The Bread and the Knife

by Dawn Drzal

  “Wow,” I said. “Yquem.”

  “Don’t get too excited,” he replied. “It’s not a very good year.”

  He explained that the 1985 vintage went well with foie gras because it lacked some of the vineyard’s characteristic complexity.

  The lighting finally arranged to his satisfaction, he sat down next to me and poured a drop of the yellow-gold wine into a glass, swirled, and sipped. He grimaced and held it out to me. I knew enough after a few dates to take it by the stem.

  “This wine is way too cold,” he said sternly, as if I were somehow to blame for his having stored it in the refrigerator. “We have to wait for it to warm up. Besides, it’s just a baby. It needs at least another ten years.”

  I felt chastised again, as if I were a naughty child too impatient to sit for another decade and wait for the wine to age properly. His denigration of the wine’s vintage, age, and temperature left me utterly unprepared for the shock of that first mouthful, so sublime that tears pricked at my eyes. Sensations and associations flooded through me as I held it on my tongue—honey, yes, and honeysuckle, and the smell of peach cobbler bubbling over in my grandmother’s oven, and a bite of tarte Tatin—grounded by an austere elegance that tamed the sweetness into subservience. I was pierced with a great tenderness for my life, the interconnected world, this man I hardly knew—and a deep longing. And all that was before I swallowed. When I did, the experience of the wine persisted, miraculously intact. This was a bad year?

  “It just goes on and on,” I said wonderingly.

  “That’s the finish,” he responded briskly, but his eyes were still gentle from watching my reaction. As he gave me a little lecture on botrytis, the noble rot that dessicates the Sémillon grapes into such unearthly sweetness, he refilled our glasses and handed me a triangle of toast thickly topped with foie gras. “Now taste it with this.” It was a pairing I had only read about and had been dying to try for years.

  At some point, the lights in the Empire State Building went off, unobserved, and the sky turned the color of stone behind it. The candle flames were nearly invisible in the non-light of almost-morning. The bottle, having performed its magic, was empty. Suddenly self-conscious, we sat up. I adjusted my dress. He smoothed his hair. Wordlessly, he helped me on with my jacket. What was there to say? The people standing awkwardly by the door were not the people on the sofa.

  Hurrying to the subway station, the vicious wind off the Hudson swirled up and around my exposed legs. I felt I had been dropped from a great height and was scurrying, insignificant as an insect, beneath an enormous and uncaring sky. It may seem silly that a glass of wine could be the vehicle for such an experience, but the needle of the sublime, which leaves a hole where it enters and where it emerges, can be threaded with any beauty.

  is for

  Zucchini Blossoms

  Although his plots were measured in square feet rather than acres, my grandfather insisted that he was a farmer, not a gardener. After mulling this over for decades, I finally realized he meant that he was interested not in the act of gardening but in the results, the product, the produce. (Certainly, he never wasted his time on flowers.) He was not self-conscious enough to derive pleasure from performing the actions of preparing the soil, planting, pruning, weeding, and harvesting, like some Edwardian lady in a large hat wielding secateurs. Although it was an avocation and he enjoyed it, much as he liked playing golf or listening to baseball on the radio, he treated gardening like a business. It was natural to him. He had grown up on a farm in southern New Jersey, near Hammonton, the blueberry capital of the country, one of eleven children of Italian immigrants. His earliest memory was of being turned out of bed when he was no more than four years old and sent into the blueberry fields with the rest of the family to pick off an infestation of beetles that had descended during the night. Having been a human pesticide, he was not about to forgo the miracle of chemicals. If it was a question of who was going to eat his vegetables—him or the bugs—it was going to be him. He was equally profligate with fertilizer. There was no such thing as an unfair advantage in the battle against nature. It was like hunting for food as opposed to for sport, even though the days were long gone when a family needed to subsist on what he grew. He was utterly unsentimental about his plants, pruning and thinning them almost sadistically, or so it appeared to us until the new growth sprang forth from the ugly hacks he had made with shears or saw.

  My grandfather’s was the story of a generation: the son of immigrant parents, a printer by trade, he made good by dint of hard work coupled with the lucky breaks provided by World War II and the prosperous years that followed. By the time I knew him, he had two houses, one by the ocean, each with a garden. His tomatoes flourished; his Boston lettuce was baby-tender; but it was zucchini, which flourishes under a thumb far less green than his, that turned into a vegetable plague each summer, inflating under the influence of Miracle-Gro to cartoonish proportions seemingly overnight. Eating the blossoms was a delicious form of birth control; we had to nip the problem in the bud or be buried in a pile of squash from which even my grandmother’s culinary ingenuity could not rescue us.

