Last Bite: A Novel of Culinary Romance

by Nancy Verde Barr

  “That’s sick, Casey.” He lowered his voice and spoke slowly, as if to show by example that it would be more adult and more civilized to remain calm. “You’re not being reasonable. You’re letting your anger take over.” That’s when I stomped down on his white shoe and left in a stream of Neapolitan expletives.

  I walked and wept for ten blocks before taking the subway to my train. On blocks two, three, and five, I tried to call my cousin Mary, who is six months older than I am and happens to be my best friend. She wasn’t picking up her cell, so on block seven, I called her work number.

  “I’m sorry. Miss Alfano will be at a meeting all afternoon.”

  “All afternoon?”

  “If this is an emergency I can reach her.” I had tried not to sound hysterical when I called, but it obviously hadn’t worked. I sounded like an emergency.

  “No. Thank you. I’ll call back.”

  Each one of my pounding steps beat out a rhythmic “I hate him. I hate him.” What is it that makes us feel so miserable when a guy we’re planning on deep-sixing anyway picks himself right up and goes out with someone else? I had pretty much come to the conclusion that I didn’t want him, but I sure as hell didn’t want him to want someone else. At least not right away. A little mourning period would have been in order. But then, what can you expect from someone who uses a canceled dental appointment as a breakup strategy?

  As soon as my parents saw me, my mother headed for the kitchen and for once in his life my father was speechless.

  “Don’t bother,” I said, shaking my head. “There aren’t enough cannoli shells in all of Little Italy to make me feel better.” I sobbed my way through the story, through dinner, through the first fifteen minutes of Wheel of Fortune, and then went up to my room exhausted.

  Mary called just about the time I had torn up the last photograph and thrown out all my floss.

  “Look, I know it hurts, but you have to keep reminding yourself that the relationship was a failure anyway.”

  “Yeah. Well, the breakup didn’t work out so well either.”

  “Seeing Richard like that is the pits. But if you think honestly about it, you didn’t really love him.”

  “I was trying to.”

  “Not good enough. The right guy is out there waiting for you, and you’re not going to have to try to love him.”

  “Well, he’s going to have to wait because I’m giving up dating and getting a gerbil.”

  “Do you want me to come over?”

  “Thanks, no. I’m going to squeeze all the sample toothpastes down the toilet and go to bed. It’s been a rough day.”

  Four and a half weeks later my father was still driving me into the city. He said he had business there, but I know he just didn’t trust me near the train tracks.

  Chapter 2

  My future ain’t what it used to be.

  —Lonnie Spiker

  I love a TV studio early in the morning. Just like me, it wakes up slowly. When I arrive, the lights are low and whatever noises the prop men are making get lost in the immensity of the room. This will all change in about an hour when the control room opens, the camera and sound crews arrive, and the line producers converge on the set. The show’s hosts, Jim and Karen, don’t join the chaos until about ten minutes before airtime, but sometimes Art, the weatherman, wanders into the kitchen early because he likes to cook and wants to get a few pointers.

  There’s always a breakfast buffet set up on a long table in the hallway right outside our studio, with plenty of good coffee, lots of cut-up fruit, every flavor of yogurt, and an Atkins-horrifying abundance of carbs—bagels, at least four kinds of muffins, croissants, three varieties of Danish, sticky buns, English muffins, scones. It’s like a huge room-service bread basket but you get to pick more than two items. I took a corn muffin, a sticky bun, and a carrot-and-zucchini muffin for my vegetable, plus two large coffees, and headed back to the prep kitchen to start work.

