The Bread and the Knife

by Dawn Drzal

  I thought I was safe as I brought out the cheese course, having selected three very nice specimens from Zabar’s and brought them properly to room temperature. So I was taken by surprise when my future father-in-law looked me in the eye and said in a conversational tone, “You know, Dawn, with all the hundreds of cheeses in the world, it’s a mystery to me why anyone would choose to serve Morbier.” One of the many invaluable lessons in humility I had not yet learned was how to swallow a rebuke with good grace. I blush to say that I could hardly keep the triumph out of my voice when I replied, “I couldn’t agree with you more. In fact, I only chose it because you served it to me at our last dinner together.” It was an ill-advised coda to an injudicious meal and left a bitter taste unmitigated by my flawless poached pears.

  is for

  Rosemary

  Rome at the height of the tourist season is not the place to run out of money. In this era of credit cards and ATMs, it may seem quaint even to talk of running out of money while traveling, but in the 1980s my boyfriend and I used traveler’s checks, and suddenly there weren’t any left. We had been running short for some time, but on the train to Roma Termini we discovered that each of us had thought the other was carrying our emergency fund, now spent. We came to this realization on a Saturday, and our plane was to leave on Monday afternoon. Even if we had been willing to cave in and ask his parents to wire money, the American Express offices were closed. It is not, however, much of an exaggeration to say that we would rather have died than admit we couldn’t do it on our own. Counting up our last remaining lire and the few dollars and coins we had left in our wallets from the US, we realized we couldn’t afford even the cheap hotel room we had reserved.

  When we explained our situation to the clerk at the information desk, he looked at us with amused pity and handed over a list of pensioni near the train station. We began making phone calls. Over and over we were turned down even before we’d finished our broken Italian question, often with laughter, as if it were truly risible that anyone would expect to find a vacancy for the same night in Rome in the middle of August. I started to imagine what it would be like to sleep on a bench in the station when, near the bottom of the list, mirabile dictu, we found a room. The woman on the line said in barely intelligible English that her son would come and get us because we would have difficulty finding the place ourselves.

  The Port Authority and Penn Station had taught me that it is never a good idea to stand still for too long in a place designed for passing through. Too many people make a living by preying upon the lost and confused. As we stood waiting, keeping a firm grip on our bags, I felt we were being circled by sharks. I couldn’t spot them because of their protective coloration, but I knew they were there, and I sensed that the circles were getting smaller as the minutes passed. After about an hour, the bench began to look like an awful possibility. We waved off a paunchy disheveled man in a graying wifebeater, only to discover he was the proprietor’s son. Too uninterested to be offended, he motioned with his cigarette for us to follow him.

  Dragging our bags down grimy streets, we followed him until we arrived at a derelict building. Then we understood why she had sent him. Even as desperate as we were, we might have reconsidered staying there, but with an unexpectedly deft movement, he hustled us over the threshold and up a dirty staircase, huffing close behind with a slap of rubber slippers in a cloud of cigarette smoke. At a landing three flights up, he elbowed past and unlocked a door. We trailed reluctantly with our bags as he shuffled down a dark hall, past a lace-curtained doorway illuminated by the blue flicker of a television. At the end of the corridor, he pushed open the door to a room from a nightmare—penitentiary or psych ward—cement floor with a metal drain in the middle, two sprung cots sloppily made up with yellow-stained sheets, and a sickly reek of disinfectant that intensified rather than dissipated during the two awful days we spent there. We sat on the edge of the cots and looked at each other, but there was no time to wallow. We needed to go in search of food.

