Turning the gas on high under the pots, we waited until bubbles appeared and then turned the heat down to a simmer. The aroma was torturous, for we were all ravenous. Meanwhile, we whisked eggs with oil to make the aioli, the local farm-raised eggs mounting easily. We pulled down the ripe red Majorcan tomatoes from the white-tiled arched hallway where they were strung together, separated by knots, to semi-dry. One group chopped the tomatoes until, after what seemed to be a very long time to me and my stomach, the pot was deemed “done.” Pulling out the chicken and duck with tongs, we cooled them until we could remove the flesh from the bones and discard the skin. We scooped up the snails and put them in another pot while we boiled the strained stock down to a rich, full-flavored broth, as sumptuous as any eaten in a three-star restaurant.
Finally, duck, chicken, and snails were stirred into the thick broth and we ladled the mixture into bowls, adding dollops of the aioli. I headed to the terrace, where I could look at the acres of fig and olive trees and the rosebushes lining the walks, and eat my snails slowly, wondering at the magic of the midnight rain.
How I Got Started
On my first day in 1959 as emergency substitute cook of the Harvard Coop, I reached with confidence into the oven to retrieve the tuna fish casserole. It smelled like it should, I knew, for my mother had made it repeatedly for the family, although with cream of mushroom soup and American cheese rather than sautéed onions and a cheese sauce like the newspaper recipe I had followed. I could hear a little gurgle from the oven, which meant all was going well, I thought; when I last peeked in, there had been little bubbles on the surface, looking like it was cooking as it should. But I couldn’t see the breadcrumbs, which in the recipe picture were on the top, and had been sprinkled over my casseroles as well.
When the first long Pyrex dish emerged from the huge oven, grasped by my thick cotton hot pads, I saw a bubbling cauldron of grease and gray rather than tinges of light brown crumbs dappling the cheese sauce that was to hold the conglomeration together.
Panic rose in my throat as I experienced every cook’s nightmare—the inability to feed waiting mouths. At nineteen, I was ill prepared to cook dinner for the twenty ravenous young men and women milling around the dining room of this international student house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I had desperately wanted to succeed at this meal. Now it looked like I might fail. Again.
The members of the co-op in 1959 had been reluctant to let me take on this task. Like my father, they wanted their dinner on time. Each resident paid fifteen dollars a month for dinners, and ate, boardinghouse-style, at six o’clock each night. My rent was thirty-five dollars a month for a room I shared with three other girls. I had already shown my incompetence at my first agreed-upon chore.
The Harvard Coop had no resident manager. It was as close as I ever came to a commune, but it was a far cry from that. Still, it was daring, as I was sharing quarters with both men and women, or, as I called them, boys and girls. We were a diverse lot—some MIT students, some Harvard, others who were researchers and/or graduate students, and me. None of us had any money. There were four girls in my room, and even at that the rent seemed high.
We each had an assigned task. Mine had been forwarding the mail to residents who had moved away. I rarely did it, putting the mail in the top drawer of the hall chest up with my good intentions. Two of the Mormon students, who had left to go on a Mission, came back to the house to visit, but also to see what happened to their mail. The mail included draft notices advising them to show up on what turned out to be the next day, for active duty in the Army. Everyone, including myself, was pretty disgusted with my disorganized indolence.
Simultaneously, the cook, a heavyset woman with massive arms and a tendency to sing spirituals with a thick Boston accent as she cooked, got sick. Her husband called us to say she would be out for a few weeks for an operation. In order to get myself in the good graces of my housemates, I volunteered on the spot to take over the cook’s job since I kept my own hours at my paying job, coming and going as I pleased. I knew I liked cooking, had spent some time in the kitchen visiting with the cook, and thought I could do it. I didn’t really feel there was an option—I was never good at chores, per se, and couldn’t see myself doing anything else. I had started the day of the tuna fish casserole.
Maybe it felt a little like a hair shirt, this idea of cooking every day, but I thought I could do it. Until my greasy tuna fish casserole stared me in the face. Now it looked like I was going to sink deeper into failure and shame. I had moved to Cambridge to become a new person, and found I still was not the woman I wanted to be.
