by Ruth Reichl
ALSO BY RUTH REICHL
Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table
Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way
Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
For Michael
CONTENTS
1. The Queen of Mold
2. Grandmothers
3. Mrs. Peavey
4. Mars
5. Devil’s Food
6. The Tart
7. Serafina
8. Summer of Love
9. The Philosopher of the Table
10. Tunis
11. Love Story
12. Eyesight for the Blind
13. Paradise Loft
14. Berkeley
15. The Swallow
16. Another Party
17. Keep Tasting
18. The Bridge
Acknowledgments
A Reader’s Guide
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Storytelling, in my family, was highly prized. While my father walked home from work he rearranged the events of his day to make them more entertaining, and my mother could make a trip to the supermarket sound like an adventure. If this required minor adjustments of fact, nobody much minded: it was certainly preferable to boring your audience.
The good stories, of course, were repeated endlessly until they took on a life of their own. One of the stories I grew up on was a family legend about myself. Its point was to demonstrate my extraordinary maturity, even at the age of two. This is how my father told it:
“One Sunday in early fall we were sitting in our house in the country admiring the leaves outside the picture window. Suddenly the telephone rang: it was Miriam’s mother in Cleveland, saying that her father was gravely ill. She had to go immediately, leaving me alone with Ruthie, who was to start nursery school the next day.
“I, of course, had to be in the office Monday morning. Worse, I had an appointment I could not cancel; I simply had to catch the 7:07 to New York. But the school didn’t open until eight, and although I phoned and phoned, I was unable to reach any of the teachers. I just didn’t know what to do.
“In the end, I did the only thing I could think of. At seven I took Ruthie to the school, sat her on a swing outside and told her to tell the teachers when they came that she was Ruthie Reichl and she had come to go to school. She sat there, waving bravely as I drove off. I knew she’d be fine; even then she was very responsible.” He always ended by smiling proudly in my direction.
Nobody ever challenged this story. I certainly didn’t. It was not until I had a child of my own that I realized that nobody, not even my father, would leave a two-year-old alone on a swing in a strange place for an hour. Did he exaggerate my age? The length of time? Both? By then my father was no longer available for questions, but I am sure that if he had been he would have insisted that the story was true. For him it was.
This book is absolutely in the family tradition. Everything here is true, but it may not be entirely factual. In some cases I have compressed events; in others I have made two people into one. I have occasionally embroidered.
I learned early that the most important thing in life is a good story.
THE QUEEN OF MOLD
This is a true story.
Imagine a New York City apartment at six in the morning. It is a modest apartment in Greenwich Village. Coffee is bubbling in an electric percolator. On the table is a basket of rye bread, an entire coffee cake, a few cheeses, a platter of cold cuts. My mother has been making breakfast—a major meal in our house, one where we sit down to fresh orange juice every morning, clink our glasses as if they held wine, and toast each other with “Cheerio. Have a nice day.”
Right now she is the only one awake, but she is getting impatient for the day to begin and she cranks WQXR up a little louder on the radio, hoping that the noise will rouse everyone else. But Dad and I are good sleepers, and when the sounds of martial music have no effect she barges into the bedroom and shakes my father awake.
“Darling,” she says, “I need you. Get up and come into the kitchen.”
My father, a sweet and accommodating person, shuffles sleepily down the hall. He is wearing loose pajamas, and the strand of hair he combs over his bald spot stands straight up. He leans against the sink, holding on to it a little, and obediently opens his mouth when my mother says, “Try this.”
Later, when he told the story, he attempted to convey the awfulness of what she had given him. The first time he said that it tasted like cat toes and rotted barley, but over the years the description got better. Two years later it had turned into pigs’ snouts and mud and five years later he had refined the flavor into a mixture of antique anchovies and moldy chocolate.
Whatever it tasted like, he said it was the worst thing he had ever had in his mouth, so terrible that it was impossible to swallow, so terrible that he leaned over and spit it into the sink and then grabbed the coffeepot, put the spout into his mouth, and tried to eradicate the flavor.
My mother stood there watching all this. When my father finally put the coffeepot down she smiled and said, “Just as I thought. Spoiled!”
And then she threw the mess into the garbage can and sat down to drink her orange juice.
For the longest time I thought I had made this story up. But my brother insists that my father told it often, and with a certain amount of pride. As far as I know, my mother was never embarrassed by the telling, never even knew that she should have been. It was just the way she was.
Which was taste-blind and unafraid of rot. “Oh, it’s just a little mold,” I can remember her saying on the many occasions she scraped the fuzzy blue stuff off some concoction before serving what was left for dinner. She had an iron stomach and was incapable of understanding that other people did not.
This taught me many things. The first was that food could be dangerous, especially to those who loved it. I took this very seriously. My parents entertained a great deal, and before I was ten I had appointed myself guardian of the guests. My mission was to keep Mom from killing anybody who came to dinner.
Her friends seemed surprisingly unaware that they took their lives in their hands each time they ate with us. They chalked their ailments up to the weather, the flu, or one of my mother’s more unusual dishes. “No more sea urchins for me,” I imagined Burt Langner saying to his wife, Ruth, after a dinner at our house, “they just don’t agree with me.” Little did he know that it was not the sea urchins that had made him ill, but that bargain beef my mother had found so irresistible.
