by Nora Ephron
Serial Monogamy: A Memoir
My mother gave me my first cookbook. It was 1962, and I began my New York life with her gift of The Gourmet Cookbook (volume 1) and several sets of sheets and pillowcases (white, with scallops). The Gourmet Cookbook was enormous, a tome, with a gloomy reddish brown binding. It was assembled by the editors of Gourmet magazine and punctuated by the splendid, reverent, slightly lugubrious pictures of food the magazine was famous for. Simply owning it had changed my mother’s life. Until the book appeared, in the fifties, she had been content to keep as far from the kitchen as possible. We had a wonderful Southern cook named Evelyn Hall, who cooked American classics like roast beef and fried chicken and a world-class apple pie. But thanks to The Gourmet Cookbook, Evelyn began to cook chicken Marengo and crème caramel; before long, my mother herself was in the kitchen, whipping up Chinese egg rolls from scratch. A recipe for them appears on page 36 of the book, but it doesn’t begin to convey how stressful and time-consuming an endeavor it is to make egg rolls, nor does it begin to suggest how much tension a person can create in a household by serving egg rolls that take hours to make and are not nearly as good as Chinese takeout.
Owning The Gourmet Cookbook made me feel tremendously sophisticated. For years I gave it to friends as a wedding present. It was an emblem of adulthood, a way of being smart and chic and college-educated where food was concerned, but I never really used it in the way you’re supposed to use a cookbook—by propping it open on the kitchen counter, cooking from it, staining its pages with spattered butter and chocolate splotches, conducting a unilateral dialogue with the book itself—in short, by having a relationship with it.
The cookbook I used most my first year in New York was a small volume called The Flavour of France. It was given to me by a powerful older woman I’ll call Jane, whom I met my first summer in the city. She was twenty-five, and she took me in hand and introduced me not just to the cookbook but also to Brie and vitello tonnato and the famous omelet place in the East Sixties. In fact, the first time I went to the omelet place, which was called Madame Romaine de Lyon, I was a mail girl at Newsweek, making fifty-five dollars a week, and I almost fainted when I saw that an omelet cost $3.45. Jane also introduced me to the concept of One Away. You were One Away from someone if you had both slept with the same man. Jane had slept with a number of up-and-coming journalists, editors, and novelists, the most famous of whom, at the end of their one night together, gave her a copy of one of his books, a box of which was conveniently located right next to his front door. According to Jane, his exact words, as she made her way to the exit, were “Take one on your way out.”
The night President Kennedy was shot, Jane was having a dinner party, which went forward in spite of the tragedy, as these things tend to do. Jane served as an appetizer céleri rémoulade, a dish that I had never before encountered and that remains a mystery to me. A few months later, I had a thing with someone Jane had had a thing with. Jane and I were now One Away from each other, and interestingly, that was the end of our friendship, though not the end of my connection to The Flavour of France.
The Flavour of France was the size of a date book, only six by eight inches. It contained small blocks of recipe text by Narcissa Chamberlain and her daughter Narcisse, and large black-and-white travel photographs of France taken by Narcissa’s husband (and Narcisse’s father), Samuel Chamberlain. I didn’t focus much on the mysterious Chamberlain family as I cooked my way through their cookbook, and when I did, I usually hit a wall. For openers, I couldn’t imagine why anyone named Narcissa would name her daughter Narcisse. Also, I couldn’t figure out how they collaborated. Did the three of them drive around France together, fighting over whose turn it was to sit in the backseat? Did Narcisse like working with her parents? And if so, was she crazy? But the Chamberlains’ recipes were simple and foolproof. I learned to make a perfect chocolate mousse that took about five minutes, and a wonderful dessert of caramelized baked pears with cream. I made those pears for years, although chocolate mousse eventually faded from my repertory when the crème brûlée years began.