  The prep kitchen is a tiny, ten-by-sixteen-foot kitchenette that was never meant to be used to prepare anything like the amount of food we need for televising. It was there for any staff or crew member who needed a refrigerator to hold a lunch or a stove to heat soup or boil water. When Sonya, our executive producer, was able to sign Sally Woods on to the show for regular appearances, she pressed the too-small room into service because it was close to the set and already had appliances and running water. We’ve made the room even smaller by building a butcher-block work island in the center of the room, leaving just enough space between it and the counters for one of us to stand. Two people passing each other qualifies as an intimate relationship, so we call the table Romeo. Right before the show goes on the air at seven o’clock, a heavy soundproof door closes us in—“us” being my assistant, Mae, two stagehands who are assigned KP duty, and me. At some time during the morning, Sonya, the talent, and a set-designer-slash-food-stylist will also cram themselves into the space to check things out. We’ve learned to work around one another nicely, but we all keep an eye on the monitor that pipes the show into the kitchen so we’ll know when there is a commercial break. Then we can open the door for a breather.

  Mae was already there when I walked in. I hoped she had her own breakfast. I wasn’t sharing.

  “Hey,” she said as she continued to unpack groceries, opening wrapped packages to check them against my shopping list. The first rule of television food production is to make sure the food is all there and it’s what was ordered. On one of my early days with the show, I’d ordered salmon fillets. When I’d opened the wrapped package close to airtime, I’d discovered that the shopper had bought a slab of smoked salmon instead. Fortunately, the talent that day was dear, unflappable Sally, who has seen it all and dealt with it all in her twenty-five years of cooking on television. She told us to “oil the bejabbers” out of the salmon and ordered the cameras to stay back. It worked out fine, but it was a lesson. Check the supplies in time to replace them if necessary.

  “Hey, yourself. How’s it going?”

  “Way cool.” For twenty-three-year-old Mae March, life is always way cool. She comes from a bit of a zany family, Mr. and Mrs. March and their daughters, April, Mae, and June. Most people think she’s joking when she tells them that. Mae has her own sense of style—or antistyle, depending on how you look at it. She wears a traditional white chef’s coat to work, but she funks up everything else—from the long, gauzy vintage skirts that end midcalf, just above the high-heeled, black Doc Marten–type boots, to the small green star she applies with a Magic Marker under her left eye every morning. She wears her long chestnut hair pulled up and held with a variety of animal-shaped hair clips and a couple of chopsticks for good measure. Occasionally she colors a small tuft of hair in the front. Today it was a deep maroon, which matched the color of her fingernails. In spite of her attempts at bizarre, she’s a knockout, with a flawless creamy complexion and high cheekbones that get a delicate shade of pink when the kitchen heat is on. Her soft gray eyes have a come-hither look even when she’s inspecting groceries.

  Her costuming makes it hard to take her seriously until she starts to work. Mae learned all she knows from high school home economics classes and her parents’ restaurant. She avoided all the culinary school egotism of thinking she’s a star chef and learned the importance of speed, accuracy, and getting along with people in small spaces. Our kitchen motto at Morning in America is EOT: Eye on Target. Mae has no problem with that. Neither do our cute young stagehands, whose target happens to be Mae. We have four stagehands available to us—all named Tony. At first, we tried to distinguish them by calling them Tony G. and Tony M. and so forth, but we could never keep that straight so we gave up. It actually works out okay, because when we need something done we just say, “Tony” and someone does it. Two stagehands stay in the kitchen with us to wash dishes, sweep floors, empty trash, and peel, trim, and chop. The other two are always nearby to run errands, carry trays, repair props, and so forth. Two Tonys arrived just as Mae was finishin
g unpacking and they tripped over each other to help her. It was like watching puberty on speed.

  That morning we were doing a live spot with Tina Lovely, a tall, willowy movie star with a glorious mane of strawberry-blond hair. Working with celebrities is fun from a starstruck point of view, but can be frustrating from a culinary point of view. Unlike Sally or our guest chefs, stars are not food professionals, and we sometimes have to do some cookery sleight of hand to make the recipes work. Tina planned to demonstrate her method of growing herbs under special lights in her sauna. Not exactly a tip with universal appeal, but she happened to be dating a rock star who was all over the news because one of his band members had been caught in a indelicate situation with an underage girl who had turned out to be the daughter of a well-known British politician.