  Neither of us had had quite enough to eat for the past several days, and nothing since coffee and a cornetto that morning, and I was about as hungry as I’d ever been or thought it was possible to be. About that I was quite wrong. Irritability, a painfully hollow stomach, and a headache are only the first stages of hunger. On a Saturday afternoon in August, whatever stores we might find would soon be closed. A few blocks away, we were lucky to come upon an alimentaria just locking up and begged the proprietor to let us grab a head of wilted lettuce, a hard, greenish tomato, and a plastic package of unnaturally pink ham. Back in the room, we prepared to make one of our “Starving Chef’s Salads.” We unpacked the soft blue plastic dish tub we had been using for this purpose since money got seriously tight. Inside it were wrapped a bottle of red vinegar and one of cheap, acrid rapeseed oil. Although rapeseed was rechristened “canola” decades later, after the invention of a de-bittering process, our bottle bore the smell of its other use: the lubrication of steam engines. It galled me that we did not have the few extra lire to buy the inexpensive olive oil that might have rendered our salads edible. This one was a particularly poor specimen and left us almost as famished as before. Even calling up the smell of rancid oil and perfumed hotel soap that permeated that soft plastic tub—what’s more, recalling the hunger that made me eat what was in it anyway—makes me gag. There is a fine line between hunger and nausea, which are as close as love and hate.

  The lace-curtained door was open for the first time next morning, and as we passed on our way out, the mama dragged her eyes away from the television set to berate us for eating in our room—she seemed to have a terror of vermin—and insisted that either our food-related items went or we did. I was not sorry to see the tub go, but we couldn’t afford a restaurant meal, and since it was Sunday all the food stores from which we might have assembled a meager picnic were closed. We began wandering through the back streets in search of something, anything, to eat, but the spirit of commerce was not alive in Rome in August in the 1980s. Again and again, we saw the sign CHIUSO until I came to loathe the word, as I do to this day. It recalls to me blistering heat, an aching head, irritability verging on panic, and a hunger so intense it had turned to pain. Hours went by. We argued about what direction to go in and whether or not to sit and rest, but stopping would be like sinking down into a snow bank when you are freezing to death. It was late afternoon in a neighborhood even more ghostly and deserted than the others, when we caught a whiff of something, something tantalizing—roasting meat, hot fat. It struck a deep, primal chord in me, and I started to run, my boyfriend close behind. What was that delicious herb—sage? We rounded a corner, and there before us was the steamy window of a rosticceria, full of plump golden chickens turning slowly on spits like something out of “The Little Match Girl.” It was—APERTO. Could it be? It was like a mirage in the desert, if mirages wafted out billows of delirious smells. We rushed through the door, our usual shyness swept aside by hunger. Quanto costa questo? The answer was a sum miraculously small even by our pauper’s standards, and we bore away our prize to the lip of a dry fountain, where we tore into it with our hands. Redolent of rosemary, its skin deliciously crisp, its flesh meltingly soft, the chicken tasted like—camphor, like pine resin, no, worse—like Pear’s soap. During the hours on the spit, the rosemary branches stuffing the bird’s cavity had mingled with the juices and the fat and turned it into a chicken-shaped room freshener. It smelled divine and was as inedible as incense. I will never forget the despair of that first bite, which I forced myself to keep in my mouth. My brain and my stomach waged an inner battle. I fought my gag reflex. To spit it out, to admit it was inedible, would be to condemn myself to the rest of a day and an entire night of starvation. But to swallow seemed physically impossible. Thinking back, that long moment reminds me of what seems like the seminal scene of my early childhood: flanked at the kitchen table between my warring parents, holding in my mouth a bite of something I had just tasted and not liked. My mother shou
ting “Swallow it!” while my father, with equal volume, countered “Spit it out!” my head going helplessly back and forth, as at a tennis match, paralyzed about what to do. In the end, my mother always won. Perhaps that was why I was able to force down that first bite. My eyes filled with tears as I met my boyfriend’s gaze. For both of us, self-preservation was stronger than the gag reflex. As we got closer to the cavity, the vile resinous taste grew stronger. We carried the half-eaten chicken back to the shop, which was, conveniently, chiuso. Did they, the only bad cooks in Italy, turn out the lights when they saw us returning? Defeated, we returned to the fountain, removed a bush’s worth of rosemary from the cavity of the chicken, and finished it.

