by Dawn Drzal
What distinguished my perfect dinner party from all the others was that the moment didn’t evaporate at the beginning of the meal; it dilated, surviving even the transition back to the brightness of the living room. Without interrupting the single kaleidoscopic conversation that had begun over hors d’oeuvres hours earlier, our guests rearranged themselves on the sofa, the armchair, the ottoman, the floor, sipping Chartreuse and making occasional forays into the boxes of foil-wrapped chocolate bottles filled with liqueurs that sat on the coffee table. There was something endearingly silly about the facsimile wrappings and the peculiar, crunchy lining of alcohol-soaked sugar. My hostess duties discharged, I sat tucked into the corner of the ivory chenille sofa nearest the stereo where my husband was happily playing DJ with his prized record collection.
At some point later, all conversation abruptly stopped—one of those unaccountable “angel passing over” silences, as if an invisible hand had been held up. And then we heard it, or rather we didn’t: an eerie, neutron bomb, middle of the country stillness, wrong for Brooklyn. Running to the window, the ingénue raised the blinds to reveal an opaque curtain of pure white. Huge, heavy, steady flakes had blurred the familiar outlines of the street, like a white duvet thrown hastily over bunched-up bedclothes. Someone looked at his watch and exclaimed disbelievingly that it was four o’clock in the morning. How had we all lost track of so many hours? It was the snow that, in muffling the street noises, had silenced the subconscious chronometer that city dwellers use to keep track of time.
Suddenly, everyone was up, putting on coats, saying their goodbyes. A plan was hatched that the Manhattan contingent would walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and the Park Slope contingent set off for home through Boerum Hill. My husband and I, glad not to have to brave the cold, stuck our heads out the window, arms around each other’s waists, to watch them whooping and laughing through the unmarked whiteness, until they split into two groups at the corner and went their separate ways.
About fifteen years after that evening, I was staying at the Inn at Shelburne Farms in Vermont with my second husband and our young son. Glancing up from my book on the lawn one afternoon, I saw the ingénue for the first time in a decade, sitting under a tree a stone’s throw away. She was so deep in conversation with another young woman that their foreheads were almost touching. If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have interrupted, but she was so completely unchanged that the intervening years seemed to disappear, and I found myself standing in front of her and saying hello. She was polite enough to try to suppress a visible wave of irritation at being intruded upon, but when she looked at my face, it was as if she were surfacing from a great depth. After I repeated my name, she remembered who I was, but the warmth I expected didn’t accompany the recognition. Without introducing me to her friend, she told me she was getting married at the inn that weekend. I congratulated her and she thanked me, but she regarded me so coldly that I realized it was intended as a dismissal. I was clearly a petty irritation, like a fly that had landed on her dinner. Flushing, I hurriedly said goodbye and retrieved my book with as much dignity as I could muster.
Walking up the steps to my room, I lifted my palm to my burning cheek. I understood from experience how she could have replaced her former life so thoroughly with a new one. But the shock of seeing that I had ended up on her memory’s cutting-room floor clarified that, until that moment, I had harbored the strange delusion that my old experiences were preserved somewhere, like a childhood bedroom. That they were still enacted, in some shadowy form, by the ghosts of the people who had shared them with me. Years earlier, in a periodic replaying of the dinner party in my mind, I realized that my relationship with every last person there—even the bond that was supposed to last forever—had turned out to be as ephemeral as the meal. This woman had been a player in the drama, and here she was in the flesh having forgotten all about it (about me!). That meant that my treasured memory was not a talisman I shared with all the others, not a mystical continuity transcending our ruptured connections, but merely a re-creation I had staged in my mind and obsessively revisited. As I looked out at the whitecaps of Lake Champlain, I forced myself to summon up how each of those relationships had ended. It amounted to a catalog of human frailties, mostly mine. But as the bird said in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” So I sank onto the faded chaise longue and ran the dinner party again from the top, putting the ingénue through her paces one more time—running to the window, whooping through the snow. Back where she belonged.
is for
Eggs
When I was a senior in high school, my mother kindly (and, I see in retrospect, wisely) offered to prepare a buffet so I could bring a bunch of friends home after the December prom. Despite expensive efforts at remodeling, our cavernous finished basement remained intractably dank, a room visited regularly only to empty the bucket of the dehumidifier. No one was going to watch TV on an icy black Naugahyde sofa in a basement whose chill penetrated the soles of your shoes even through the carpeting. The other furniture intensified the room’s gloomy air: in one distant corner a massive carved “Spanish-style” bar and in the other a table and chairs constructed from whisky barrels and more black Naugahyde. Still, it was private, and more comfortable than the backseat of a car.