Just before I’d moved to New York, two historic events had occurred: The birth control pill had been invented, and the first Julia Child cookbook was published. As a result, everyone was having sex, and when the sex was over, you cooked something. One of my girlfriends moved in with a man she was in love with. Her mother was distraught and warned that he would never marry her because she had already slept with him. “Whatever you do,” my friend’s mother said, “don’t cook for him.” But it was too late. She cooked for him. He married her anyway. This was right around the time endive was discovered, which was followed by arugula, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisée, which was followed by the three M ’s—mesclun, mâche, and microgreens—and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the last forty years from the point of view of lettuce. But I’m getting ahead of the story.
By the mid-sixties, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook, and Michael Field’s Cooking School had become the holy trinity of cookbooks. At this point I was working as a newspaper reporter at the New York Post and living in the Village. If I was home alone at night, I cooked myself an entire meal from one of these cookbooks. Then I sat down in front of the television set and ate it. I felt very brave and plucky as I ate my perfect dinner. Okay, I didn’t have a date, but at least I wasn’t one of those lonely women who sat home with a pathetic container of yogurt. Eating an entire meal for four that I had cooked for myself was probably equally pathetic, but that never crossed my mind.
I cooked every single recipe in Michael Field’s book and at least half the recipes in the first Julia, and as I cooked, I had imaginary conversations with them both. Julia was nicer and more forgiving—she was by then on television and famous for dropping food, picking it up, and throwing it right back into the pan. Michael Field was sterner and more meticulous; in fact, he was almost fascistic. He was full of prejudice about things like the garlic press (he believed that using one made the garlic bitter), and I threw mine away for fear he would suddenly materialize in my kitchen and disapprove. His recipes were precise, and I followed them to the letter; I was young, and I believed that if you changed even a hair on a recipe’s head, it wouldn’t turn out right. When I had people to dinner, I loved to serve Michael’s complicated recipe for chicken curry, accompanied by condiments and pappadums—although I sometimes served instead a marginally simpler Craig Claiborne recipe for lamb curry that had appeared in Craig’s Sunday column in The New York Times Magazine. There were bananas in it, and heavy cream. I made it recently and it was horrible.
Craig Claiborne worked at The New York Times not just as the chief food writer but also as the restaurant critic; he was enormously powerful and influential, and I developed something of an obsession with him. Craig—everyone called him Craig even if they’d never met the man—was famous for championing ethnic cuisine, and as his devoted acolyte, I learned to cook things like moussaka and tabbouleh. Everyone lived for his Sunday recipes; it was the first page I turned to in the Sunday Times. Everyone knew he had a Techbuilt house on the bay in East Hampton, that he’d added a new kitchen to it, that he usually cooked with the French chef Pierre Franey, and that he despised iceberg lettuce. You can’t really discuss the history of lettuce in the last forty years without mentioning Craig; he played a seminal role. I have always had a weakness for iceberg lettuce with Roquefort dressing, and that’s one of the things I used to have imaginary arguments with Craig about.
For a long time, I hoped that Craig and I would meet and become friends. I gave a lot of thought to this eventuality, most of it concerning what I would cook if he came to my house for dinner. I was confused about whether to serve him something from one of his cookbooks or something from someone else’s cookbook. Perhaps there was a protocol for such things; if so, I didn’t know what it was. It occurred to me that I ought to serve him something that was “my�
�� recipe, but I didn’t have any recipes that were truly mine—with the possible exception of my mother’s barbecue sauce, which mostly consisted of Heinz ketchup. But I desperately wanted him to come over. I’d read somewhere that people were afraid to invite him to dinner. I wasn’t; I just didn’t know the man. I must confess that my fantasy included the hope that after he came to dinner, he would write an article about me and of course include my recipes; but as I said, I didn’t have any.
Meanwhile, we all began to cook in a wildly neurotic and competitive way. We were looking for applause, we were constantly performing, we were desperate to be all things to all people. Was this the grand climax of the post–World War II domestic counterrevolution or the beginning of a pathological strain of feminist overreaching? No one knew. We were too busy slicing and dicing.