  Any summer morning in Avalon, New Jersey. I pull on some shorts and hurry outside the moment I wake up. It is exciting and private, the world before sunrise, when the ground is cold beneath my feet and the porch railings drip with salty moisture. No one has breathed this air but me. It has blown across thousands of miles of ocean, straight from Europe. The island is hushed, and if I strain my ears, I can hear the surf, never audible during the day. A laughing gull perched on a nearby telephone pole sends up its eerie dying caw. Then the sun, hot on my cheek, evaporates the mystery. The smell of Barbasol and the sound of running water through the bathroom window signal the imminent appearance of my grandfather. My grandmother is whistling in the kitchen (how unlike my mother she is). A minute later the screen door bangs softly, and I run to the side of the house to help her gather zucchini blossoms in her terrycloth apron before they open. Back inside, the breeze flutters the yellow half-curtains above the kitchen sink as she peers carefully inside each flower to check for unwanted guests, then showers it gently with the black nozzle and lays it on a bed of paper towels. Later that morning, when the blossoms are quite dry, she heats half an inch of Wesson oil in a frying pan and whips up the batter, which is both a heresy and a miracle. This ethereal, inimitable batter, never to be equaled, is a very thin decoction of water and … Bisquick.

  I am standing at her elbow now as she twirls a blossom in the batter and gives it a quick shake. The fritter sizzles as it hits the hot oil, and she waits for delicate bubbles at the periphery to signal it is time for the single turn. Then she waits again for the incomparable gold to appear, a gold like a child’s downy forearm in the sun. Tipped from the spatula onto a bed of more paper towels, most of the fritters never reach the table, disappearing when she turns back to the frying pan.

  To this day, deep into middle age, I have never given up, ordering zucchini blossoms whenever they appear on a menu in their evanescent season. They arrive greasy and sodden, sometimes filled with cheese (lily-gilding) or with the miniature squash still attached, sprouting from the flower like a deformed thumb. Conversely, in a misguided attempt to achieve lightness, the blossoms will have been chopped up, resulting in something light but utterly characterless. But, of course, I am being unfair. No rendition, no matter how exquisite, could deliver the tang of the sea breeze through the screen door, the rustle of my grandfather’s newspaper, the friendly sizzle of the pan, the ever-hopeful gulls shifting from foot to foot on the neighbor’s slanted roof. It is a mystery how a humble fritter, a battered flower, can carry such a freight of sense memory—no, make that love.

  Afterword

  Food continues to surprise me with its infinite adaptability as living metaphor. On a recent trip to Vietnam with a few friends, I got a taste of how it can unite the foreign and the familiar in much the same way it fuses past and present. A monsoon was sweeping the c
oast, but we showed up for our street food tour in Hoi An anyway. Our guide, a young local named Phuoc, wasn’t at the coffee shop where we were supposed to meet at three p.m., and it took another half hour for him to appear after the girl behind the counter called him on his cell phone. Although he tried to look pleasant as he tucked in his rumpled shirt and smoothed his hair, it was pretty clear he thought we were crazy for not canceling like everybody else. The skies had darkened steadily and the rain turned to sheets while we were waiting, but we gamely followed him into the lane, fording the streaming gutters outside the front door. Our misgivings deepened as we left the tourist precincts of the “Old Town” and splashed in silence behind him, our umbrellas nearly useless in the slanting deluge, the streets becoming more dilapidated until the buildings gave way entirely to empty stretches of mud.

  After half an hour ankle-deep in cold rain, blindly following a stranger into no-man’s-land, the tour no longer seemed like such a lark. We stopped to confer and decided to mutiny, but as we turned to announce our intention, we saw him vanish through what appeared to be a solid wall. Scurrying to catch up, we spotted an opening so narrow we had to furl our umbrellas before plunging into the Vietnamese version of Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley. Our Western frames were too wide to permit facing forward, so we edged along obliquely while people stared down from their windows before resuming their conversations above our heads, as though we were tromping through their living rooms, which in some cases we basically were. Phuoc slipped ahead easily through the muddy warren, pausing at each turn for us to catch up. After countless labyrinthine twists, the light abruptly brightened and the roofs fell away, and we burst into a teeming city, buzzing with motorbikes and buses and bicycles. Here, behind the Potemkin Wall of UNESCO tourist stalls and pedestrian malls, was where the workers of Hoi An and their families actually lived.

