The Bread and the Knife

by Dawn Drzal

  His second daily foray into the kitchen occurred about an hour after gruel consumption: time to bake his daily quick bread. Baking posed a challenge not only because of the strict grain rotation schedule but also because Aloysius was allergic to yeast and sugar. He often related with grim relish the story of how he had felt his throat closing up the last time he’d had a milkshake (thirty years earlier), and he was certain he would go into anaphylactic shock if he put any sugar in his system. When our small son pressed a few pieces of candy corn into his hand one Halloween, Aloysius stared at his palm as if it held pellets of rat poison. “Wow,” he said, on his way to the bathroom to wash his hands. “Thanks. How about if I just smell it later?” Not that his hypochondria was a secret. He had a Proustian horror of drafts and, like Gorey’s Doubtful Guest, was rarely without a woolen muffler. The first time I met him, at a restaurant in June, I was surprised to see him swathed to the ears, but my fiancé just laughed indulgently and told me that Aloysius viewed air-conditioning as his personal nemesis. Despite the fact that no diva could have protected her throat more assiduously, he was always “coming down” with something, and his nasal ablutions were a frequent topic of conversation.

  An hour or so after the bread came out of the oven, it was time to prepare the evening “meal,” a plain steamed vegetable with either brown rice pasta or barely seasoned protein (tofu, fish) topped with crumbled quick bread for bulk. This hodgepodge was sometimes packed in a Tupperware container, to be consumed in furtive bites outside whatever theater he happened to have gotten discount tickets to, punctuated with sips from the plastic water bottle he filled from our Poland Spring dispenser.

  Since he was also allergic to anything fermented (soy sauce, vinegar, alcohol) and many miscellaneous foods that I now mercifully forget, it was impossible to include him in household meals. I kept a list of the offenders on the side of the refrigerator, but even when I was triumphantly convinced I’d avoided all minefields in that night’s family dinner, he’d look at me with a sad little smile and say something like, “Sorry, today is not a corn day.”

  Finally, after fourteen years, we offered him an ultimatum: a deadline to move out of my study in exchange for the exclusive occupancy of the maid’s room. He turned us down. Although he didn’t come right out and say so, he was clearly holding out for the study, which was larger. When he finally left and we had unrestricted access to our own apartment again, it was hard to believe we had tolerated his presence for so long. It felt like being suddenly cured of a chronic physical condition. We got rid of the sofa bed when we moved … just in case he showed up on the doorstep of our new place.

  Gruel

  ½cup amaranth

  1½cups water

  ¼cup unsweetened almond milk

  no salt

  1 teaspoon flaxseed oil

  1 teaspoon hempseed

  1 scant tablespoon whole milk yogurt, preferably expired

  1 teaspoon whey powder

  1. Combine amaranth, water, and almond milk in a small saucepan.

  2. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cover.

  3. Cook for 30 to 40 minutes, not stirring frequently enough to prevent amaranth from forming a thick crust on the bottom and sides of pan.

  4. Remove from heat. Scrape contents into a bowl and stir in remaining ingredients. Half-fill pot with water and leave in sink.

  Serves: you right if you eat this.

  is for

  Huitlacoche

  After a particularly trying day of working with Josefina Howard on her culinary autobiography, I sometimes turned for solace to David Plante’s Difficult Women, a tripartite memoir of his relationships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer. I felt a perversely soothing schadenfreude at Plante’s horror in accidentally wedging the elderly, drunken Rhys into a toilet bowl; nothing shrank Josefina’s outsized ego like reading of how Plante arrived for a long stay at Greer’s isolated Tuscan farmhouse to hear her bellowing at another guest’s baby, “That’s not the way to use fucking finger paints!” A friend who has been a successful editor for more than fifty years is fond of saying, “Books are like children: you can never do enough for them.” Every time he says it, I mentally replace “books” with “authors,” which is why he has lasted in the business for more than half a century, whereas I left with an anxiety disorder after a decade. And while I wasn’t thinking of Plante as I sneaked the final pages of Josefina’s manuscript into my bag while paramedics strapped her onto a stretcher, it is just the sort of thing he might have written about. Difficult women provoke desperate behavior.

  Josefina was often referred to as “a force of nature,” a phrase that captures the inhuman quality of those willing to flatten entire cities to get what they want. Invariably, such people are more fun to read about than to know. Nevertheless, a woman doesn’t merit the label “difficult” unless her outrageousness is counterbalanced by some hugely positive quality. Josefina’s was her missionary zeal for the cuisine of her adoptive country. Although born in Cuba and raised in Spain, no one was more passionate about the food of Mexico. When she opened Rosa Mexicano on the Upper East Side in 1984, authentic Mexican cooking was all but unknown in New York City, and she was almost single-handedly responsible for introducing the authentic flavors of the country to a group of diners who were hungry for it.

