by Ruth Reichl
“Your friend likes to eat,” he said to Béatrice. He seemed pleased. He held up one of the pommes soufflés that the butler had set on his plate and said, “You will like these, I think.” He told the butler to serve me immediately, out of order.
“Taste!” he commanded. I put the puff of potato in my mouth; it was a magic potato chip, a crisp mouthful of hot air, salt, and flavor. My face must have betrayed me, because Monsieur smiled again. “Incredible, no?” he asked.
“Incredible, yes!” I said.
Monsieur du Croix turned to his wife. “This child likes to eat!” he said for the second time. She gave him a thin, mirthless smile. He winked at me. “You will like dessert, I think,” he said. “A whole wheel of Brie has just arrived from the Île de France. Have you ever tasted a real French Brie?”
I had not. He cut me a large wedge that drooped appealingly across the knife and set it on a plate. He surrounded it with a few grapes (“From Sicily,” he murmured, almost to himself, “not these sad, sour Canadian fruits,”) and told the butler to bring it to me. “Eat it with your fork,” Monsieur commanded, “It would be wasted on bread.”
I dutifully cut a piece, carefully removing the rind the way I had always seen it done. “No, no, no,” said Monsieur du Croix angrily. I jumped. “Eat the skin,” he said. “It is part of the experience. Do you think the cheesemaker aged this ten weeks just to have you throw away half of his effort?”
“Bien sûr,” I said meekly, scooping up the rind. I felt Monsieur du Croix watching as I ate the strong, slippery cheese. It was so powerful I felt the tips of my ears go pink. The nape of my neck prickled. I closed my eyes. When I opened them Monsieur du Croix was watching me the way a teacher watches a particularly apt pupil. After two months of Madame Cartet it felt very good.
When we came down to dinner that night the table was again set for four. Béatrice looked startled. Her parents came in and she turned to her mother and asked, “Vous mangez avec nous ce soir?”
“Monsieur désire dîner avec les enfants,” said Madame, using the formal term for her husband and making it clear that dining with us was not her desire.
Her husband came in rubbing his hands gleefully. “Tonight,” he said, “we have a really extraordinary dinner.” He turned to me. “Have you the experience of foie gras?”
I had not. His eyes crinkled happily as the butler served each of us a plate holding a thick pink square and a smattering of what looked like small, sparkling topazes. The maid followed behind him, offering toast. I had never seen anything like this, but I watched Béatrice carefully and copied everything she did. She picked up her knife and cut a piece off the square. She placed it on the toast, added a couple of the jewels, and took a bite. I did the same and my mouth was flooded with so many sensations I could hardly take them all in at the same time. As the luxurious softness of the liver overwhelmed me I felt my eyes start to tear. I swallowed, speechless, to find Monsieur du Croix watching me with undisguised delight.
“C’est bon, oui?” he asked. I nodded.
The butler appeared with an entire sole on a platter. “The real thing,” said Monsieur, as the butler began to bone the large, flat fish. “You will see how simple and delicious this is.”
It was not like any fish I had ever tasted. “If all fish were like this,” I said, “I would like fish.” Monsieur laughed. Madame looked more sour than before, and I wondered what had made her so unhappy. Then the next course arrived and I stopped thinking altogether.
“What is it?” I asked, looking at what appeared to be a giant Venetian paperweight on a platter. It glistened and gleamed, a dome made entirely of vegetables.
“A chartreuse of partridge,” said Monsieur du Croix. “Very few people make it correctly, but our chef is a master.”
“It is so pretty it would be a shame to eat it,” I said, hoping he would not destroy that beautiful still life of carrots, peas, and beans.
“And a crime not to,” said Monsieur du Croix firmly sticking a knife into the dome. “Food is meant to be eaten.”
After the chartreuse there was a simple green salad. “We have a greenhouse just for the lettuces,” said Monsieur as he mixed it. “And we bring the olive oil and vinegar from France. The meat is very good here, but the olive oil is inedible.” He handed the butler a plate of salad to take to his wife.
