by Dawn Drzal
Recently, through a combination of luck and some truly obsessive digging on the Internet, I managed to track down the chef de saucier of the VIP Room from 1975. Not much older than I was at that time, he now teaches at the Cornell Hotel School. He could not explain to me how the Béarnaise sauce, which was served with beef, found its way onto my shrimp. It is possible that I mentally combined the shrimp from one meal with the sauce from another, but the sauce I remember perfectly. Here is the chef’s recollection of the version I ate that night:
As I remember the Béarnaise sauce for the Chateaubriand and the filet mignon was a reduction of fresh tarragon, tarragon vinegar, and a very dry white wine. It was reduced by one-half and brought to room temperature (this is important to not break the end sauce). We then clarified whole butter and cracked and separated egg yolks into a very clean mixing bowl. Using a bain-marie, we would then slowly whip the yolks over a moist heat until they start to thicken. Be careful not to overheat the eggs as you will have scrambled eggs instead. Once the egg mixture becomes rather thick, we start to slowly incorporate the butter into the egg mixture. Once the fluffiness is achieved, we then slowly incorporate some of the tarragon mixture to taste (please not too strong and maintain a thicker-than-nappe consistency). The goal is to achieve light and fluffy with a prevalent tarragon flavor. At the very end, a squeeze of lemon to brighten the dense flavor of the yolk. You can finish with chiffonade of fresh basil or tarragon. I prefer to leave the sauce like the sun, bright and yellow. I hope this brings a wonderful memory back to life.
Beginning to question whether a mere sauce could have saved me from borderline anorexia, I came across a quote from Baron Brisse, sometimes referred to as the world’s first food journalist. A man of enormous girth, who had to pay double to get on the nineteenth-century equivalent of a bus, he wrote of Sauce Béarnaise, “It frightens me! With it, one might never stop eating.” Clearly, I had august company in believing that Béarnaise was more than a sauce; it was a force.
Twenty years later, I was sitting at a large round table at French Laundry, Thomas Keller’s legendary restaurant in Yountville, California. The Sauce Béarnaise had done its job so effectively that I had become a cookbook editor, and the chef had designed a tasting menu for six of us to showcase the proposal for his first cookbook, which I was considering. Across the table sat my husband’s new business partner and his girlfriend, whom I had met for the first time earlier that day, horribly hungover by the pool. After running to the bathroom several times, she claimed she had eaten something that hadn’t agreed with her the night before. My husband had told me she was a single mother and knew she wasn’t getting any younger. She desperately wanted the man to marry her, and it was vital that she look good in a bikini. Claiming not to be an adventurous eater, she accepted a sourdough roll but declined every one of the fifty-three astonishing dishes that came out of the kitchen. At some point, I realized it was useless to urge her to taste the eggcup of White Truffle Oil–Infused Custard with Black Truffle Ragout or even the Salad of Petite Summer Tomatoes with Vine-Ripe Tomato Sorbet in the hope that she might find her own “Sauce Béarnaise.” It had been too many years since she sacrificed her body to the jealous gods of anorexia and alcohol. So she sat alone in the middle of the feast, rolling her bread into little white pills that she washed down one by one with a swallow of red wine.
is for
Crab
“Dawn! What have you done for me lately?” The booming voice on the other end of the line was unmistakable even though I hadn’t heard it for six or seven years: it was the famous David Halberstam rumble, a basso profundo you could feel in your molars. From anyone else, the question might have been a joke, although not in the best of taste as the first thing to say after such a long time. But from Halberstam, it was a literal question. If I had not done anything to benefit him in the years since we had seen each other, then as far as he was concerned, those years were wasted. Needless to say, our conversation was brief.