  Twenty-four hours later, having eaten nothing else, we got on a plane to Boston. In the hours before we boarded, I had gone far beyond pain, irritability, and light-headedness. My metabolism had been thrown into a perverse sort of overdrive and begun burning up muscle now that the stores of fat were gone. I could actually see and feel myself getting thinner by the hour. No one who has ever starved, if even for a day or two, will ever revile safe and edible food of any kind, even if it is served on an airplane. It would be wrong to say I felt gratitude as the plastic tray was set before me. I was overwhelmed instead with a sense of the kindness of food, as if it were something sentient, with agency and my best wishes at heart.

  I am glad to have been that hungry once, although it is not an experience I would willingly repeat. It cured me of the spoiled arrogance of disparaging perfectly good food that passes for refinement in some circles, as if having ever-so-rarefied tastes (sometimes masquerading as “intolerances”) makes you a superior human being, a sort of princess-who-won’t-eat-the-pea. But I still can’t stomach rosemary.

  is for

  Stuffing

  Whenever someone calls my Stromboli Stuffing “dressing,” I have to stifle the urge to burst out laughing. Dressing is far too genteel a word for this irresistible but decidedly unrefined amalgam of white bread, Italian sausage, boiled ham, onions, garlic, butter, eggs, and mozzarella cheese. Technically, Stromboli Stuffing may be a “dressing,” since it is baked outside the bird, but spiritually it is stuffing.

  Stromboli Stuffing was invented by my stepfather, a man whose operative word was “more.” There may be other recipes in existence like this one, but I can confidently say he never opened a cookbook in his life. So if someone else did come up with essentially the same thing, the discovery parallels the simultaneous invention of calculus by Leibniz and Newton. The dish expressed the man, who like all of us had the virtues of his vices. Excessive, irresponsible, and self-indulgent, he could also be—I must admit—a hell of a lot of fun. What’s brilliant about Stromboli Stuffing is that, like my stepfather, it is pure id. No celery, no chicken stock, no herbs: nothing dutiful, healthy, or adult. While not a recipe for a successful life, it produced a great recipe for stuffing.

  You can tell that Stromboli Stuffing is a real dish, an organic entity possessing integrity rather than just a cheap spinoff, because it resists all attempts to tart it up and make it into something it’s not. Every time I tried to “upgrade” the ingredients—using prosciutto instead of supermarket boiled ham or fresh whole milk mozzarella instead of the eight-ounce bag of semi-skim shredded stuff—the results were disastrous. The prosciutto curled up dry at the edges; the mozzarella stretched into foot-long strings. This stuffing is what it is and wears its origins proudly.

  Stromboli Stuffing debuted for me in 2001, in the Cuban mahogany–paneled dining room of a sprawling Riverside Drive apartment that my husband and I had just renovated. My stepfather had told me how to make it over the phone that afternoon.

  “Dawn, this stuffing is di-vine,” pronounced my mother-in-law. “What’s in it?” Conversation around the nineteenth-century dining table ceased. Scanning the expectant faces of the distinguished guests beneath the Montgolfier chandelier, I made my decision.

  “You don’t want to know,” I replied.

  Last year, it was my contribution to a friend’s potluck Thanksgiving. As the guests tucked in, the expected and always gratifying murmurs of appreciation began. What is this? What’s in it? Thinking the name would be self-explanatory, I said it was called Stromboli Stuffing.

  “Oh, Stromboli, like the island? We were just in Stromboli!” exclaimed one couple.

  “No, Strom-bo-li, like the sandwich,” I said.

  Someone at the other end of the long table half overheard and piped up. “Stromboli, like the volcano?”

  “No, Strom-bo-li, like the sandwich!” I sounded like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.

  As I began to explain that the Stromboli sandwich is a rolled construction of dough filled with meats and cheese and baked in a pizza oven, it became clear that the name wasn’t self-explanatory at all. These New Yorkers had never heard of a Stromboli sandwich. (Nor, they assured me, had the denizens of Stromboli.) The Stromboli sandwich, it turns out, is a Philadelphia specialty, a fact I had to leave Philadelphia to discover.

