Tender at the Bone

by Ruth Reichl

  Doug vetoed the next house because it had no garage. “Nick and I are going to combine our tools and set up a shop,” he said. “Otherwise, what’s the point of buying a house together?” Martha rejected the next three houses because they didn’t have room for the compost pile she was planning to take along.

  Channing Way had everything: a garage, a basement, and a big backyard. Even Nick could not call the nondescript neighborhood in the Berkeley flatlands bourgeois. Best of all, the funky old Queen Anne cottage with its seventeen rooms each painted a different color was listed at $29,000; split four ways the mortgage and taxes would be $45 a month. “We’ll never have to have real jobs again,” Doug exulted. “Never!”

  The plan was to grow our own food; it would be cheap and we would not be dependent on evil agribusiness. Meanwhile Martha and I baked bread every day and learned how to stretch a single chicken to feed fifteen. We discovered the joys of the cheaper variety meats and experimented with tongue and squid and heart.

  Then everybody in Berkeley started reading Diet for a Small Planet and learned that eating at the top of the food chain was morally indefensible. Meat completely disappeared from our lives.

  Martha and I dutifully cooked our way from one end of the book to the other, through garbanzo pâté (11 grams of usable protein) and peanut-sesame loaf supreme (12 grams). The recipes were nutritious, politically correct … and dreary. We began making secret modifications, changing the recipes to make them more appealing.

  Our greatest success was Con Queso Rice; by using twice the cheese and three times the garlic of the printed recipe we managed to make a dish that was delicious.

  CON QUESO RICE

  (WITH APOLOGIES TO

  FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ)

  1 cup black beans

  1 ½ cups white rice, uncooked

  1 teaspoon salt

  3 cloves garlic, peeled and diced

  2 small onions, chopped

  1 4 oz. can green chiles, chopped

  1 fresh jalapeño, chopped

  1 pound Jack cheese, shredded

  1 pound cottage cheese

  Soak beans overnight in water to cover.

  In morning drain and cook beans in 4 cups fresh water for about an hour, or until tender. Cool.

  Meanwhile, cook rice: bring 3 cups of water to boil, add rice and salt, cover, and lower heat to simmer. Cook about 20 minutes, or until water has evaporated. Cool slightly.

  Mix rice, drained beans, garlic, onion, and chiles in big bowl.

  Preheat oven to 350°.

  Butter a large casserole. Cover bottom with a layer of the rice-and-bean mixture. Cover with a layer of Jack cheese and cottage cheese. Put in another layer of rice and beans, and keep layering until all the ingredients except for the final ½ cup of cheese is used up. End with a layer of rice.

  Bake for 30 minutes.

  Add final sprinkling of cheese and cook 5 minutes more.

  Serves 6.

  “Broken” was not in Nick’s vocabulary. He could fix anything; he was a plumber, a carpenter, an electrician. He could wire houses and repair cars, clocks, and video equipment. As he went through town he was always rescuing things from the garbage and bearing them triumphantly home.

  This was very nice for his friends, who could count on him to lend them any kind of equipment. And, it was certainly the morally correct position if you believed in protecting the earth. But for those of us who lived with him, surrounded by growing piles of salvaged stuff, it had definite drawbacks. Within a year our old house was overflowing with Nick’s treasures, and he was still collecting. I could live with that, but when his rescue missions came into the kitchen we finally went to war.

  The first skirmish was over the kitchen sink. One day Nick came home toting a six-foot-long metal sink he had found in a restaurant that was being demolished. As he lifted it out of the back of his truck he said gleefully, “Solid stainless, and it was free.”

  I came out to look. The old woman who lived in the ancient cottage next door was perched in the branches of the apple tree along the fence. At ninety-three she still did her own pruning, dressed in an ankle-length black dress. I waved up at her. She did not wave back.

  “The sink has no legs,” I pointed out.

  “I found those too,” he said, hauling a pair of elaborately turned mahogany table legs out of the truck. “Aren’t they beauties? They came off an old library table. We just put the sink on top.”