I had multiplied the entire recipe by three in order to have enough food, and miscalculated, hence the resulting disaster, a layer of grease topping a gloppy lumpy slosh of milk, flour, and cheese, sprinkled throughout with breadcrumbs and clumps of tuna fish on the bottom. I felt a burning in my throat—a familiar feeling when I thought all was lost and I would flop and did not want to, did not want to, did not want to, fail. I needed to fix this, to find a way to turn the disaster into a modicum of success, or at least something edible.
In desperation, I improvised. Turning the oven up to Broil, I opened a commercial sack of the pale white bread common to the times—pre-sliced, white, soft, and squishy. Spreading the bread onto a metal cookie sheet, I ran the pan under the broiler, praying I would remember to remove it before the toast burned.
After skimming the excess grease the dishes’ contents looked a lot better. Pouring everything left in the dish into a huge dented pot with a long handle, I turned the heat underneath the pot on high and kept stirring until the whole mess inside it came to a boil and the ingredients combined to appear to be a sauce holding tuna fish. I poured in frozen English peas from the freezer, stirring until I smelled the toast browning.
I reached in, just in time to prevent burning, and pulled out the pan. I slid the toast onto oval serving dishes rescued from one of the cupboards and turned the toast over to reveal the white untoasted side. Now was not the time for such niceties as toasting on both sides. I took the pot of sauce, tuna, and peas and poured it over the slices of half-done toast. I stuck my finger into the near-empty pan and scraped around the sides before putting my finger in my mouth. Yum. I had succeeded!!!
Walking into the dining room, my bounty on the platter, I looked at the waiting faces. “Tuna fish à la king,” I said, renaming the meal I was presenting so proudly. My heart was beating with excitement, and my throat had eased up enough for me to speak.
They dug in, and that was that. No one complained, as they sometimes did for the regular cook, and I scuttled away to finish the brownies that would cap my meal. Suddenly I felt victorious and happy. They had liked it! Or, at least, hadn’t disliked it enough to tell me. That moment of holding my success aloft was my gold Oscar. I had won.
Within the first few days I understood the difficulty of multiplying a recipe by more than two, because it is not easy to get the ingredients measured accurately—particularly when using an uneven number—and because food changes as it “grows.” Three times as much fat is not needed to cook three times as many onions, for instance. I learned how important good smells were to appetite and cooking onions permeated the house with an aroma of well-being. I learned not to change a recipe drastically when I had hungry mouths to feed.
The expectant look on the faces of the diners—a captive audience, in a way—was important to me, just as it had been important to me as student director of Our Town to hear the applause when the play was over. I wanted that look to change into one of satisfaction and elation. And I learned I loved cooking. I was happier in the kitchen than I was anywhere else. Along with that happiness came what I call the triumph of taste—that moment when one knows one’s food is good, just before sending it out to be consumed.
My second night as cook the Israeli boy, Uri, an exacting scientist, helped me fix spaghetti and meatballs. The recipe called for twenty meatballs. I again multiplied the ingredients in the
recipe, but this time by an even number, and used some judgment rather than following illegible jotted numbers. I pulled all the ingredients together with my hands and arms, as I had seen the cook do, combining them as I moved, kneading them into one. I took a taste and liked what I had done, albeit raw. I passed the cookbook to Uri, who had no frame of reference, to follow. When Uri read to make twenty meatballs, he did just that, as unquestioningly as he would add two ingredients together in a chemistry class. He shaped them carefully and methodically into twenty balls the size of softballs before slipping them into the oven. I wasn’t watching, and he didn’t question his assumptions.
It was nearly time to serve before I saw what he had done and realized I had another calamity. Not only were his softballs too big to be called meatballs, they were still red and raw in the middle. Inedible in their present state, I dropped them in a couple of large frying pans, poked and tore them apart, sautéing them as fast as I could before topping the sauce and spaghetti with them. Platter once again held high, I announced the name of the dish—spaghetti and meat sauce. From this I learned to read the body of the recipe and make changes in the body as well as in the ingredient list, adapting what I had to the number of people I had to serve. I learned that a recipe is only as good as the interpreter, that it was not as inviolate as a chemistry formula, requiring all the senses, including a sixth sense, a hunch about the way a recipe should go.