Only one thing can distract a teenage male from large platters of hot food, and I recall a puppyish stampede down the stairs past a table laden with enough fare for a small wedding reception. Hours later, hunger prompted some of the boys to lead their dates over to check out the row of rectangular chafing dishes whose Sterno had long since burned out. Under the lids were baked ziti, lasagna, beef Stroganoff with egg noodles—carefully prepared, now cold and congealed. Nevertheless, the trays were soon cleaned out with locust-like efficiency, and the couples melted back into the gloom. All that remained were some scrambled eggs whose liquid had separated in a milky pool at one end of the serving dish. My stomach felt imperiously empty, so I reluctantly took a few spoonfuls. To my astonishment, they were delicious. They tasted like my grandmother’s eggs. The next morning, I congratulated my mother. “You finally did it! You made eggs as good as Grandmom’s. They were even amazing cold.” She smiled and shook her head. “They were Grandmom’s eggs. She came over to help me last night after you left.” Genius will out.
There is a reason why chefs ask prospective employees to make an omelette. It is in this, the simplest of dishes, that the cook’s hand is laid bare. There is nowhere to hide in an omelette, and the touch of genius, if there is any, will be revealed. My maternal grandmother had the touch. Whatever she made—whether it was one of the scores of traditional Italian dishes she knew by heart or something complicated from a cookbook or food magazine—was at least delicious and often exquisite. Not surprisingly, her gift was most apparent in her eggs. She didn’t even make omelettes—she did homeliness one better and made scrambled eggs. As absurd as it may sound, they were, without exception (and I ate them hundreds of times), sublime. They had an elusive quality of pure dairy sweetness that I have never encountered elsewhere, in any home kitchen or restaurant, and that I have been attempting without success to replicate all my life. Once or twice I have captured a hint of it, I never figured out by what accident, and years passed between successes. She used no secret ingredient, no special pan, no arcane technique, because I watched her like a hawk for two decades from the breaking of the eggs (regular white supermarket eggs, taken straight from the refrigerator) to the serving plate. It was maddening. Everything was too simple, too flexible. She used anywhere from one to ten eggs, although two to six seemed to work best. After breaking them into a bowl—she preferred shallow to deep, I noticed, and glass to metal or plastic—she would add either a splash of milk or a bit of cold water from the tap and a pinch of salt (usually plain old iodized Morton’s). Then she would beat the eggs with a fork—and this may be where the magic came in. There was a special sound to her beating, a subdued glop. She was gentle with the
eggs, but not too gentle. (Do I remember her saying, Be nice to your eggs and they’ll be nice to you, or did I make that up?) She was just forceful enough that under her fork they turned a beautiful pale lemon yellow; generating very few bubbles, she beat just until they were completely emulsified, not a second longer. Meanwhile, a pat of butter would be melting in a pan (small ancient Teflon or large cast iron, depending on quantity) over medium low heat. It didn’t even matter what kind of butter she used, but the one cardinal rule was that the eggs should never brown. She gently moved the cooked part aside with a spatula so that the runny part moved into the empty bottom of the pan and cooked them just until they were set, no longer glossy but not quite matte. Part of their deliciousness lay in their shape: in the last moment, they formed themselves into large, organic curds that needed to be served whole, so that cutting into them was like cutting into a steaming quenelle.
The memory of their texture and color lingers, and I can almost smell them still, but as the years pass that indefinable sweetness is like a beloved person’s voice that I can no longer hear in my mind’s ear. I recapture a scintilla of it only on the rare occasions when I succeed in producing it myself. In my quest, I have experimented with milk versus water, fork versus whisk, shallow bowl versus deep, different pans, different heat, and most of all different beating techniques. I take a few deep breaths, try to channel my grandmother, to hear the rhythm of the fork against the bowl, to reproduce the glop, to minimize the bubbles, to recreate that pale lemon yellow. But what sets a great cook apart from a merely good one—the culinary Midas touch that makes the humblest thing she prepares taste ineffably, irreproducibly delicious—will always be a mystery.
is for
Fowl
Before I was old enough to know that you should never meet your heroes, I dreamed of writing a biography of M. F. K. Fisher. An editor I knew wrote me a letter of introduction, and for several years I flew out to California to interview her when I could afford it and pored over her papers in Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library the rest of the time.