  “Doesn’t it need four legs?” I asked.

  “Oh, we can make the others out of two by fours,” he said dismissively.

  “It’s going to look weird,” I protested.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Besides, I’ve come up with a great idea.” He sat down at the kitchen table Doug had built and started drawing his combination shelf and dish drain. “See,” he said, sketching rapidly, “we build the shelves right over the sink with slatted bottoms. Then you just wash and stack.” He looked proudly down at the paper and added, “They drip dry and you don’t have to put them away. They’re already away!”

  “It takes up so much room!” I said.

  “What do you want,” he asked contemptuously, “a dishwasher?”

  We didn’t approve of dishwashers, of course (bourgeois and energy-inefficient), but in my secret heart I longed for one. We were feeding more people every night. Nick considered everyone he met a potential friend and he was constantly crying: “Come for dinner!” Martha and I would count heads as we set the table and then stir more water into the soup.

  We hadn’t meant to be a commune, but the house was so big it seemed selfish not to use the space. Martha and I both liked cooking, and what difference could a few more mouths make? Friends visiting from New York would come for a week and stay a few months. Jules came the night he broke up with his girlfriend; he was there a year before we understood that he was actually living with us. Then Bob, the graduate student next door, started showing up every night just as we sat down to dinner. Doug built a bigger table.

  One day Nick found Francesco and Elena, two Venetians on a Fulbright, wandering around campus and offered them a place to stay while they looked for an apartment. “Living here is so intense, so filled with life,” said Elena approvingly and they moved in too. This was fine with me: they all offered support in the escalating war with Nick.

  “Do you really think we need eight bags for recycling?” asked Jules one day, looking at the bags lined up beneath Nick’s sink. There was one for clear glass, one for green glass, three for different kinds of metal, one for plastic, one for compost, and one tiny bag for the things that resisted our earnest efforts at recycling.

  “Don’t talk to me,” I sighed, “talk to Nick. I think they’re an eyesore and I’d love to have them out of the kitchen.”

  But Nick would not be moved. The bags were ugly and recycling was annoyingly time consuming, but it was the right thing to do. We grumbled; we recycled. We could also agree that Nick was right when he asked us not to buy Nestlé’s products, although I no longer remember why. We agreed with the ban on Welch’s (they supposedly supported the John Birch society) and Coors (fought with unions). Grapes, of course, were completely forbidden, but it was a moot point: the farm workers had such strong support in Berkeley that grapes were simply unavailable. But the day Nick came home saying that coffee was unhealthy and henceforth we should all drink tea we went into open revolt.

  “We are Italian,” said Francesco and Elena, “we must have coffee.”

  “I am American,” said Doug, “and I must too.” Jules was equally adamant about coffee being a necessity of life. The four of them immediately went to the Whole Earth store and bought a new coffee grinder.

  Nick retaliated by filling the kitchen with little brown sacks of assorted weeds and herbs for tea. These soon became so prolific that you couldn’t open a cupboard without having chamomile flowers rain down on your head.

  Next Nick discovered biorhythms. He made charts for everyone in the household
and put them on the bulletin board in the kitchen. If anybody was in a bad mood he’d look significantly at the chart and say, “See?” It got annoying. But not nearly as annoying as the big messes of millet and barley that were now taking up most of the space in the kitchen.

  Nick had discovered grains. He would come down in the morning, scoop up a bowlful of millet, cover it with Dr. Bronner’s Balanced Mineral Bouillon (the label urged us to mineralize all food), and pronounce it delicious. “Just try it,” he’d urge, reading the bottle’s warning: “Astronomy’s eternally great all-one-God-faith unites the human race! For on God’s spaceship earth, with bomb & gun, we’re all-one or none!”

  Actually, with enough butter melted across the top I found the millet sort of appealing.

  I could live with the grains. I didn’t mind when Nick started sneaking bee pollen and nutritional yeast into our food. It was all right with me when he began growing bean sprouts, even though they took up all the space on the counter not already occupied by towel-wrapped bowls of milk being turned into yogurt. I could even support his interest in a new book called The Lazy Colon. But when he started in on sugar I drew the line.