He turned to me. “Have you ever had a soufflé?” he asked. I thought about La Belle Aurore, but heard myself saying, “No, never.”
I was rewarded with a huge smile. Monsieur turned to his wife and said happily, “What a pleasure, to watch a child eat her first soufflé!” She inclined her head in regal agreement. He winked at me.
“Close your eyes,” he commanded as I took the first bite. I did, and my mouth closed over the hot, fragrant air only to have it disappear at once. But the flavor stayed behind, the chocolate reverberating from one side of my mouth to the other. I took another bite, hoping that I could make the texture last a little. I couldn’t, but I kept trying, my eyes closed, until my spoon went back to the plate and found nothing there.
“Do you always eat like this?” I asked Béatrice after we had thanked her mother for dinner and climbed back up to the children’s quarters.
“Oh no,” she said, “only when I dine with my parents. And that happens very rarely.”
But on Sunday the table was once again set for four, and Monsieur du Croix was smiling with anticipatory glee. The first dish was a clear consommé that tasted as if a million chickens had died to make it. Eating it I suddenly laughed and Monsieur looked quizzically in my direction. I didn’t know what to say; I had been thinking of one of my mother’s prize dishes, canned consommé chilled until it jelled, topped with sour cream and supermarket salmon caviar. I had to say something, so I blurted out, “I was wondering what happens when you chill this soup.” Monsieur looked to the heavens and exclaimed, “She even thinks like a gourmet!”
“Ris de veau à la financière!” he announced next; it was one of the dishes from Aunt Birdie’s wedding menu, but I had never tried it. Alice didn’t like sweetbreads; “Pancreas!” she’d said, as if the idea were absurd. My stomach twisted a little but I did not want to disappoint Monsieur du Croix and I resolutely picked up my fork. It crunched through the crisp vol-au-vent pastry to skewer a bit of sweetbread. “Who could not like this?” I thought to myself, savoring the softness of the sweetbread against the pastry. “It’s wonderful!” I cried.
“You must bring your friend again,” said Monsieur du Croix to Béatrice.
“Oui, Papa,” she said meekly. As we climbed the stairs to pack she said, “You will come again, won’t you?” She said it again, after we were settled on the train. At the very last minute the chauffeur had handed each of us a package. Inside were a dozen pastries far more beautiful than anything we had seen in the pastry shops. “I think my father likes you,” said Béatrice simply.
I went back the next weekend, and the weekend after that and then it was just assumed that when Béatrice went home I went with her. We saw very little of her mother, but her father almost always ate with us. He called us “mes deux filles,” and he set out to please and surprise us at each meal, introducing us to caviar, lobster bisque, marrons glacés.
“What a bore!” said Béatrice, “I wish he were interested in sports.” But I had begun to see that her rebellion was just a pose and that she was secretly thrilled to have her father’s attention. “Will you help me bake something for his birthday?” she asked, and we began combing through cookbooks, looking for something to please him. “What about a lemon soufflé?” I was remembering the recipe from La Belle Aurore.
“Aren’t they difficult? He would be so pleased.”
I didn’t know enough to know that soufflés were hard to make, and the recipe Béatrice found was very precise. “I wonder why we are supposed to clean the bowl with lemon?” I asked.
“Because,” said Béatrice with authority, “the smallest amount of grease in the bowl will ke
ep the egg whites from whipping properly.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. “We have to make sure the top of the soufflé dish has no butter on it either,” she said smugly. “That way the batter won’t slip as it rises.” I realized that she had been doing some studying on the sly.
Monsieur du Croix beamed when we carried the soufflé into the dining room. Even Madame du Croix smiled. Béatrice went pink with pleasure. “I think that is the first present I’ve ever given him that he really liked,” she said later as we lay in bed. Even in the dark I could hear the smile in her voice.