  My stepfather is gone—along with the apartment and everyone in it—but the stuffing remains. It’s humbling to realize that, despite all our strivings, we have no idea what will survive us. My stepfather was not the sort of man to give much thought to what his legacy would be, but I imagine he would be surprised to discover it was a stuffing recipe. Lest this sound mocking, consider Brillat-Savarin’s famous dictum, “The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.” How many of us can say we achieved that?

  In the spirit of Thanksgiving, the recipe follows. Just consider your audience before you share what’s in it.

  Stromboli Stuffing

  Obviously, the recipe did not come to me looking like this. It was refined orally over a period of years in harassed (me) but affectionate (him) Thanksgiving phone calls between New York and Florida. It took a long time to get it right, but here is the definitive 2006 version.

  ½ loaf Wonder Bread or similar white bread, torn into bite-sized pieces

  1½ huge Vidalia onions, diced

  1½ sticks unsalted butter

  5 or 6 large cloves garlic, minced

  1 pound sweet Italian sausage, removed from casing

  ½ pound spicy Italian sausage, removed from casing

  2 eggs

  ½ pound boiled ham, torn into bite-sized pieces

  8 ounces (bagged) part-skim shredded mozzarella

  1. Preheat oven to 400°F. (Since you will probably be making other things on Thanksgiving, 25° in either direction will not make any difference.)

  2. Put bread in bowl large enough to hold all ingredients.

  3. Melt 1¼ sticks butter in extra-large skillet over medium-high heat. Sauté onions until golden.

  4. Add garlic and sauté for an additional minute or two until golden.

  5. Pour onions, garlic, and butter over bread.

  6. Wipe out the pan. Add remaining ¼ stick butter and melt over medium-high heat. Add sweet and spicy sausage and cook through (don’t overcook; the stuffing will bake for an additional 15 minutes). Set aside.

  7. Add two eggs to bread mixture in bowl. Mix with hands, preferably, or wooden spoon if you must.

  8. Add boiled ham and mozzarella to bread mixture. Mix.

  9. Add sausage and mix. If stuffing is not recognizable as stuffing (i.e., if it appears to be all meat and no bread), add a bit more torn bread. Err on the side of moistness.

  10. Spoon mixture into a 9 × 13" Pyrex baking dish. (The stuffing can be made ahead to this point, covered, and refrigerated for up to 24 hours. Bring to room temperature before baking.) Bake approximately 15 minutes or until lightly browned at edges.

  is for

  Tarte Tatin

  With surprisingly few exceptions, people who like to spend time in the kitchen fall into one of two camps: cooks or bakers. It is as rare to be equally at home with both activities as it is to be truly ambidextrous. Partly it’s a matter of temperament, which is why cooks tend to be fri
ends with other cooks and bakers with bakers. To make a gross generalization that nevertheless holds a nugget of truth: bakers are rule-followers and cooks are rebels. (Bread bakers are a spiritual breed who take their instructions from a higher authority.) More accurately, bakers get pleasure out of following instructions to achieve a precise result, whereas cooks consider it a necessary evil. But the differences go deeper. Why is it that I, as a cook rather than a baker, can calmly survey a five-page recipe for boeuf bourguignon but break out in a cold sweat when considering one of the same length for a marjolaine? Because baking is about trying to approach an ideal of perfection: you can only fail or succeed. An activity where perfection is the minimum is not my idea of fun. I get enough of that from my own superego without looking for it in the kitchen. When it comes to cooking, a dish can diverge from the recipe without necessarily being worse. It might even be better! This is true for bakers only when they become so expert at making the same thing after years of practice that they can attempt a tiny alteration. Cooks can experiment freely from the beginning. (The exception to my little rule is the French, temperamentally a nation of bakers, who speak of a dish’s being “correct.”)

  For me, the experience of cooking is one of excitement, whereas that of baking is one of anxiety. Baking is all about the outcome; cooking is about the process. And you get to watch it happen. On the stove, for example, you can observe as mushrooms brown in a skillet or a sauce thickens in a pan. You are free to open the oven door to see how a roast is doing without being afraid it will collapse. You can taste while you are going along without fear of contracting salmonella from raw egg.