by Gael Greene
Soon we were pooling our savings to explore all the great restaurants, Craig’s favorites, whatever Silas Spitzer recommended in Holiday magazine, and Gourmet’s monthly picks.
Once I was with Don, other men became simply male humans, not possible conquests. I didn’t see them as men I needed to seduce. I didn’t have to prove anything anymore, because Don seemed to adore me. He was smart and funny and brooding, with a deep melancholy streak. Sometimes he would be telling a story so sad that he would cry. I was moved by his tears, his deep sadness. I would be his woman, his mistress, his muse, his good mother.
Don and I would lie in bed after making love, trading bedroom stories, tales of a thousand and one nights. He’d slept with hundreds of women. And it didn’t matter how many men I’d been with. “Whatever you’ve done is what makes you what you are,” he said. “And that’s the you I love.”
Blueberry Pie with Orange-Nut Crust
I believe this came from the Times in the sixties, and I made it into my own summer pie. The vintage recipe called for shortening, but I’ve substituted butter for twenty-first-century tastes.
Crust:
2 cups flour
1/4 tsp. salt
2 tsp. sugar
8 oz. unsalted butter
2 tsp. grated orange rind
1/3 cup finely chopped almonds or pecans
5 tbsp. ice water (approximately)
Filling:
4 cups blueberries
1/2 cup sugar
2 tbsp. cornstarch
Preheat oven to 375° F. If you have a pizza stone, place it on the bottom rack.
Mix flour, salt, and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer. Cut butter into eight pieces. Using the paddle attachment, add one piece at a time. Continue processing until pieces of butter are no larger than a pea. Add orange rind and nuts and process briefly. Remove bowl from mixer.
Sprinkle 3 tablespoons of the water over the mixture and mix in with a fork. Pinch the dough together. If it holds and doesn’t feel dry, you do not need to add the remaining water. If it’s dry and does not hold, add remaining water, 1 tablespoon at a time, as needed, to make the dough come together. Roll into two balls, flatten, and wrap separately in plastic. Refrigerate for approximately one hour.
Remove one pastry disk from the refrigerator 20 minutes before rolling. Roll the pastry and line a nine-inch pie plate with it. Refrigerate the pastry-lined plate and remove remaining disk from fridge while preparing the berries.
Pick over the berries, then gently toss with granulated sugar and cornstarch. Pour into pastry-lined pie plate.
Roll out remaining pastry. If you have a lattice-top form to punch out a checkerboard top, use it. Otherwise, cut 3 to 4 slits in the top layer of pastry once you have laid it over the blueberries. Moisten the edges and crimp to seal.
Place on the bottom rack of the oven, ideally on the pizza stone. Bake for 20 minutes. Reduce temperature to 350° and move the pie to the middle rack and bake for another 20 minutes. The pie is done when the juices start to bubble and the crust is nicely browned on the edges.
Serves 8.
5
SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING BLUE
AGING HIPPIES LIKE TO SAY, “IF YOU REMEMBER THE SIXTIES, YOU WEREN’T there.” I remember the sixties because food and sex were drugs that did not destroy memory cells. I still had a hangover of fifties’ sensibility. I was curious about LSD, but it was supposed to bring out the real you from within. Forget about that. I could see from my friends who loved smoking marijuana that it was an escape from reality and brought on the munchies, a symptom I couldn’t afford in my trade. Caught up in work, paying bills . . . and playing house, I still wore my panty girdle and white gloves. The counterculture was a sideshow. I covered it for the New York Post and for Ladies’ Home Journal. Unlike Al Aronowitz, a middle-class New Jersey boy who went beat covering the Beats for the Post and claimed to have given the Beatles their first grass, I liked shoes and bags that matched, and clean sheets, preferably ironed. The chocolate velvet cake at the Four Seasons was about as druggy as I cared to go.
Looking back from the media-saturated world of today, where I suppose even prepubescents know what Bill Clinton did to flavor his cigar, it is difficult to believe how innocent we were. My article “Are You Man Enough to Take a Mistress?” must have seemed a provocative challenge to readers of Nugget when the men’s monthly ran it in December 1962. Mistress still had a slightly back-street connotation. Mistress had an aura of glamorous wickedness, so unlike today’s everyday, socially acknowledged live-in companion or domestic partner.