  Seven nights a week for more than fifteen years, Josefina held court from the same table, monitoring the room from a throne-like chair whose carved wooden back rose above her head in a dark crescent, gray hair swept back from her forehead, eyes steely under straight black brows. If she spotted a lapse, she would teleport to correct it, vanishing before your eyes. She did not make the rounds like many owners, visiting the tables of VIPs and regulars; patrons stopped by and paid their respects to her, always addressing her as Mrs. Howard. Those not in the know sometimes called her Rosa, summoning thunderclouds in her face. Worse still, they occasionally had the audacity to suggest that the spelling of the restaurant should be corrected—

  to “Mexicana”—to reflect agreement between the noun and adjective: Rosa’s Mexican restaurant. Josefina would explain with exaggerated courtesy that “Rosa Mexicano” refers to the shade of Mexican pink that embodies the heart of the country: Elsa Schiaparelli’s shocking pink, the pulsing color of bougainvillea, a few degrees hotter than magenta, the hue even of the Mexican taxis. I always suspected the restaurant would be fully booked the next time they called for a reservation.

  One night I slid into the chair opposite her. I was a cookbook editor, and the marketing director had told me to march in there and get Mrs. Howard to sign a contract, which editors and agents had been trying to do for years. Like a lot of powerful people, Josefina had devised a uniform for public life, which she was wearing that first evening we met: a bright, loose-fitting silk shirt over black pants. Only the most stylish women can make the absence of jewelry a statement, and I could almost see the ghost of Mexican silver at her wrists and throat. As we started to talk, Josefina told me she had never found anyone who understood her well enough to tell her story. The last editor had been thrown out on her ear because she hadn’t known who Noël Coward was.

  “Can you imagine?” Josefina barked incredulously, shaking her handsome gray head. “‘Out!’ I said to her. ‘Get out of my restaurant!’ At first, she didn’t believe me, but I was serious.”

  Luckily for me—or, as I thought later, perhaps not—she and I saw eye to eye despite my not knowing Spanish and never having visited Mexico. After years of saying no, she signed a book contract. Perhaps I just caught her at the right time. She was getting on in years, although her ageless face made it impossible to tell exactly how old she was, and woe betide the person who asked her.

  From that evening on, she began to seduce me with food. It was more than an education: it was an indoctrination into the cult of Josefina’s Mexico. It was her spiritual homeland, and she had the gift of communicating its essence precisely because it was not native to her. The closest I can
come to describing the experience is to say it was like falling in love, not with her, but with the country I had never seen, through its food. Even now, after having visited Mexico, I look back on that time as if the country and I had an affair—brief, intense, colorful, full of new flavors and savors and excitements, and then abruptly over. People are always surprised—I am still surprised myself—at the depth of my understanding of Mexican cuisine, its influences and evolution. All of this she managed to convey in about nine months.

  Here is what I remember. Not the pomegranate margaritas, although they were clearly a preoccupation for Martha Stewart when she had Josefina on her show multiple times (I was a little embarrassed for Martha about that). Josefina was quite insulted when people ruined her food by drinking margaritas during the meal. I remember her asking huffily (not to their faces, of course; even she wouldn’t do that), “Would people drink margaritas during a French meal? An Italian one?” I do remember being offered a shot of good tequila followed by a chaser of sangrita, an elegant cylindrical shot glass of pomegranate and bitter orange juice served chilled as an aperitif. This might be followed, in season, by a tiny cup of esquites, young sweet corn kernels barely sautéed in butter and serrano chile and flavored with chopped epazote. Ah yes, those herbs: fresh epazote, hard to find, with its seductively stinky aroma of petroleum and citrus. Sharp, soapy cilantro (which she pronounced see-LAN-tro, with a tender elongation of the first syllable and a rolling of the “r”—she had a smoky, beautiful voice whose rich timbre sometimes vibrated with a mysterious purr). And hoya santa, whose huge leaves smelled like sassafras and black pepper. Even now, crumbling a few dried leaves and stems can call up, like the scent of a faded wedding bouquet, a ghostly parade of exciting dishes from the kitchen. I can see Josefina’s strong, ringless fingers offering me a small tortilla, still warm, rolled around some savory tidbit she wanted me to try. Josefina always wanted me to taste something or other, but she would never offer it on a cold metal fork. It is very intimate to accept food from someone’s fingers, and I remember how gently she handed me those tortillas, as if she were conveying gifts that she didn’t want to bruise. They could be filled with anything—the house’s famous guacamole, made tableside in a molcajete that could have been lifted from the Museum of Natural History—or my favorite dish, Mixiotes de Cordero. These lamb shanks, coated with chiles, garlic, and spice, were wrapped in a tall parchment bundle that would arrive at the table straight from the oven. When the waiter unwrapped it with a flourish, a billow of fragrant steam would envelop your face. Wrapping the meltingly tender shreds of lamb in a tortilla and mopping it in the puddle of pungent juices that had collected in the parchment below was one of the culinary high points of my life.