I lost my editorial virginity to Halberstam when I was twenty-four. Called in as reinforcement for the flagging Tom Congdon, whose mental and physical health were being ruined by the task of trying to tame the massive manuscript that was to become The Reckoning, I was sent home by the publisher with a desktop computer (it was the mid-eighties) and instructions not to come back until it had been cut by three hundred pages. In the battle of life, Tom was no match for David: Halberstam was a predator—wiry and hawk-like, his nose straining to meet his chin—while the genteel and diffident Tom, whose smooth face and enormous forehead recalled an overgrown baby, was prey. Whatever else you could say about Halberstam, you could never accuse him of laziness—he always needed two editors, even at the New York Times. But if his output was prodigious, it was also undigested. When I sat down at the scroll-legged mahogany library table that served as my desk, the first sentence I read was, “Henry Ford was a charismatic man of charisma.” And so it continued. No wonder Tom had actually had an epileptic seizure, possibly induced, his doctor said, by thousands of hours spent staring at a flickering computer screen.
Any notion I’d entertained that staying home to edit was going to be a vacation was quickly squelched. I worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, and Halberstam’s mountainous manuscript blanketed every surface of the living room from February to May. Years later, a boyfriend who also worked in the business asked me, “Why is it that every time you have to edit a manuscript, it’s like you’re scaling Everest?” My answer was, “Because I am.” Only in the case of The Reckoning, however, was it physically true. Eventually, the manuscript was safely turned over to the production department. Tom’s health improved, and as a gesture of thanks he gave me a first edition of M. F. K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me and took me to dinner at La Colombe d’Or.
Perhaps for Tom it was just one of many enjoyable meals that studded his publishing career, but that dinner marked the beginning of my gastronomic and professional coming of age. La Colombe d’Or was a little piece of Provence tucked in an old brownstone on East 26th Street. Stepping beneath the pretty striped awning past the flower boxes full of geraniums and ivy that screened the subterranean entrance from the street, I felt we had just exited the Train Bleu rather than the Lexington Avenue subway. We were led past curtained windows flung open to the late spring breeze to a banquette covered with blue Provençal fabric. Tom ordered two glasses of champagne as an aperitif—so soigné, I thought, surprised that one could order glasses without ordering a bottle and filing the information away where I would call upon it for the next twenty-five years, until I stopped drinking entirely. We perused the brief menu, penned in spiky French script. It was composed of seasonal and regional dishes, unusual in an era when French still meant either stuffy old-school classic or nouvelle cuisine. One of the entrees was soft-shell crabs, which Tom was politely surprised to hear I had never eaten before and insisted I order. I don’t recall the first course; I only remember the shock of that first bite of soft-shell crab meunière, citric sharpness mellowed by toasty brown butter, the peculiar resistance of the shell, the squirt of saline succeeded by something squishy and undifferentiated that didn’t bear thinking about, and then the awful moment when I wondered if I would be able to chew and swallow what felt like a mouthful of shrimp shells. Happily, I forced myself. Taken together, the combination of sensations was thrilling, like some sort of initiation. I couldn’t wait to take another bite.
Dessert was another first that Tom was delighted to introduce me to: fraises des bois, wild strawberries, which—
I learned that night—have nothing in common with grocery store strawberries but the name. A bowl of irregular rubies, each shading to translucent scarlet at the edge, served unadorned (how apt of the French to say nature to mean “plain”). Perhaps there was some crème fraiche or crème anglaise on the side, but I remember only the incredible concentration of taste and color, the intensity and miniature perfection of those simple berries. Sitting on the banquette as Tom safely flirte
d with me from his married, middle-aged vantage, I felt a vague aspiration forming. I could not have articulated it, but the evening had lifted a curtain on a civilized approach to the world, almost a philosophy, in which the pleasure of being an adult lay in the intelligent satisfaction of the appetites. Although I eventually discovered that I lacked the discipline for that sort of restrained hedonism, soft-shell crabs have never lost their fascination for me. They are the food of liminality, of that magical period of unlimited potential when one identity has been shed and the next has not yet been assumed.