“I can make a meal out of anything,” Mom told her friends proudly. She liked to brag about “Everything Stew,” a dish invented while she was concocting a casserole out of a two-week-old turkey carcass. (The very fact that my mother confessed to cooking with two-week-old turkey says a lot about her.) She put the turkey and a half can of mushroom soup into the pot. Then she began rummaging around in the refrigerator. She found some leftover broccoli and added that. A few carrots went in, and then a half carton of sour cream. In a hurry, as usual, she added green beans and cranberry sauce. And then, somehow, half an apple pie slipped into the dish. Mom looked momentarily horrified. Then she shrugged and said, “Who knows? Maybe it will be good.” And she began throwing everything in the refrigerator in along with it—leftover pâté, some cheese ends, a few squishy tomatoes.
That night I set up camp in the dining room. I was particularly worried about the big eaters, and I stared at my favorite people as they approached the buffet, willing them away from the casserole. I actually stood directly in front of Burt Langner so he couldn’t reach the turkey disaster. I loved him, and I knew that he loved food.
Unknowingly I had started sorting people by their tastes.
Like a hearing child born to deaf parents, I was shaped by my mother’s handicap, discovering that food could be a way of making sense of the world.
At first I paid attention only to taste, storing away the knowledge that my father preferred salt to sugar and my mother had a sweet tooth. Later I also began to note how people ate, and where. My brother liked fancy food in fine surroundings, my father only cared about the company, and Mom would eat anything so long as the location was exotic. I was slowly discovering that if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.
Then I began listening to the way people talked about food, looking for clues to their personalities. “What is she really saying?” I asked myself when Mom bragged about the invention of her famous corned beef ham.
“I was giving a party,” she’d begin, “and as usual I left everything for the last minute.” Here she’d look at her audience, laughing softly at herself. “I asked Ernst to do the shopping, but you know how absentminded he is! Instead of picking up a ham he brought me corned beef.” She’d look pointedly at Dad, who would look properly sheepish.
“What could I do?” Mom asked. “I had people coming in a couple of hours. I had no choice. I simply pretended it was a ham.” With that Dad would look admiringly at my mother, pick up his carving knife, and start serving the masterpiece.
MIRIAM REICHL’S
CORNED BEEF HAM
4 pounds whole corned beef
5 bay leaves
1 onion, chopped
1 tablespoon prepared mustard
¼ cup brown sugar
Whole cloves
1 can (1 pound 15 ounces) spiced peaches
Cover corned beef with water in a large pot. Add bay leaves and onion. Cook over medium heat about 3 hours, until meat is very tender.
While meat is cooking, mix mustard and brown sugar.
Preheat oven to 325°.
Take meat from water and remove all visible fat. Insert cloves into meat as if it were ham. Cover the meat with the mustard mixture and bake 1 hour, basting frequently with the peach syrup.
Surround meat with spiced peaches and serve.
Serves 6.
Most mornings I got out of bed and went to the refrigerator to see how my mother was feeling. You could tell instantly just by opening the door. One day in 1960 I found a whole suckling pig staring at me. I jumped back and slammed the door, hard. Then I opened it again. I’d never seen a whole animal in our refrigerator before; even the chickens came in parts. He was surrounded by tiny crab apples (“lady apples” my mother corrected me later), and a whole wreath of weird vegetables.
This was not a bad sign: the more odd and interesting things there were in the refrigerator, the happier my mother was likely to be. Still, I was puzzled; the refrigerator in our small kitchen had been almost empty when I went to bed.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” I asked. “The stores aren’t open yet.”
“Oh,” said Mom blithely, patting at her crisp gray hair, “I woke up early and decided to go for a walk. You’d be surprised at what goes on in Manhattan at four A.M. I’ve been down to the Fulton Fish Market. And I found the most interesting produce store on Bleecker Street.”
“It was open?” I asked.
“Well,” she admitted, “not really.” She walked across the worn linoleum and set a basket of bread on the Formica table. “But I saw someone moving around so I knocked. I’ve been trying to get ideas for the party.”
“Party?” I asked warily. “What party?”
“Your brother has decided to get married,” she said casually, as if I should have somehow intuited this in my sleep. “And of course we’re going to have a party to celebrate the engagement and meet Shelly’s family!”
My brother, I knew, would not welcome this news. He was thirteen years older than I and considered it a minor miracle to have reached the age of twenty-five. “I don’t know how I survived her cooking,” he said as he was telling me about the years when he and Mom were living alone, after she had divorced his father and was waiting to meet mine. “She’s a menace to society.”
Bob went to live with his father in Pittsburgh right after I was born, but he always came home for holidays. When he was there he always helped me protect the guests, using tact to keep them from eating the more dangerous items.
I took a more direct approach. “Don’t eat that,” I ordered my best friend Jeanie as her spoon dipped into one of Mom’s more creative lunch dishes. My mother believed in celebrating every holiday: in honor of St. Patrick she was serving bananas with green sour cream.