Having Béatrice as a friend had improved my status at school. And I had learned enough French to start catching up with the class. I spent the first week of May memorizing a Ronsard poem, and when Madame Cartet called on me in recitation class I began, “Mignonne, allons voir si la rose” and realized, suddenly, that I was going to get it all, every word, correctly. When I finished there was a sigh and I knew that the entire class had been with me, holding its collective breath as the rose faded on the vine. “Vingt!” said Madame Cartet. She actually sounded happy to be giving me a perfect score.
But I wasn’t the only one doing my homework. One lunchtime in late May Monsieur du Croix began to talk about the coming summer and his favorite vegetable, the tomato. “No, Papa,” said Béatrice, “the tomato is a fruit.” Monsieur looked slightly stunned and then said, “I beg your pardon,” as he reached out and rumpled her hair.
“You’ve been studying!” I said as we climbed the stairs. Béatrice blushed. “He’s never really talked to me before,” she said quietly.
And then, suddenly, it was June. School was over. I spoke French. I could go home.
I wasn’t nearly as happy as I had expected to be.
“You’re coming back aren’t you?” asked Béatrice. I hadn’t considered the future, but now I did. I thought about my friends in New York. Jeanie suddenly seemed hopelessly unsophisticated. I thought about our small apartment, with its peeling gold bathtub. I thought about my mother’s moods and her poisonous messes.
“Yes,” I said, “I’m coming back.”
DEVIL’S FOOD
And I did go back. But after three years in a French school I was tired of girls and uniforms and Catholic school. Jeanie’s letters were filled with the assassination of President Kennedy, civil rights marches, and guys with guitars in Washington Square. She was listening to Joan Baez and going to coffee houses. I wanted to go to a real high school, have a boyfriend, and learn to drive a car. I had visions of sock hops and proms and flirting in the hallway.
My plan was to finish high school in New York, but my mother had different ideas. In one of her more manic phases she sold the house Dad had built in Wilton and bought a different one, on the water, in the next town. “It’s a surprise,” she said when she presented my father with her fait accompli, “you’ll love it.” I think Dad hated the house on sight, but he was too polite to say so. He accepted it. What else could he do? My grandmother, the impresario, had paid for the land on which my father’s handmade house stood, and the title was in my mother’s name.
Our new house was white, with bay windows and an attached garage on a street of proper houses. The kitchen was fully equipped with avocado-green appliances. There was even a dishwasher, something we had never had before. The sprawling living room had wall-to-wall carpeting and a fireplace. The dining room had a view of Long Island Sound. Downstairs there was also a book-lined, pine-paneled den that Mom called “the library,” a screened porch shaded by an ancient willow, and my parents’ bedroom. Upstairs was my domain.
I think Mom had visions of some cozy mother-daughter relationship, where we would sit in my fluffy pink bedroom and whisper secrets in the dark.
But I immediately painted my bedroom red and made friends with all the wrong people. I didn’t want to talk to my mother, much less whisper with her, and it would have taken torture to make me tell her any kind of secret. “Just leave me alone!” I found myself shouting, over and over.
Mom and Dad were taken aback to find that their adorable daughter had turned into such an awkward, troublesome teenager. When I started teasing my hair, wearing tight pants, and circling my eyes with black eyeliner they looked at me as if I were some creature from another planet. When I came home drunk they pretended not to notice. They weren’t thrilled with my new best friend Julie either. “She’s fast,” Mom insisted, using one of those words I hated. And occasionally she would ask in a plaintive voice, “Aren’t there any boys in your class who don’t want to be mechanics?” I didn’t even deign to answer.
My parents were upset and annoyed and they had lost the habit of caring for a child. On top of that, Dad found commuting tiresome and Mom hated suburban life. My mother began spending her days in town and staying for dinner. By ten I’d find myself listening for the inevitable phone call: “It’s so late. Do you mind if we don’t come back?” In the end my parents gave up all pretense of coming home during the week. As my mother said to her friends, “Ruthie is so mature.”
I proved my maturity by hosting an endless party. My new friends were happy to have a place to hang out when we skipped school. Which we did regularly. By November I had convinced myself that I had better things to do than read Moby Dick and learn about the Continental Congress. Cook, for instance.