My mother always said I was mean when I was hungry. Not only was (and am) I, but all the inhabitants of our house seemed to be. A late meal or an inadequate meal caused ill-will and crossness. Whoever was in control of the food was in control of the mood of the co-op. Later I was to understand this had been true in my family as well as in the world. Food is the most powerful control issue in a home, nation, the world. Without it, little runs right.
I also learned never to tell anyone what you are cooking until you know what it will be, particularly if you have never cooked it before. There is a fine line between anticipation and disappointment, and the inexperienced cook is better served seducing with mystery and aroma.
Each day brought new lessons, going from fear to a growing feeling of satisfaction. I basked in the approval of the diners, feeling a fulfillment and contentment mixed with joy that was new to me. The rest of my weeks of cooking went so well I couldn’t wait to get to the co-op after my job at Massachusetts General.
When the cook returned to work at the co-op, I was bereft. I didn’t do anything else as well as I had cooking for the co-op, nor did I enjoy any other work I did, certainly not my paying job, as much. To find something I loved, like cooking, that I was good at, was a gift of enormous proportions. On the phone my mother begged me not to become a cook, rattling off a list in opposition to the idea—I would have to work at night with men, the work would be too hard for such a skinny girl since I couldn’t lift those heavy pots, and, the clincher, Southern ladies didn’t cook. Cooks were hired help and treated as such. They were not part of the party, or embraced enthusiastically for their successes, as I was at the co-op.
Mother wanted to believe she had brought me up to be a lady. In short, would I be marriageable if I was a cook, a hired person who had no stature? (I wonder if she ever thought she had succeeded in making me a lady, a person who did not swear, and would have worn white gloves if they were still in fashion; a woman who was gentle and prayerful, always followed the correct form outlined for wives in the Officers Manual of the US Army.) She had loved being a colonel’s wife, the power and respectability it gave her, and grieved when it was gone. She wanted that for me, even while knowing I was not the kind of person who could ever deal with the restrictions. Mother would always just shake her head when people complimented her about me, as if she were surprised that I had accomplished anything, because she was not sure I was a lady.
I knew no lady who worked in a kitchen, although I knew there were a few that owned restaurants and were hostesses in their own restaurants. In 1959 there were hardly any female waitresses in fine-dining restaurants, much less female chefs. I figured I couldn’t even get a job, which was probably true, and that my mother was right. I knew nothing about cooking schools, if there were any. When Julia Child became a national figure on PBS a dozen years later, she made it possible; even though she never worked in a restaurant to my knowledge, she elevated females to a respectable level in the kitchen.
From the moment we met, Dorothea Benton Frank taught me. Though she never told me to lose weight, she shared a tip from her fashion days and told me emphatically to wear V-necked black T-shirts to look skinnier. One look at my arm flaps and she added I should always wear sleeves.
She shared that if one can write funny, one can write one’s own ticket. For her, writing humor wasn’t hard. According to her, she kept a pin in her Pucci pocket for pricking her own pomposity. Recently I reread all of the introductions to her books and laughed at each one, no matter how tragic, no matter the circumstances, and decided rather than a pomposity-pricking pin she used a pen she kept in her Gucci. The pen works better as it contains ink.