Probably I’d sold the story before Don and I surprised ourselves by getting married on Labor Day weekend in 1961. I liked the idea of being his mistress (although, in fact, we shared the bills). We had watched our friends pairing off, having babies, moving to the suburbs because it was better for the children. Neither of us was eager to marry. I had actually convinced myself marriage was too big a commitment, since Don made it clear marriage was not his immediate goal. Don was not my dream man. His deep melancholy sometimes felt like more than I could carry.
“We’ll just live together as long as it’s wonderful,” I said. He agreed. And it was wonderful.
When I traveled for a Post story, I never felt the smallest flicker of lust for anyone. I thrived on that as evidence of how much I loved Don, how much I felt loved. Most of my out-of-town assignments for the Post were brief, but an investigation of illegal baby adoptions involving New York couples took me to Las Vegas and Los Angeles for almost a month. Back in New York, I found Don gloomy and annoyed by the long separation.
“I want to get married,” he said. “If you don’t want to marry, then we should end this and one of us should move out.”
I was caught by surprise. He had convinced me he would never marry, and I was cozy and comfortable just as we were, no legal tie. “But darling, we don’t need to be married,” I said. “We’re great together. . . . We’re better than being married. What made you suddenly decide you want to do this?”
“I think we should do it for your parents,” he said.
That stopped me for a minute or two. I didn’t laugh. “Are you sure?” I asked. “You’re upset about my parents?”
“I hate the subterfuge . . . the pretense.” He was lying facedown on the hated gold coverlet of our bed, bought to match the twenty-five-dollar gold-and-red cotton fake Persian rug from the Salvation Army that I also hated—all my least favorite colors, but I believed everything should match.
I got someone to recommend a crisis therapist. I went four times and I heard myself talk. “I’m too tall. He’s too short. I can’t live without him. Marriage should be forever. I don’t ever want a divorce. How do I know if he’s really the one? He gets depressed and he hates his mother. That’s not a good sign. But I love how emotional he is. . . . I love that he cries. I don’t think I want to live without him.”
What did the therapist say? I’m sure he had something to say. Crisis therapists, unlike strict Freudians, are allowed to, expected to, talk. But I listened to myself and decided I would marry Don, invoking the same mantra that had protected me so far—for as long as it was wonderful. What a relief! I wasn’t signing on forever. It was in the back of my mind, unspoken, freeing me to marry. Once I said yes, I was really excited and committed. I was going to be married. How amazing. And my parents would be happy, too. They were convinced I’d never find a man who would marry anyone who’d slept around as much as I had (and they didn’t know the half of it).
“Who would buy a cow if you’ve already got the milk?” Daddy had said. Well, now we would have crème fraîche and mountains of whipped cream.
We went to Detroit to get married.
My mom’s friends gave me a shower. “You must have a shower,” Mother said, “because I’ve been buying shower gifts for everyone else’s daughters and nieces for twenty-five years and now it’s my turn.” Her canasta pals brought me nightgowns, very sexy nighties, red satin wit
h spaghetti straps, black with a see-through lace midriff, off-the-shoulder baby-doll pajamas. Did they know?
Daddy gave us the choice of a fancy wedding or five thousand dollars. I negotiated a small wedding in my sister’s backyard, facing a ragtag forest, and four thousand dollars. Mom’s friend the florist had promised me a Gothic arch or Corinthian columns. My heart dropped and I found myself snarling when I saw the four stumpy poles stuck in the dirt. “What are those cigarette butts?” I cried.
“They are not Greek columns?” my mother asked.
“I should have known no one in Detroit could produce a Gothic arch.” I stormed around in my shorts and rubber curlers, trying not to cry and destroy my eyes.