I had been cooking all my life, but only as a way to please grownups; now I discovered that it had other virtues. I wasn’t pretty or funny or sexy. I wasn’t a cheerleader or a dancer and nobody ever asked me to the drive-in. I yearned for romance and dreamed of candlelight suppers, but I didn’t have the nerve to invite Tommy Calfano to dinner. It was so much easier to say, “Why doesn’t everybody come over to my house?”
They were happy to: it was a parentless paradise. The party was on. We drank. We danced. We watched television. We played strip poker. Mostly, however, we ate.
I started with the recipes I had learned from Mrs. Peavey and Alice, but I soon branched out. My mother’s cookbooks all had titles like How to Make Dinner in Five Minutes Flat but I started going through magazines, clipping recipes. It never occurred to me that a recipe might be too hard; hadn’t I mastered soufflés at the age of thirteen? I understood the rhythm of the kitchen and I was very relaxed. And very lucky.
If anyone had cared about the outcome things might have been different, but everything I cooked turned out fine. I had a perfect audience: anything would impress my friends and nothing would impress my parents. And so I tried recipes that took four days or had twenty-five steps, just for the fun of it. I developed the asbestos skin of a cook, stirring the pans with my fingers if there were no handy spoons and occasionally forgetting a potholder before reaching into the oven. I learned to ignore minor burns. And to improvise: my mother’s kitchen was ill-equipped, so I used a wine bottle for a rolling pin and beat egg whites with a forty-year-old eggbeater.
When I shopped, I wandered greedily through the supermarket, picking up any item that captured my imagination. If my parents wondered why it cost so much to keep a teenage girl in food they never said. Mom handed over a wad of cash at the beginning of each week murmuring, “Teenagers are so hungry.”
They are. But they like sweets best of all, and that year I discovered the secret of every experienced cook: desserts are a cheap trick. People love them even when they’re bad. And so I began to bake, appreciating the alchemy that can turn flour, water, chocolate, and butter into devil’s food cake and make it disappear in a flash.
Boys, in particular, seemed to like it.
DEVIL’S FOOD CAKE
1 cup milk
¾ cup cocoa
⅓ cup white sugar
1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
¼ cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups sifted cake flour
1½ teaspoons baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
Preheat oven to
350°.
Heat milk in a small pan until bubbles begin to appear around the edges. Remove from heat.
Mix cocoa and white sugar together in a small bowl and slowly beat in warm milk. Let cool.
Cream the butter with the brown sugar. Beat in the eggs, sour cream, and vanilla. Add cocoa mixture.
Mix remaining dry ingredients together and gently blend into butter mixture. Do not overbeat.
Turn into 2 well-greased and floured 9-inch layer cake pans, and bake 25 to 30 minutes, until cake shrinks slightly from sides of pans and springs back when touched gently in the center. Cool on a rack for a few minutes, then turn out of pans onto rack.
Wait until completely cool before frosting.
SEVEN-MINUTE FROSTING
4 egg whites
1½ cups sugar
¾ cup water
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
⅛ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
Combine egg whites, sugar, water, cream of tartar, and salt in top of double boiler. Set over simmering water and beat with an electric mixer for about 5 minutes, until soft peaks are formed. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Keep beating until frosting is stiff enough to spread. Use immediately. This looks like a lot, but use it all; it is enough to fill and frost the cake.
I woke up just as the first bits of light were starting to struggle into the living room. Tommy was next to me on the couch, his arm wedged beneath my neck. I sat up, my brain banging against my skull. My mouth was filled with cotton. Peering through the thin light, I saw bodies sprawled on all the chairs, some of them boys I hadn’t even seen the night before. Ashtrays overflowed onto the rug and glasses lay overturned on sticky wet spots. A record was on the turntable, the needle going kathunk, kathunk, kathunk as it spun.
What if my parents came home early? I picked up Tommy’s arm, trying to make out the numbers on his watch. As I brought the dial close to my face he woke up and grinned at me.