  Tina was writing a cookbook. Actually, it seems as though every other person I meet lately is either writing a cookbook or planning to. Thanks to Sally’s years of overwhelming culinary influence, food is fashionable and trendy, and lots of people who were raised on TV dinners and frozen fish sticks are now gourmet cooks. If you’re a celebrity like Tina, publishers are eager to bring out your work. I have no problem with this because I love the food world and the more people in it, the merrier. And, of course, the more work there is for me.

  After showing how to pot the herbs, Tina planned to offer some examples of how to use them once you get out of the sauna. She’d given us her recipes for herb-roasted chicken, baked potatoes with chive sour cream, and a sort of French bread with basil. We had to make her food look good, even though the recipes were not really workable.

  Mae picked up her copies of the recipes and sat down next to me. I moved my muffins out of her reach. As usual, she got right to the point. “Her recipes suck. Do you think she actually makes this stuff? She cooks the chicken to death. She wraps the baked potatoes in foil, for God’s sake. Even lousy restaurants don’t do that anymore. She so can’t cook. I’ll bet she doesn’t even eat. She’s so skinny.”

  I looked at my remaining muffin and thought of Tina chewing gum for breakfast. “Probably not. I told Sonya the recipes needed tweaking and she tried to convince Tina to let us redo them. But Tina said her dinner guests always gobbled them up.”

  “She probably never looked under the parsley left on the plates.”

  “Since she’s not actually giving recipes but only showing how to pot the herbs and offering some ideas of how to use them, Sonya said to go with them. We just have to make the food look good. Don’t wrap the potatoes or they’ll shrivel. I’ll explain that to Tina. We’ll make sure the chicken is fully cooked, but get it out of the oven before it takes on too much color.” Food always looks darker on TV than it really is, so timing is especially tricky with chicken and turkey. Poultry has to be fully cooked in case the host tastes it, but if it cooks too long, it looks black and shriveled. In the “old days,” magazines used to paint barely cooked birds with a combination of dish liquid and shoe polish so they would have a golden-brown glow. We don’t ever do things like that.

  “If I make the bread her way,” Mae pleaded, “it won’t even look good. Her recipe is a joke.”

  Tina’s basil French bread called for mixing the traditional ingredients of yeast, flour, and water with sauna-raised basil, all of it to be whirred in a food processor and plopped (her word) on a baking sheet, then coaxed into a rounded shape and baked. Voilà, a French boule. She insisted that the dough didn’t have to rise. Stunad! (My word.) Bread has to rise.

  “All right, Mae. Make a few loaves the classic way. Let them rise and give them surface tension. We’ll slice those so the pieces look like bread and hide Tina’s blob behind Jonathan’s props. I’ll start with the trays.”

  Work on a cooking segment begins a few weeks before the day it is televised. Sonya picks the chef or celebrity, known as “the talent,” who will appear on the show, and then together we choose from the recipes the talent suggests. Sonya decides if they fit into the overall programming; I decide if they are visually interesting and technically possible. Once we’ve agreed on the recipes, it is my job to break them down into what needs to be seen and how to show it in the time allotted, which is usually only three and a half minutes. After Sonya approves my recipe breakdown, I can make shopping and equipment lists for the crew and write the scripts. The scripts are not dialogue scripts with lines for the talent to memorize. They outline what steps and in what order the recipes will be shot. From the scripts, I determine what needs to be done ahead of time and then make prep lists for Mae and myself.

  Since we can’t leave any ingredients or equipment on the set before the cooking spot is ready to air, we set everything up on large cafeteria trays, which wind up scattered all over our tiny workplace. The trays are key. Each one of them represents a different part of the recipe that the talent will demonstrate. We put large pieces of masking tape on the trays and mark them with numbers according to their place on the set. In the three minutes of commercial break time just before the food segment begins, we have to get all that food to the set, and union rules allow only the stagehands to carry it. The numbers on the trays tell them in what order to set the trays down. Mae and I follow right behind, remove the items from the trays, and place them where the chef can easily reach them. We work all of this out before the show even begins so we are not guessing in this brief time where to place things and inadvertently put something down in a place that blocks the camera’s view of the food. Jonathan, our set designer and food stylist, is right behind us making the setting attractive with napkins, plates, some flowers, and occasionally an objet d’art that he finds irresistible. He tweaks the food using tools from his stylist’s basket—tweezers, toothpicks, a water spray, a jar of oil, and paintbrushes in various sizes.