Don looked terror-stricken but handsome, deeply tanned (working nights will do that) in a dark gray pinstripe suit from Brooks Brothers, his first new suit since his high school graduation. I had no ring for him. I was very sensitive about wedding rings for men. I had seen too many men slipping their wedding bands in their pockets or flipping them on the dresser before jumping into bed with me. I didn’t want to imagine Don ever taking off our wedding ring for a few hours.
Probably we should have taken the whole five thousand dollars Daddy offered, but I wanted Detroit to know I wasn’t making it up—I really was getting married. I felt disoriented: The cigarette-butt debacle. Anxiety about Don meeting my eccentric family in one fell swoop. His mother as sweet as treacle (of course we had to invite her). It was all so unnerving that afterward, when we arrived in our honeymoon suite at the St. Clair Inn just for the night—we’d take a real honeymoon in Italy later that fall—we immediately called room service and ordered six desserts, all of them bordering on inedible, and ate every one.
This was just a small hiccup before the glorious food revolution that was coming.
My Ex-Sister-in-Law’s Orange Pour Cake
I baked this moist tea cake for Christmas gifts in the sixties. I placed each cake on a vintage carved breadboard that cost five dollars back then and wrapped it in cellophane. Imagine having the time for such domestic arts. I am deeply envious.
Cake:
2 cups flour, plus 2 tbsp.
1/2 cup butter, softened
2 eggs
2/3 cup sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tbsp. grated orange zest
1/2 cup chopped nuts (walnuts or pecans)
3/4 cup sour cream
Topping:
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup orange juice
1 tbsp. grated orange rind
Preheat oven to 375° F.
Cream 2 tablespoons of the flour into softened butter in a large bowl. Beat eggs in small bowl. Add sugar and combine with flour and butter mixture.
Sift remaining flour with baking soda and add slowly into the egg-butter-sugar mix until combined. Add grated orange rind, nuts, and sour cream. Pour or spoon into greased metal loaf pan.
Bake 30 minutes.
For the topping, combine sugar, orange juice, and 1 tbsp. grated orange rind.
Remove cake from the oven when done and pour topping on cake while cake is still hot.
6
INNOCENTS ABROAD
IN BLUE TROUT AND BLACK TRUFFLES, JOSEPH WECHSBERG, MY MODEL OF A peregrinating epicure, had written, “All epicurian roads lead to Vienne.” Not Vienna, but Vienne, a small outpost dating back to Roman times, south of Lyon. Don’s best friend, Jules, was just back from army service in France with the newly converted’s galloping obsession for gastronomic adventure. He could see we were smitten with food. He was properly impressed by my adaptation of Café Chauveron’s mussels in Chardonnay cream, glazed under the broiler. “Not exactly the same,” we all agreed. “But really close.” Don poured a $1.89 bottle of Chablis. We told Jules our plans for a belated honeymoon in Italy. Jules urged us to make time to discover France. We revised our itinerary. Of course we would go to Vienne. Not sensibly by train from Paris, as more seasoned gourmands would have, but naïvely, determinedly, from Rome—by two trains, an autobus, and a taxi, about the most obtuse detour one might contrive.
Never having known the glories of La Pyramide—famously “Chez Point,” when the legendary Fernand Point was alive—I can only detail the glories committed in his memory as they fertilized our budding gluttonous sensibilities. La Pyramide was dramatically spruced up years later. But back in 1962, it was still the same modest maison Point had ruled, with Madame Point sitting on a tall chair at the entrance, checking out arrivals, and, I felt, writing us off as innocents abroad. Well, we had our doubts about La Pyramide, too. The tacky little dining room with its funereal gladioli seemed ominously bourgeois, without promise. Maybe we had found our obsession too late.
But then came a molded pyramid of sweet butter to marvel at, huge, enough to butter toast for a family of four for a week, and a rich, gamy terrine framed in the tenderest pastry crust. A fresh knife and fork heralded a round of truffle-studded foie gras set into a square of brioche—exactly the yellow cakelike texture of the richest challah. I had never tasted fresh foie gras before—so pink and delicate and buttery. It filled my mouth with silk and demanded attention. I knew at once this could become an addiction. Then a ritual change of silver and the waiter arrived with a small pastry boat filled with a ratatouille of autumn vegetables, each distinctly itself yet happily married. By then, we were getting a little tipsy and congratulating ourselves for our brilliance in being alive and at the kitchen’s mercy.