  One day he came in muttering, “White death!” and dumped it all into the garbage.

  “I need that for baking,” I shrieked.

  “But look,” he said proudly, “I’ve brought you something better.” And he held up three jars of honey. “This is clover, this is alfalfa and this is buckwheat,” he said happily.

  “I HATE honey,” I shouted, grabbing one of the jars and throwing it on the floor. Nick beat a hasty retreat.

  That afternoon he appeared with a peace offering. “You said you wanted a radio in the kitchen,” he said, plunking a Rube Goldberg contraption on the counter. “It works perfectly!” he boasted. It had no dial and springs were popping from the back. The antenna was a piece of hanger he had attached to an odd socket. He plugged the thing in and the familiar sound of KPFA, the local left-wing station, filled the kitchen. “Even better,” he said proudly, “it only gets one station!”

  “What if I want to listen to music while I’m cooking?” I asked crossly.

  “You can’t,” he replied. He seemed to consider this an advantage.

  And then it was Thanksgiving, and the conscience of Channing Way made our national holiday his personal project. We weren’t planning on having turkey, were we? How could we even consider such a thing? Turkeys were not only high on the food chain but one of the more egregious examples of the vertical integration of agribusiness.

  “But it’s Francesco and Elena’s first Thanksgiving,” I protested. “We have to give them turkey!”

  “Why?” asked Nick innocently. “I’ve had a really great idea.”

  “Your last great idea was the urine recycling project!”

  “That would have worked if I hadn’t used metal barrels,” he said. “Anyway, this is a really good idea.” We all rolled our eyes, but he ignored us. “Do you know how much food supermarkets throw out every day? What if we make a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner and cook the entire thing out of Dumpsters?”

  “Garbage?” said Doug. “You expect us to eat garbage?”

  “Count me out,” said Jules. Martha wasn’t enchanted either. But it was hard for any of us to defend our position; in the face of Nick’s moral rectitude we always seemed, well, bourgeois. How could we refuse when he urged us just to try once, to see what we could find in the garbage.

  It was extraordinary what was being thrown out! Flats of perfectly good eggs had been discarded merely because a couple had cracked. We found ripped bags of flour and crumbled cartons of cookies. The bananas might be a little brown, but they made wonderful banana bread and the apples were just fine for applesauce.

  We began making daily runs to the Dumpsters; I would never have admitted it to Nick, but the garbage runs were fun. We came home with all sorts of items I would not normally have bought and I liked the challenge of figuring out ways to use them. Within weeks I had discovered dozens of uses for white bread.

  And then one day I found a steak, neatly wrapped and perfectly usable. As I held up the package I thought of Rolf at La Seine. And then, of course, of Mom.

  “Do you think it would be better to use this meat or let it go to waste?” I asked Doug.

  “Waste can’t be good,” he said.

  “Do you think we should eat it?” I asked Nick.

  “Definitely,” he said.

  Without any discussion the morality of garbage changed our diet. Soon we were dragging home torn bags of marshmallows, dented cans of soda, and similarly forbidden foods. Maybe Thanksgiving wasn’t going to be so bad.

  The drought had devastated the eucalyptus population of Tilden Park and local residents were being encouraged to cut the dead trees for firewood. The day before Thanksgiving, Doug and Nick took the chain saw up to the mountain. When they came back we all went out to help stack the wood along the side of the house. The old lady next door watched silently from over the fence and without a word Nick went and stacked some of the wood against her house too. She nodded solemnly and went inside. Nick watched her go. Then, impulsively, he followed.

  We watched him knock on her door and go inside. He was gone for a long time. “She’s pretty deaf,” he said when he finally returned. “It took me a while to make her understand that I was inviting her to join us for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “Is she coming?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said, “why wouldn’t she?”

  “I bet you didn’t tell her we weren’t having turkey,” I replied as we piled into the van to make the final Dumpster run.

