and we blinked, adjusting our eyes. “Don’t forget to make a list of what you find and where you found it,” Alice called as we fanned out past neat pyramids of fruit, spiral stacks of mushrooms, and fluffy bouquets of herbs.

  At the meat counters the tiny kids were strewn with flowers, which made them look like sacrifices instead of food. The animals were so young that the butchers’ knives moved soundlessly through the soft bones. The innards were beautiful too: the tripe so clean and white it might have been spun by spiders, and the great dark blocks of congealed blood laid out like so much marble. Calves’ brains, intricate coils, looked like some exotic fungus lying on the counter. “How beautiful they are!” said Lydia, staring at the looping twists. “I want to do something with those brains at the dinner.”

  Mark stood by the fish stalls, eyeing bright snapper, glistening blue mackerel, and silver sardines. “Raw fish,” he murmured, “we should do something with raw fish. That would surprise them, since Catalans always cook their fish.”

  Across the aisle Alice was cooing over skinny, dark green asparagus. “We’ll buy lots and lots of them to cook,” she exclaimed. “They’re wild!” She moved to the next stack, some fat white asparagus, which she stroked tenderly. “I love their little lavender tips,” she explained, leaning over to break one off and stick it into her mouth. The vendor looked on, startled.

  Jonathan was mesmerized by clams with brightly patterned shells. “They’re called Romeos,” he said, staring at them. “Aren’t they wonderful? I want to use them for the dinner.” The fish woman flirted with him, patting the shells so that all the clams seemed to stick out little red tongues. Jonathan laughed out loud and the fishmonger, delighted, did it again. Then she went behind the counter and picked up a baby. Holding her out toward Jonathan she crooned, “Mi niñiña.”

  Jonathan squeezed my shoulder. Somewhere in Mexico, I thought, at this very moment, someone is holding Gavi. I hoped, with all my heart, that when she said, “Mi niñiña,” she care
ssed the words in the same way. My eyes filled with tears, and I looked away.

  * * *

  The kitchen that the city of Barcelona had selected for the chefs was tiny. It contained two burners, no equipment, and a minuscule sink that rebelled each time it was asked to swallow more than a cup of water. But it would be three more days until the chefs discovered this, and by then it would be too late. As they left the market, they were thinking big. “Colman’s bragged about us all over Barcelona,” said Alice. “Every winemaker and chef in the region is coming. The Julia Child of Spain will be there. How many courses, do you think?”

  Day by day the number grew. “Remember, we don’t have a lot of time,” said Alice . . . just before adding a quail course to the menu.

  “Let’s not go crazy,” said Jonathan. And then tacked on clams casino as a second course.

  “We want to make this as foolproof as possible,” suggested Mark, increasing the courses with a poblano pesto. Still to come: the fish course, the meat course, the salad course, dessert.

  The menu changed almost hourly as they discovered new foods. But as the days went on, one thing remained constant: Dessert, the chefs had agreed from the start, would be a blood-orange sorbet. “They’ll be amazed,” said Alice. “The only thing they ever do with blood oranges is use them for juice.”

  But on the day before the dinner Jonathan suddenly had a terrible thought: “What if there’s no ice-cream maker?” he asked.

  “Oh, there must be one,” said Mark.

  “If there’s not,” said Bradley, “I’ll do it by hand.” They all turned to stare at him. “With a rubber spatula,” he explained, “and a stainless steel bowl set over rock salt and ice.”

  * * *

  There was no ice-cream maker. There was barely a bowl. As the chefs hauled their purchases into the kitchen they looked at one another with dawning horror. Five people could not possibly work in that kitchen at the same time; five people could barely breathe in there at the same time. The dinner, clearly, was doomed.