is for
Dinner Party
By a rough estimate, I threw about a hundred dinner parties over the course of my first decade in New York. During my twenties and early thirties, few things gave me more pleasure than inviting six or seven people over to eat a complicated dish I had read about and researched, a much more time-consuming and serendipitous process in the years before every recipe imaginable was instantly accessible on the Internet. My favorite dishes were elaborate peasant productions that people had spent generations arguing about: choucroute garnie and paella, bourride and tagine. No doubt it was the only child in me trying to reproduce the holiday atmosphere of extended family gatherings, when the dinner table would suddenly swell from its usual two or three to twelve and beyond. My policy of never making any recipe twice kept life exciting, but it resulted in the occasional spectacular failure like one evening’s chicken in a bulletproof salt crust. When the hammer and screwdriver suggested by the recipe proved useless, I tried dropping it on the kitchen floor, where it chipped a terra-cotta tile and rolled behind the refrigerator like a lumpy basketball. When the armor finally yielded to a crowbar retrieved from the trunk of a neighbor’s car, it was revealed that instead of roasting to golden brown perfection, the bird had steamed into something resembling a shrunken head.
Nevertheless, most of these dinners were pleasant, and many were delightful. Just one, however, stands out in my memory as perfect. It took place on December 27, 1990—a date I can verify because, at some point during the evening, an unexpected snowstorm began blanketing the city. The day before, my husband and I had flown back from a Christmas visit to my parents, who had loaded our carry-on bags with an enormous uncooked porchetta, two bottles of excellent Margaux, one of green Chartreuse, and two boxes of liqueur-filled chocolates. One of the advantages of being relatively young and poor was that we could share our eclectic windfall without the fear of being judged. It was the twenty-something version of sharing a care package at camp. Like much of our hospitality then, it had an impromptu purity that I never managed to recapture in later, flusher years.
Reaching about five answering machines, we realized that the usual suspects were out of town for the holidays. Forced to put some actual thought into the guest list, I reread the last chapter of M. F. K. Fisher’s An Alphabet for Gourmets, in which she states that gastronomical perfection can be reached in a dinner for six people: “two beautiful, one intelligent, three of correlated professions such as architecture, music, and photography.” She then elaborates, “A good combination would be one married couple … one less firmly established … and two strangers of either sex, upon whom the better-acquainted diners could sharpen their questioning wits.” Upon reading those words, it struck me that my previous guest lists had suffered from a fundamental error: I had approached them like menus composed of a series of loosely related dishes when I should have viewed them as recipes, taking into account the complex chemical reactions between the guests. I deviated from the rest of her advice only in the number of invitees. It seemed like a waste to cook for six people when you could have eight.
My husband and I had recently moved into a floor-through brownstone apartment in Carroll Gardens. Brooklyn then was still considered ultima Thule by Manhattanites, cut off from the mainland, and Carroll Gardens was best known as the neighborhood where Italian mobsters housed their elderly parents. But the apartment was lovely: during the day its high-ceilinged, well-proportioned rooms were flooded with light from triple windows at the front and back. With the arrival of evening, the dim central room turned into a cave illuminated by candlelight. On that evening, we had arrayed in the living room our usual assortment of baba ghanoush, taramosalata, and luscious purple Kalamata olives from Sahadi’s, the Lebanese food emporium on Atlantic Avenue. Alongside were piles of laham ajeen—a sort of Middle Eastern pizza—and za’atar bread from the neighboring Damascus Bakery. The first guests to arrive were my closest friend and her husband, fellow Brooklynites who lived in neighboring Park Slope. Married since graduate school, they filled M. F. K. Fisher’s “married couple” category. By contrast, my husband and I, married a little over a year, were in the “less firmly established” camp. Even before they took off their coats, they were drawn into the kitchen by the aroma of roasting pork stuffed with crushed garlic, fennel seeds, hot pepper, and herbs, which seemed atavistically designed to get the ghrelin flowing. The buzzer began ringing again, admitting