  Inside the stores people were standing in line to pay for their turkeys and sweet potatoes; outside there was no waiting. Nick unearthed a ten-pound sack of potatoes and a pound of butter. I found celery and apples. Doug even discovered some dented cans of cranberry sauce.

  “Look!” said Jules, holding up a package of Monterey Jack cheese. “I bet if we came back at midnight we might even find a turkey.”

  “Dream on,” I said.

  Doug laid a fire when we got home and the fresh scent of eucalyptus filled the house. Martha went out to the garden to dig up beets and carrots and pick the last of the lettuce. While she roasted vegetables and made a salad I constructed the Con Queso rice.

  “Thanksgiving’s going to be strange without turkey,” said Martha wistfully as we ate.

  “We’ll have just about everything else,” I said. “Stuffing, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pie. We’re even having creamed onions.”

  “I know,” she said, “but it won’t be the same without turkey.”

  “Do you really mind?” asked Nick.

  “Not really,” she said. And then, in a lower voice, “Well, just a little.”

  After dinner we mulled wine with cloves, cinnamon, and orange peels. Jules did the dishes while the rest of us began peeling apples for the pies. “Where’s Nick?” I said suddenly.

  “Oh, he’s probably out in the shop inventing a more efficient fork,” said Martha, and we all laughed.

  It was good in there; the kitchen was crowded with friends and more people kept arriving every minute. The air was heady with the spicy smell of hot wine and alive with Cajun music. Doug put his arms around me. “Aren’t you glad we came to California?” he whispered.

  As he said it, I thought of my parents. My poor father, alone in the house with Mom. She was in a depression and the place would be eerily silent. Was she even cooking dinner? “I should have invited them to come out,” I sighed.

  As I spoke a gust of cool air burst into the kitchen. Nick came in carrying a big box. He set it on the floor, leaned down, and pulled out a bulky bundle wrapped in torn plastic. Handing it to Martha he said triumphantly, “Turkey!”

  We all stared at the bird. There were twelve people in the kitchen at that moment, and every one of us had the sense not to ask where it had come from.

  THE SWALLOW

&nb
sp; “If all you’re going to do is cook, you should get a job in a restaurant. At least you’d be making some money.”

  Mom perched on the edge of the sloping bench Doug had hammered together out of old pieces of plywood, eating raspberries from the bushes that threatened to overrun our lawn. Laundry flapped on the line above her head. My father, stretched out in one of the precarious plastic lounge chairs Nick had rescued from the garbage, snored softly beneath the newspaper shielding his face from the California sun.

  My mother was staring critically at the unkempt yard, her gaze sweeping across the driveway filled with vehicles in various states of repair. I had tried to think of a million reasons to postpone my parents’ visits, but when my mother was high they always showed up. I dreaded the visits.

  “You have no privacy!” my mother moaned.

  “Privacy,” I replied, “is overrated.”

  “This is not a normal life,” she said. “You don’t work. You live in this menagerie and all you do is cook for people who don’t appreciate you. Don’t you have any ambition?”

  “No,” I replied proudly, “I don’t.” I launched into the standard Berkeley lecture about ambition being the problem with America. I told them I was trying not to use more than my share of the world’s resources and talked about walking lightly on the earth. I had cut my hair, bought Birkenstocks, and wore nothing but overalls purchased at Value Village. I had traded in my contact lenses (too artificial) for wire-rimmed glasses. “You look,” my father said, “like a New-Age nun.”

  “You never do anything,” said Mom accusingly. “All you ever do is cook. This is no way to live.”

  “Yeah,” I said sarcastically, “not much to brag about to your New York friends.”

  She ignored me. “I just hate to see you frittering away your potential. Wouldn’t you like to go to France and take cooking lessons? Dad and I will pay for it. You can brush up on your French.”

  “It’s in the wrist,” I teased. I knew that she had just turned me into Audrey Hepburn. She imagined that I would come home with better clothes and a better attitude. Maybe even a poodle.