The truite saumonée was stuffed with a poem of mushrooms and vegetables and was painted with a potion blending butter, cream, and port. We drank a wine we’d never heard of called Condrieu, icy golden vin du pays in an unlabeled bottle. It cost one dollar and was so fragile that it could not be exported, we were told (though now it is widely exported and you can’t get half a thimbleful for one dollar). With the crusty mustard-slicked and crumbed duck and its accompanying sauceboat of béarnaise, we shared a half bottle of heady and imperious Hermitage. The miraculous duck . . . how did they do it?
The elderly maître d’, Vincent, invited me to the kitchen to see the cooking of the duck.
“Us?” asked Don, who did not speak French.
“Non, moi,” I said, rising dizzily. In the soot-blackened alcove, a Boy Scout troop of teenage cooks paused to stare, one of them tossing coals from a wheelbarrow into the oven where the bird had been grilled. I muttered what compliments I could muster in French, given my inebriated state.
Back at the table, there was a challenging confrontation with creamy Saint Marcellin cheese and something goaty in a leaf, then ice cream and the house’s mythic eight-layered Gâteau Marjolaine. Just at the point I knew another bite was impossible, a platter of the pastry chef’s frivolities appeared—diminutive cream puffs, itsy napoleons, mini-tartlets. Between groans of pain and ecstasy, we devoured them one by one. Everyone was giggling—Vincent, the waiters, a few lingering clients. Flushed faces all around us were giggling. Somehow we got the check and somehow we paid, dispensing francs equal to the twenty-seven-dollar tab and a tip or two. Someone aimed us out the door and in the direction of La Résidence—two triumphant pilgrims, leaning into each other for support . . . totally, blissfully, wondrously sauced.
Raw Tomato Sauce for Pasta
Don and I loved a pasta with an uncooked tomato sauce that we ate at a shack on the beach in Ischia during our belated honeymoon. I gave the idea to Craig once. He said it was awful, but I noticed he ran a very similar recipe some months later. Only the best summer tomatoes will do.
4 large beefsteak tomatoes
4 very large cloves of garlic
6 large basil leaves
1 tsp. salt
6 grindings of black pepper
2/3 cup fruity extra virgin olive oil
1 lb. bucatini or perciatelli
Core and chop tomatoes coarsely, between 1/4 and 1/2 inch. (I never bother to peel them, but you can.) Put the tomato and all its juices into a large bowl. Peel garlic and smash with a chef’s kn
ife if you want to remove it before serving, or mince two of the cloves if you want to leave it in for a more intense garlic taste. Add garlic to tomatoes.
Cut 3 of the basil leaves into fine ribbons and add to tomatoes. Add salt and pepper. Stir in olive oil. Cover and let sit at room temperature for 8 to 10 hours, stirring occasionally.
Cook pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water for 10 to 12 minutes. Drain in a colander, reserving a third of a cup of pasta cooking water in the pot. Return pasta to pot and toss with reserved liquid. Ladle into soup bowls. Remove smashed garlic from tomatoes and ladle over pasta. Sliver remaining basil and scatter on top. Some will want a flurry of fresh grated Parmesan; purists will not.
Serves 4 as a main course, 6 as a first course.
7
COMFORT ME WITH CHOCOLATE MOUSSE
WHAT MIGHT HISTORY HAVE BEEN IF EVE HAD TAKEN THAT APPLE AND baked it into a tarte tatin and shared it with the snake? For Don and me, having tasted the fruit of the foie gras, there was no turning back.
Back home, the pursuit of cuisinary perfection became all-consuming. We worked, yes. You need money to dine well. And Don was ambitious, a committed newspaperman. For me, journalism was just a hobby, providing running-around money till I sold that novel. But novels take forever. By then, I was in weekend-warrior attack mode on the three hundred pages of a novel not even I quite understood. Meanwhile, to cook a great meal was instant gratification.