the rest of the guests in ones and twos. Each guest knew at least two other people, but I was the only person to know everyone, so there was both sufficient comfort and plenty of opportunity for wit-sharpening. The smell of the porchetta incited everyone to consume vast quantities of hors d’oeuvres washed down with copious amounts of Penfold’s Koonunga Hill, the house wine at that time. Their needs taken care of for the moment, I was free to observe that my guests certainly fulfilled Fisher’s requirements. All were intelligent (one was brilliant), two were beautiful, and six of the eight were in correlated professions: book and magazine publishing, writing, teaching (literature), and theater criticism (the other two were lawyers, but one of them was my husband and the other was so handsome he could be forgiven almost anything). Fisher’s formula, if it doesn’t sound cold to call it that, was working like a charm. My best friend’s husband—a magazine editor and fiction writer—was peppering the large-chinned, handsome litigator about arcane points of courtroom procedure for a noir novel he was writing. The assistant editor, a long-legged ingénue endearingly unaware of her beauty and bemused about why she was there with the grownups, gamely discussed feminist theory with my novelist best friend before they settled into a wicked exchange of gossip about a mutual acquaintance. My husband was in his element—intellectual conversation. I could see the ghosts of his parents sitting in approval at either elbow as he first weighed in on the feminist theory discussion before moving on to take issue with the theater critic about her recent pan of a Caryl Churchill play. I asked the brilliant literature professor, whose true love was theology, what he thought of the idea of my commissioning a biography of Hildegard von Bingen that would include a CD of her music and somehow ended up hearing his thoughts about Thomas Aquinas and the Trinity. Within moments, interactions among the guests began forming and dissolving like complex molecules in a volatile solution, some bonds stronger, some weaker, so that conversations of two merged into four and six and then separated and reconfigured into odd numbered groupings. Soon I was too caught up to admire it.
The hors d’oeuvres had long been decimated when the porchetta was finally ready. As we stood to filter into the dining room, everyone drained his wineglass in preparation for the Margaux aerating on the sideboard. In the center of the dining room, my grandmother’s fruitwood dining table glowed like a candlelit island. We had dispensed, as usual, with a first course, and thick slices of porchetta were fanned out on a platter in the center of the table. Beside it was a huge bowl of Potatoes Fontecchio, a recipe from The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. They were delicious enough to be one of the sole exceptions to my rule of never repeating a dish: whole new potatoes roasted until nearly dessicated, cut in half and tossed while still hot with loads of minced garlic, extra-virgin olive oil, fresh mint, salt, and pepper. Flanking the candlesticks were a basket of fresh semolina bread with sesame seeds from the Italian bakery on Court Street and a watercress and endive salad.
When all the plates and glasses were filled, I paused to enjoy the lull
of hungry people eating, the clinking of flatware punctuated only by appreciative murmuring. And then there arrived the moment I had been waiting for without realizing I was waiting for it, the real—if unacknowledged—reason I gave dinner parties in the first place: the moment when time stood still and I was suddenly suffused with the unassailable certainty that all was right with the world, a sense of sublime connection not only with my guests but also with whatever it is that makes eating the bread and drinking the cup the ultimate metaphor of spiritual communion. These moments were my secret, the closest thing I had to a religion. Until I read the dinner party scene in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse a few years later, in one of those exceedingly rare encounters in literature when we come across something so private that we have barely attempted to articulate it even to ourselves, I thought I was the only person to feel precisely this sensation. It was a shock to recognize myself in Mrs. Ramsay’s joy as she served the boeuf en daube (“a perfect triumph”) to her guests: “It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity…. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.” This feeling unconsciously emanating from the guests, that we constituted an island against the darkness outside, made all the trouble of shopping and cooking and cleanup worthwhile. It was grace, produced by what Fisher calls “the alchemy of hospitality.”