On one of these visits, her caregiver-cum-companion left soon after I arrived, dressed as the Statue of Liberty. She announced she would be gone all day for the Golden Gate Bridge Celebration. After enlisting my help with a few surreptitious tasks of which that lady would not approve, Fisher turned her wheelchair to face me and asked, “Do you like pheasant, dear?” Of course, I said I loved it. She could have asked me if I liked excrement and the answer would have been the same. She pointed to the kitchen. “There’s a nice fresh pheasant on the counter. An orphan boy shot it for me this morning.” An orphan boy? She looked me over appraisingly. “You can cook dinner for me, dear. You’d like that, wouldn’t you.” It was a statement rather than a question. My heart began pounding crazily. It was like being asked to play the violin for Paganini without having a chance to practice.
While she went to rest, I examined the pheasant, which had a couple of lead slugs embedded in one of its hugely muscled thighs. They were the thighs of an Olympic sprinter. Nice and fresh indeed. Weren’t pheasants supposed to be hung? I had known Mary Frances long enough to begin to suspect that this was some bizarre test, not only of my cooking skills but also of my mettle, as if writing her biography were a secret society and this was part of the hazing ritual. Then I got a brilliant idea: braising with sauerkraut! The combination of the technique and the enzymes would tenderize even this monster. When she got up, I shared my idea with her. I saw a spark of respect kindle in her eye. “I always keep a few cans of sauerkraut in the cupboard, dear. You won’t even have to go out shopping.” And then she told me she always rinsed her sauerkraut, to prevent it from being too salty. This went against my instincts, especially since I was counting on the brine to tenderize the meat, but who was I to argue with Paganini?
The pheasant looked very respectable, browned and nestled between layers of sauerkraut studded with juniper berries in one of her ancient Dutch ovens. It might not be the pheasant sous cloche she had ordered on the train to Chicago with her uncle, commemorated so gloriously in The Gastronomical Me, but with any luck it would be edible. As I put the lid on the pot and slid it into the oven, I said a silent prayer. Two hours later, the kitchen was redolent with a promising smell and Mary Frances pronounced that she was hungry. I had set the round table with wine glasses and her green Mexican plates, put out a bowl of buttery red new potatoes and a salad made from gorgeous lettuces left as offerings by various admirers. Although crippled with arthritis and Parkinson’s, Mary Frances did not believe in eating in her wheelchair. With great effort, leaning heavily on her cane, she transferred herself into a dining chair. Lifting the cover released a billow of tangy, meaty steam. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Would you like a nice slice of breast?” I asked, praying she would say yes to the part that was likely to be the tenderest because I could slice it paper thin. But she never gave the easy answer. “Oh no, dear,” she said. “I’d like a leg.” I sighed, knowing better than to resist. There was nothing to do but serve it to her. First, she tasted the sauerkraut, making a little moue of displeasure. “This has no taste, dear. Sauerkraut is supposed to be sour.” I could feel spots of pink spring to my cheeks. The injustice of it! I would never have washed it if she hadn’t told me to! But before I could decide whether to respond, she picked up the leg with both hands and took an enormous bite from the thigh. I looked down, awaiting the verdict. Nothing. I looked at her apprehensively. Could it take that long to chew? It must be even tougher than I had feared. And then I realized, to my horror, that she had not said anything because she could not speak—that bite of pheasant was lodged in her throat. She was turning crimson, her eyes very wide. I stood up. “Are you all right?” I asked inanely. “Can I help you? Is there someone I can call? A doctor?” I rushed over to the phone, but there were no emergency numbers there. Her face was now almost purple. I began to get really worried, the kind where you get very calm. “Do you want me to do the Heimlich maneuver on you?” A look of supreme annoyance crossed her face, superseding the fear for a moment. She flapped her hands, waving me away. I thought of clapping her between the shoulder blades, but she was so birdlike I was afraid I’d break her vertebrae. A headline flashed before my eyes in black-and-white newsprint: ASPIRING BIOGRAPHER KILLS M. F. K. FISHER. BELOVED AUTHOR DEAD AT 80. I resolved to do the Heimlich even if it meant hurting her, but just as I walked behind her, she gave a massive cough and a piece of meat flew out of her mouth and across the room. “Oh, my God,” I stammered, “I am so sorry. I tried, I mean I knew it would be tough … I wanted you to have the breast.” She stopped me cold with a look. Her color was returning to normal. She took a gulp of wine. “I’ll stick to this,” she said. “It’s safer.”