“I don’t mind the color,” said Jeanie, a trusting soul whose own mother wouldn’t dream of offering you an all-orange Halloween extravaganza complete with milk dyed the color of orange juice. Ida served the sort of perfect lunches that I longed for: neat squares of cream cheese and jelly on white bread, bologna sandwiches, Chef Boyardee straight from the can.
“It’s not just food coloring,” I said. “The sour cream was green to begin with; the carton’s been in the refrigerator for months.”
Jeanie quickly put her spoon down and when Mom went into the other room to answer the phone we ducked into the bathroom and flushed our lunches down the toilet.
“That was great, Mim,” said Jeanie when Mom returned.
“May we be excused?” is all I said. I wanted to get away from the table before anything else appeared.
“Don’t you want dessert?” Mom asked.
“Sure,” said Jeanie.
“No!” I said. But Mom had already gone to get the cookies. She returned with some strange black lumps on a plate. Jeanie looked at them dubiously, then politely picked one up.
“Oh, go ahead, eat it,” I said, reaching for one myself. “They’re just Girl Scout mint cookies. She left them on the radiator so all the chocolate melted off, but they won’t kill you.”
As we munched our cookies, Mom asked idly, “What do you girls think I should serve for Bob’s engagement party?”
“You’re not going to have the party here, are you?” I asked, holding my breath as I looked around at our living room, trying to see it with a stranger’s eye.
Mom had moments of decorating inspiration that usually died before the project was finished. The last one, a romance with Danish modern, had brought a teak dining table, a wicker chair that looked like an egg and hung from a chain, and a Rya rug into our lives. The huge turquoise abstract painting along one wall dated from that period too. But Mom had, as usual, gotten bored, so they were all mixed together with my grandmother’s drum table, an ornate breakfront, and some Japanese prints from an earlier, more conservative period.
Then there was the bathroom, my mother’s greatest decorating feat. One day she had decided, on the spur of the moment, to install gold towels, a gold shower curtain, and a gold rug. They were no problem. But painting all the porcelain gold was a disaster; it almost immediately began peeling off the sink and it was years before any of us could take a bath without emerging slightly gilded.
My father found all of this slightly amusing. An intellectual who had escaped his wealthy German-Jewish family by coming to America in the twenties, he had absolutely no interest in things. He was a book designer who lived in a black-and-white world of paper and type; books were his only passion. He was kindly and detached and if he had known that people described him as elegant, he would have been shocked; clothes bored him enormously, when he noticed them at all.
“No,” said Mom. I exhaled. “In the country. We have more room in Wilton. And we need to welcome Shelly into the family properly.”
I pictured our small, shabby summer house in the woods. Wilton is only an hour from New York, but in 1960 it was still very rural. My parents had bought the land cheaply and designed the house themselves. Since they couldn’t afford an architect, they had miscalculated a bit, and the downstairs bedrooms were very strangely shaped. Dad hardly knew how to hold a hammer, but to save money he had built the house himself with the aid
of a carpenter. He was very proud of his handiwork, despite the drooping roof and awkward layout. He was even prouder of our long, rutted, meandering driveway. “I didn’t want to cut down a single tree!” he said proudly when people asked why it was so crooked.
I loved the house, but I was slightly embarrassed by its unpainted wooden walls and unconventional character. “Why can’t we have the party in a hotel?” I asked. In my mind’s eye I saw Shelly’s impeccable mother, who seemed to go to the beauty parlor every day and wore nothing but custom-made clothes. Next to her, Mom, a handsome woman who refused to dye her hair, rarely wore makeup, and had very colorful taste in clothes, looked almost bohemian. Shelly’s mother wore an enormous diamond ring on her beautifully manicured finger; my mother didn’t even wear a wedding band and her fingernails were short and haphazardly polished.
“Nonsense,” said Mom. “It will be much nicer to have it at home. So much more intimate. I’d like them to see how we live, find out who we are.”
“Great,” I said under my breath to Jeanie. “That’ll be the end of Bob’s engagement. And a couple of the relatives might die, but who worries about little things like that?”
“Just make sure she doesn’t serve steak tartare,” said Jeanie, giggling.
Steak tartare was the bane of my existence: Dad always made it for parties. It was a performance. First he’d break an egg yolk into the mound of raw chopped steak, and then he’d begin folding minced onions and capers and Worcestershire sauce into the meat. He looked tall and suave as he mixed thoughtfully and then asked, his German accent very pronounced, for an assistant taster. Together they added a little more of this or that and then Dad carefully mounded the meat into a round, draped some anchovies across the top, and asked me to serve it.
My job was to spread the stuff onto slices of party pumpernickel and pass the tray. Unless I had bought the meat myself I tried not to let the people I liked best taste Dad’s chef d’oeuvre. I knew that my mother bought prepackaged hamburger meat at the supermarket and that if there happened to be some half-price, day-old stuff she simply couldn’t resist it. With our well-trained stomachs my father and I could take whatever Mom was dishing out, but for most people it was pure poison.