I got married and entered into a series of absolutely insane culinary episodes. I made the Brazilian national dish. I wrapped things in phyllo. I stuffed grape leaves. There were soufflés. I took a course in how to use a Cuisinart food processor. I even cooked an entire Chinese banquet that included Lee Lum’s lemon chicken. Lee Lum was the chef at Pearl’s, the famous Chinese restaurant where no one could get a table. If you did get a table, you remembered the meal forever because there was so much MSG in the food that you were awake for years afterward. Lee Lum’s recipe for lemon chicken involved dipping strips of chicken breast in water-chestnut flour, frying it, plunging it into a sauce that included crushed pineapple, and dousing the entire concoction with a one-ounce bottle of lemon extract. Once again, the recipe was from the Sunday Times column written by Craig Claiborne. Craig of course had no difficulty getting a table at Pearl’s, and I looked forward to going there with him someday, after we had actually met and become close personal friends. I’d gone to Pearl’s once and was stunned to discover that it was not only impossible to get a table if you weren’t famous but that being famous was not enough—there were degrees of famous. There was famous enough to get a table, and then there was famous enough to get Pearl to come to the table to tell you the nightly specials, and then there was true fame, top-of-the-line fame, which was famous enough to get Pearl to allow you to order the sweet-and-pungent crispy fish. This was what it came down to in New York: You had to have pull to order a fish.
I became a freelance magazine writer. One of my first pieces, for New York magazine, was about Craig Claiborne and Michael Field, who turned out to be at war with each other. As a result, I met Craig Claiborne, and after the article appeared, he invited me to his house. What he served for dinner was not memorable, and in any case, I don’t remember it. Then Claiborne came to our house for dinner, and I served a recipe from one of his cookbooks, a Chilean seafood-and-bread casserole that was a recipe of Leonard Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre. I can’t believe I remember her name, much less how to spell it, especially given the fact that her recipe was a gluey, milky, disappointing concoction that practically bankrupted me.
I don’t think it was Felicia Montealegre’s fault that Craig and I never became friends, but there was no question in my mind after our two meals that we had no future together. Craig was a nice guy, don’t get me wrong, but he was so low-key that once I’d gotten to know him, I was almost completely unable to have even imaginary conversations with him while cooking his recipes.
Around this time I met a man named Lee Bailey, and I guess I would have to say that if there were any embers burning in the Craig Claiborne department, they were completely extinguished the moment I met Lee. Lee Bailey was a friend of my friend Liz Smith, who believed that everyone she knew should be friends with everyone else she knew. So one night, she invited us to Lee’s house for dinner. Lee lived in the East Forties, in a floor-through below the ground, and what I distinctly remember about it was that it had some sort of straw matting on the walls that probably came from Azuma, and it was just about the most fabulous place I’d ever seen. It was simple, and easy on the eyes, and comfortable, but nothing was expensive, and there was no art to speak of, and no color at all. Everything was beige. As Lee once said, “Be very careful about color.”
And then dinner was served. Pork chops, grits, collard greens, and a dish of tiny baked crab apples. It was delicious. It was so straightforward and plain and honest and at the same time so playful. Those crab apples! They were adorable! The entire evening was mortifying, a revelation, a rebuke in its way to every single thing I had ever bought and every dinner I had ever served. My couch was purple. I owned a collection of brightly painted wooden Mexican animals. I had red plates and a shag rug. My menus were overwrought and overthought. Would Lee Bailey ever in a million years consider cooking the Brazilian national dish? Or Lee Lum’s lemon chicken? Certainly not. It was horribly clear that my entire life up to that point had been a mistake.
I immediately got a divorce, gave my ex-husband all the furniture, and began to make a study of Lee Bailey. I bought the chairs he told me to buy, and the round dining room table that seemed to be part of the secret of why Lee’s dinner parties were more fun than anyone else’s. When Lee opened a store at Henri Bendel, I bought the white plates, seersucker napkins, and wood-handled stainless flatware that were just like his. I bought new furniture, and all of it was beige. I became Lee’s love slave, culinarily speaking. Long before he began to write the series of cookbooks that made him well known, he had replaced all my previous imaginary friends in the kitchen, and whenever I cooked dinner and anything threatened to go wrong, I could hear him telling me to calm down, it didn’t matter, pour another drink, no one will care. I stopped serving hors d’oeuvres, just like Lee, and as a result, my guests were chewing the wood off the walls before dinner, just like Lee’s. I began to osmose from a neurotic cook with a confusing repertory of ethnic dishes to a very relaxed one specializing in faintly Southern food.