I nattered away for the next few minutes, trying to make things feel normal again. She was so drained by her ordeal that she seemed hardly aware of my presence, but I still kept talking. Although she hadn’t appeared to move, her wineglass suddenly shattered with splintering force on the black tile floor. I sprang up, my skirt soaked, wet shards around my feet. She looked at me, her blue eyes suddenly very focused. “You’d better get a broom,” she said. And then, “I’ll bet you think I did that on purpose, don’t you, dear?”
is for
Gruel
One of my favorite picture books is The Doubtful Guest by Edward Gorey, a delightfully macabre little tale of a peculiar creature who appears one night on the doorstep of an overbred Edwardian family. Once he darts inside, there is no getting rid of him, and seventeen years later he is still eating the plates and hiding all the towels. Houseguests being what they are, one needn’t look far for Gorey’s inspiration. My own “doubtful guest” was my second husband’s college roommate, who seemed to come along for the ride when we moved in together. Although he didn’t stay continuously for the fourteen years he made himself at home in our apartment, he took up residence three or four times a year for about a month at a time. Given the spatial restrictions of Manhattan real estate, th
is was a problem, especially since he slept in my study and his habit of rising late was exacerbated by a resolute adherence to Pacific Standard Time. A light sleeper, he was so unpleasant when awakened before three p.m. that we all tiptoed around until he got up, whereupon he invariably claimed not to have slept a wink.
Arguably worse than his usurpation of my study for a month at a time was his commandeering of the kitchen. I should state for the record that I am not someone who can’t stand people in “my” kitchen. I wouldn’t even have minded particularly if he ate what was in the larder, although the one time in all those years that I asked him to pick up something at the store, he left me the receipt with $1.49 circled, so that I could reimburse him for the bananas. The problem was one of occupation. Once he took over the stove, he was there to stay—on and off—for the next three or four hours, despite the fact that I needed to prepare dinner for my family. It seemed doubly unfair that he should be in my study when I wanted to work and in the kitchen when I wanted to cook, yet like the over-polite Edwardians in The Doubtful Guest, I seemed unable to confront him when my oblique suggestions were neatly deflected.
I would have been happy to cook for Aloysius (that really should have been his name), but he inhabited an alternate culinary universe. Actually, culinary is the wrong word; it implies that what he consumed was food. He is the one person I’ve met who would have lost nothing by being fed through a tube. His day invariably began (nine hours after ours did) with the concoction of a complicated gruel prepared according to a strict rotation schedule. Monday might be amaranth day (which my son hated because of the lingering smell), Tuesday buckwheat, Wednesday millet, and so on. These grains, carefully measured out of dusty plastic bags from the bulk bin, were boiled for thirty to forty minutes while being stirred with a wooden paddle. When the contents had been transferred to a bowl, the scorched pot was half filled with water, the coagulated paddle left afloat, where they would remain until someone in the household became sufficiently disgusted to wash them. Assorted seeds, oils, and powders were then stirred into the mush. When it was finished, it looked and smelled like boiled newspaper. Providing Aloysius with roughly half of his daily caloric intake, his breakfast Oobleck concluded with a dessert of exactly seven berries. He was very insistent that one needed to consume only seven berries to enjoy their full nutritional benefit. It should come as no surprise that a man of average height who thinks seven blueberries constitutes a serving should weigh 120 pounds. The serving size question, about which he felt an almost religious fervor, gave a clue to the modus operandi behind his eating habits: controlled undereating masquerading as an obsession with health. I don’t presume to understand his psychic makeup, but Aloysius had made an art form of living on $9,000 a year since college, and you can’t do that if you eat as much as a normal person. Although he claimed to be writing a screenplay for most of the time he lived with us, the hours not devoted to preparing food seemed to be spent on the phone bullying and wheedling hapless customer service representatives into giving him things for free. Living on practically nothing is a full-time job. In one particular area, though, his obsessive thrift clearly belied his obsession with health: he would routinely consume foodstuffs long after their expiration date, appearance, and/or smell indicated they should have been tossed.