She had many virtues, including her love for her family, her generosity to charities, her leadership, and the fact she never wrote about me. When we met I had a certain leeriness of writers. Pat Conroy had written what my husband calls an affectionate caricature of me in Pat Conroy’s Cookbook, “borrowing” parts of my own snail and mountain oyster story and embellishing it. Anne River Siddons had morphed me into a character composite with a friend’s peccadilloes in Hill Towns, which had also hurt my feelings. It had taken me a while to challenge Anne’s husband, Heyward, about it, as in the book “my” character had had some romantic sprees and included a pass at Heyward. Did Heyward really think I had made a pass at him? It was hard to believe. We had not one spark between us, much less a spark of lust on my part. Had he told Anne that to make her jealous, as some husbands do? Or did Anne make it up with delusions about Heyward’s prowess? When I brought the book up, “Oh, no,” he said, “it wasn’t you. That incident was all about a mutual friend of ours I’ll call Hortense. She got drunk and made a pass years ago.” However, as an author Dottie was always direct and open with me, and I figured if she did write about me she would at least make me skinny, sober, and faithful.
We had more in common than wearing black V-necked T-shirts with sleeves. We loved food, cooking, reading, and shared a favorite Charleston dress shop, sometimes even finding out we had purchased the identical items. Cooking was important to both of us and I knew it from her first book, Sullivan’s Island. One either wants to cook, eat something, or have sex as one reads her books. Eating is easiest. Her food is not pretentious, it is all eatable food, duplicable food, food that will make you hungry, even if you have just eaten a meal.
Her female characters are allowed to be titillated—horny even—when looking at a certain man. They are even allowed to sleep with men they wouldn’t ever want to marry. Fortunately for her, Dottie started writing in an era when women could have sex in a book. I took a writing course in 1962 on how to write a romance novel, and it seared me through and through. The teacher said that books didn’t sell when women had sex. To be a successful romance writer, he said, the women had to be virgins, and even their passions would stop short of fulfillment until marriage. I had taken the class to learn how to write, and so I wrote about the first time I had been raped. He told me in no uncertain terms that didn’t happen to romance novel women. So I gave up.
Not Dottie. She never gave up. She was determined to write so she could earn enough money to buy her family home when her husband resisted.
Dottie’s characters have a way of making readers laugh at how silly relationships are that bind sensible women to husbands and lovers with few redeeming qualities, a full measure of hot air and what we politely call Dick-Do in the South. (This rampant male disease is when one’s stomach extends more than one’s D . . . Do.) Often I wonder if she just took the things she loved about Peter, her husband, and reversed them in her cads.<
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Her love of food showed in her generosity of entertaining. No one went hungry at a party of Dottie’s, no matter how many people showed up. The first party I attended at her family’s Sullivan’s Island home, the one she purchased from her siblings with money earned with that break-out novel, was a party for SEBA, the South Eastern Bookseller’s Association. Famous writers lined the piazza with the swimming pool in the background, the buffet was plentiful and ongoing, and the caterer exceptional. If the piazza had caved in, as has happened at other parties for more foolish folk who overloaded them, every important Southern author would have been silenced. A clever way to get rid of competition, perhaps, but not Dottie’s style.
The kitchen was the center of her parties and Dottie reigned there, cooking shrimp and grits with her daughter Victoria at her side. A college graduate working for her father, Peter, Victoria’s true ambition was to cook. Whenever I went to New York, I would visit Victoria and we would eat out somewhere and talk about food. One day, Dottie told me Victoria wanted to attend cooking school. Dottie was dubious, perhaps for the same reason my mother was. And I think she wanted Victoria to be able to have her own earning ability, too, if she needed it. It didn’t surprise me Victoria wanted to cook professionally so I made a list of all the jobs available where Victoria could earn her way in the world including personal chef, food writer, food stylist, and restaurant chef as well as many others. I wrote Dottie a letter and enclosed the list. The next thing I knew Victoria was enrolled in Culinary School. Oh, and she met a good guy there.
What surprised me about Dottie’s response was how seriously she took Victoria’s longing for a culinary education, how she considered her approach, the importance for Victoria to have a paying career, and later, her enthusiasm for her daughter’s chosen path. It was perhaps the thing I admired most about her, that ability to reconsider, change one’s mind and enthusiastically support that which she had opposed. Mind you, she kept her eye on the chefs whose kitchens hired Victoria. If a woman could have a character swing an andiron at a faithless husband, imagine what she would do with an iron skillet if someone harmed Victoria.
Reunion Beach Page 30