The most important thing I learned from Lee was something I call the Rule of Four. Most people serve three things for dinner—some sort of meat, some sort of starch, and some sort of vegetable—but Lee always served four. And the fourth thing was always unexpected, like those crab apples. A casserole of lima beans and pears cooked for hours with brown sugar and molasses. Peaches with cayenne pepper. Sliced tomatoes with honey. Biscuits. Savory bread pudding. Spoon bread. Whatever it was, that fourth thing seemed to have an almost magical effect on the eating process. You never got tired of the food because there was always another taste on the plate that seemed simultaneously to match it and contradict it. You could go from taste to taste; you could mix a little of this with a little of that. And when you finished eating, you always wanted more, so that you could go from taste to taste all over again. At Lee Bailey’s you could eat forever. This was important. This was crucial. There’s nothing worse than having people to a dinner that they all just polish off and before you know it, they’re done eating and dinner is over and it’s only ten o’clock and everyone leaves and it’s just you and the dishes. (And that was another thing about dinner at Lee’s: On top of everything else, he had fewer dishes to wash, because he never ever served a first course or a cheese course; and if he served salad, it just went onto the plate along with everything else.)
And by the way, Lee never served fish, so I never served fish, and I’ll tell you why: It’s too easy to eat fish. Bim bam boom you’re done with a piece of fish, and you’re right out the door. When people come to dinner, it should be fun, and part of the fun should be the food. Fish—and I’m sorry to say this but it’s true—is no fun. People like to play with their food, and it’s virtually impossible to play with fish. If you must have fish, order it at a restaurant.
You might think that having Lee as a real friend might have made it superfluous to have him as an imaginary friend, but you would be wrong. As I conducted my inner conversations with Lee—about what to serve, or what would be the perfect fourth thing to accompany what I was serving—it never occurred to me to pick up the phone and ask him. Lee was much too easygoing; he would just have laughed and said, anything yo
u feel like, honey. He was, in his way, as close to a Zen master as I’ve ever had, and all of us who fell under his influence began with his style and eventually ended up with our own.
I always secretly wished that Lee would include a recipe of mine in one of his cookbooks—he frequently came to dinner and was always fantastically kind about the food—but he never asked for any of my recipes. He did take a photograph of my backyard for one of his cookbooks, and he used my napkins and plates in the photograph; but of course, I’d bought them at his store in Bendel’s, so it didn’t really count.
Meanwhile, I got married again, and divorced again. I wrote a thinly disguised novel about the end of my marriage, and it contained recipes. By then, I’d come to realize that no one was ever going to put my recipes into a book, so I’d have to do it myself. I included Lee’s recipe for lima beans and pears (unfortunately I left out the brown sugar, and for years people told me they’d tried cooking the recipe and it didn’t work), along with my family cook Evelyn’s recipe for cheesecake, which I’m fairly sure she got from the back of the Philadelphia cream cheese package. A food writer who wrote about the book carped that the recipes were not particularly original, but it seemed to me she missed the point. The point wasn’t about the recipes. The point (I was starting to realize) was about putting it together. The point was about making people feel at home, about finding your own style, whatever it was, and committing to it. The point was about giving up neurosis where food was concerned. The point was about finding a way that food fit into your life.
And after a while, I didn’t have to have long internal dialogues with Lee—I’d incorporated what I learned from him and moved on. Four things were not enough; I went to five, and sometimes to six. I liked salad and cheese, so I served salad and cheese. So there were more dishes to wash—so what? On the design front, I left behind beige, and as a result I made all the decorating mistakes that are possible once you do.