  There was a nice rhythm going in the kitchen when Jonathan stormed in, demonstrating that he was already having a supremely awful day. He was cradling a box of little clay pots in one arm and holding a large bag of potting soil in the other hand. He lifted the soil up above his head as though he were about to auction it off. “It’s all brown. The pots are brown; the food’s brown; the dirt’s the color of shit. Brown bread, brown chicken, brown potatoes—all brown. How the hell can I make that pretty? Doesn’t anyone consider color when they suggest these spots?”

  I was accustomed to Jonathan’s irritable disposition. It no longer gets a rise out of me, but he keeps trying. “Good morning, Jonathan. Had your coffee yet?” He is particularly unpleasant before he has had coffee, and never goes for it himself. A Tony dropped his dish towel and ran for the buffet as though he were afraid he’d be blamed for all the brownness. I made a halfhearted attempt at appeasement. “A lot of food is brown, Jonathan. We have nice red cherry tomatoes and lots of parsley that you can put around the chicken.”

  “I can’t keep covering everything with parsley. Next you’ll be asking me to drape it over a chocolate cake.” He took out the only key in existence that opened his private cabinet. Inside was a wild assortment of scavenged dishes, napkins, vases, bowls, candles, and art objects. It looked like a garage sale waiting to happen. He made more noise than necessary as he moved platters around to find one that would make the chicken presentable for morning TV.

  Before long, Mae had four batches of basil dough mixed and rising in bowls. There’s no wiggle room in live television, and that accounts for our second motto, CYA: Cover Your Ass. In food television, that means “make more than you think you need.”

  While the bread dough was doing its thing, Mae was creaming a couple of pounds of unsalted butter against the side of a mixing bowl with a wooden spoon. She had already chopped the mounds of herbs we needed, which a Tony had washed, dried, and stripped from the stems, and they were lined up in front of her. One Tony was scrubbing baking potatoes and another Tony was oiling the racks that would hold the roasting chickens. There was happy chatter going on and I thought of what Sally always says when she is in such a kitchen: “Isn’t cooking together fun?” It is indeed.<
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  Mae and I each took a chicken and carefully slipped our hands under the skin to make a space for the herb butter. We picked up the softened butter, worked it under the skin, and began to massage it over the meat. If your head is in that place, it is a very sensual sight and the Tonys kept elbowing each other and whispering. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I heard what they were thinking.

  We rested the birds on their sides on Tony’s well-oiled racks in roasting pans, massaged the outsides with more butter, and slid them into the oven. I went back to the trays to recheck the setup and make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I always talk myself through the script so I can anticipate what might be needed: “Tina and Karen each open a potato and break up the pulp” two knives, two forks “and each spoon sour cream inside” two spoons “and taste” extra forks because the first ones may look yucky from breaking up the potatoes. Viewers truly write us letters about things like that. If there’s a question about whether something is needed, I put it out anyway. It’s a CYA lesson I learned the hard way. On an earlier show, I had to crawl on my hands and knees below the camera’s eye to put a whisk in Karen’s hand when the talent asked her to beat some eggs. It was an okay way to get it there, but I took a lot of razzing from the camera crew.

  I gave an empty tray a number and wrote on the tape “Finished bird, beautifully garnished on pretty platter.” The chicken hadn’t finished baking, and Jonathan was still stewing about the platter, but everything happens so quickly right before airtime that we might forget what goes on it and where it goes. I marked another empty tray “I uncut finished blob, I sliced bread” as well as “bread basket, napkins, butter dish, and butter knives” and told Jonathan we’d need these items. He ignored me. He was standing at his cabinet with four different platters lined up at his feet. He had one hand curled up so it made a lens-like circle and he was turning his hand camera from one dish to the other. It’s not as though we had all morning, but I knew better than to rush him. “You have way too much free time, Jonathan,” I said under my breath.