  I remember the first time I tasted her red, white, and green chiles en nogada, the delicate heat of the chiles offset by the creamy white sauce and punctuated with the astringent burst of pomegranate arils. She introduced me to elaborate, complicated moles and to the bright, sophisticated seafood dishes of Veracruz. One bitter cold evening, when I arrived at the restaurant feeling chilled to the bone and utterly depleted, Josefina put before me a bowl of pozole, the iconic pork and hominy stew. After telling me it was made from pig’s heads and feet, she waited expectantly for me to dig in. I had no choice, but it took only a few delicious bites to banish all thoughts of its dubious origins. By the time I left, I felt atavistically fortified by generations of Mexican women and ready to face life again.

  Josefina’s uncompromising quest to bring new flavors and ingredients to the restaurant brought her into near-constant conflict with her partners, who were more concerned with the bottom line than with authenticity. Her battles with these five men were epic and bloody. In today’s adventurous climate, where a Lower East Side “New Mexican” restaurant can put dried earthworms in a dessert and toasted grasshopper tacos with ant-salt guacamole don’t cause anyone to blink an eye, it is hard to fathom what a struggle it was for her to serve huitlacoche at Rosa Mexicano. Known in English as “corn smut,” huitlacoche is a fungus that causes the ear of corn to swell enormously and turn black, bursting out of the husk. Despite its disgusting appearance, it has a delicious flavor when cooked—delicate and mushroom-like with a sweet hint of corn. The word derives from Nahuatl for “black excrement,” but huitlacoche tastes so heavenly that it is sometimes known as the “excrement of the gods,” an epithet that captures the unique ambivalence aroused by something that tastes so good while looking so repulsive. At Rosa Mexicano, huitlacoche was folded into a crepe with creamy mascarpone and manchego cheese—and always seasoned with epazote, with which Josefina believed it had an almost symbiotic relationship. Although she never won her long-running battle to introduce ants to her customers, she prevailed in creating an ever-evolving menu whose excitement kept them coming back year after year.

  Despite her indomitability, Josefina carried an indefinable aura of tragedy. Even though she was writing an autobiography, she never brought up her past. Only from the final manuscript did I learn that she became a war refugee as a child after her father and grandmother were assassinated by opposing sides in the Spanish Civil War. I’d had no idea of the years of struggle and poverty she and her mother endured, only the bare outlines of which she shared in the manuscript. Saddest of all was the single sentence where she conveyed that one of her sons had died. And yet the ultimate message was that she had worked hard all her life, had her loves, her friends, her successes, her adventures. A remarkably resilient life then—a full life—if not exactly a happy one.

  Josefina wanted her book to capture the magic of Mexico as her restaurant had, but she wasn’t a writer, a limitation compounded by the fact that English was not her native language. She had been recounting anecdotes for so many years that she thought it would be a cinch to transfer them to the page, but she soon discovered that writing and talking are not the same thing. Furthermore, she had waited so long to tell her story that the freight of her ambitions multiplied; over the years, the load of what she wanted to convey had taken on impossible proportions. Writing was agonizing, so it was easier to procrastinate, complain, blame, prevaricate, and create complications. Finally, she hired a friend to help her. Usually, this is a recipe for disaster, but luckily it worked. Unfortunately, Lila Lomeli wrote in Spanish, so we needed to hire a translator. Then there were recipes to be transcribed and tested, because Josefina was also not a chef. She had particularly high aspirations for the book’s appearance, since she had been a professional interior designer before becoming a restaurateur. In addition to agonizing over the photographs and illustrations, she had strong opinions on color, typeface, endpapers. The book was postponed once, missing the Christmas catalog, and then again. I was eight months pregnant by this point, and one day my boss informed me that I had until Friday to transmit the manuscript, or else. I did not want to find out what “or else” meant two weeks before going on maternity leave.

  The book was essentially finished, but Josefina had been holed up at home fussing with the final pages for more than a week. It looked like I would have to go to her apartment to get it. Although she claimed to be ill, I was certain she was only suffering from a severe case of completion anxiety. She didn’t answer when I phoned to say I’d be coming over after work, and it took her a full five minutes to respond to my insistent buzzing on the intercom. When she finally pressed the button, her voice crackled weakly that I couldn’t come up because she wasn’t dressed, but I insisted.

  I was taken aback by the old woman who opened the door. All the color had been leached out of her—not only from her ashen skin but also her flattened hair and rumpled clothes. As I followed her into the stuffy living room, I was surprised by an odor of unwashed linens and something more troubling, an undertone of decay that I would recognize only later in life as a sign of serious illness. While I still believed her illness was psychosomatic, I felt a sharp twinge of fear: this breakdown went far beyond completion anxiety. At the same time, I couldn’t help being thoroughly
disconcerted by her apartment. It wasn’t the considerable mess that bothered me but the utter impersonality of the place. Where were the artifacts from her travels, the mementos and photographs, the rich detritus of a life well lived that Rosa Mexicano had led me to expect? This featureless box could have been a sample unit for a management company, or a fake room in the furniture department at Bloomingdale’s. It made me wonder which was the real Josefina, the stranger who apparently lived here or the one I knew, who presided over the restaurant every night. Was Josefina’s larger-than-life persona a vampire that fed on her private life, leaving only this husk behind?