  Expertly dodging traffic, Phuoc led us to a street vendor stirring a cauldron of what looked like used motor oil. The tiny ceramic cups we were offered held black sesame soup, and Phuoc confided fondly that generations of schoolchildren had been kept “regular” by a daily morning dose from this very stall. In fact, the current vendor had taken over for her father when he turned one hundred. The soup was surprisingly delicious despite its off-putting appearance—smooth and slightly sweet—and miraculously warming. Somewhat fortified, we continued our pilgrimage, stopping in one open-fronted garage to taste a lady’s famous green papaya salad and in a second to sample another’s Cao Lau, the noodle dish unique to Hoi An. Then it was on to a covered alley for rice congee studded with cubes of congealed pig’s blood and chunks of offal. Probably calibrating that our senses needed a rest, Phuoc chose for our next stop an elaborate multistory restaurant-cum-factory producing Hoi An’s specialty: delicately translucent white rose dumplings. A table ringed with slim young girls was turning out small mountains of them, two-inch rounds of rice flour filled with a dime-sized bite of ground pork or shrimp. The proprietress who oversaw production was dressed in head-to-toe leopard Lycra despite her generous proportions, and every time our guide called her “Big Boss,” she squirmed with pleasure and jangled her charm bracelets.

  Drier now, and in a better mood after a plateful of dumplings and some tea, we splashed back into the street. Phuoc pointed out a woman selling fetal duck eggs as we passed her on the curb, not bothering to pause as he asked if anyone was willing to try one. When two of us surprised him by saying yes, he gave his first real grin of the day and suggested we allow the vendor to prepare them for us. Of course we agreed, deciding not to observe the proceedings too closely. There’s a reason eating a fetal duck egg is one of the stunts on Fear Factor, and what the eye doesn’t see, the gorge doesn’t rise over. A few minutes later, my egg was peeled, sauced, and being held out on a large ceramic spoon by the smiling vendor. I opened my mouth, and she popped it in as if I were a finicky toddler. I had no choice but to chew and swallow, but suffice it to say that fetal duck eggs in Hoi An are matured for nineteen to twenty-one days, and embryos begin to develop beaks and feathers at seventeen days. It was a relief a few minutes later to detect the familiar smell of roasting pork and join some teenage girls giggling around roadside braziers as if they were tables at Pinkberry. Although we had been eating for hours, we happily accepted a palate-cleansing kebab on a chopstick.

  We still had one more garage to visit, though, where Phuoc told us we were to learn the art of sucking snails. He was greeted like a member of the family, which perhaps he was, and we were seated on the ubiquitous child-sized plastic chairs. A few minutes later, Phuoc carried over a mounded bowl of oc hut, small dark snails in a sea of red chili sauce. The idea, he said, was to pick them up and suck the meat out of the larger end. If nothing happened—and for us nothing did—you were supposed to suck the pointy end to break the seal and try again. The technique was much trickier than you might expect, and our hands and lips were on fire by the time we finally got the hang of it. Our pleasure in succeeding was offset by the discovery that the large end was covered by a crunchy, keratinous little plug that had to be chewed and swallowed, while the snail meat tasted like mud. At our last stop, we joined a queue of children dancing with impatience as they awaited their after-school snack: individually made fish-shaped waffles, like Japanese taiyaki, redolent of vanilla and stuffed with bean paste or chocolate.

  At the end of the tour, Phuoc shared wistfully that his dream was to see New York City, but for me, going home was depressing. Vietnam’s colors and flavors were so intense they made the city in January seem like a black-and-white movie; every morning I felt like Dorothy waking up in Kansas after clicking her heels in Oz. But lying in bed one day, long after I should have gotten up, in the middle of fantasizing about how to become an expat in Hanoi, I recalled the message of the movie: after running away, Dorothy ends up discovering “there’s no place like home.” Now it hit me why the sesame soup in Hoi An had seemed somehow familiar: in color and purpose, it was identical to the stewed prunes my grandmother had pressed upon me at various times during my youth. I had put up a token fuss because I knew I was supposed to, especially given what they were “for,” but I actually liked their silky black sweetness. How was the age-old Chinese remedy any different from its homely Italian equivalent?

  Food allows us to assimilate what is “foreign” and literally make it part of ourselves. When we swallow something like a fetal duck egg, we signal not only to others but also to ourselves that we are open to new experience. By ingesting a part of the culture that seemed unpalatable or even inedible only moments before, we are accepting an aspect of the people as well. Once you have gotten rid of the “that” in “They eat that?” there is no longer a “they.” Just as profoundly, however, such openness can reveal that the seemingly foreign is simply home in a different guise. One twist of the kaleidoscope, and the sucking snails could be piles of blue crabs on a checked tablecloth in Avalon, the rice congee with pork my grandmother’s Sunday spaghetti sauce crowded with sausage, meatballs, and braciole.

  For Phuoc, the food tour had been merely a visit to the old neighborhood. Hoi An was Kansas for him, which meant New York was Oz. I didn’t have to move to Hanoi to get the color back in my life. I only needed to wake up.

  Acknowledgments

  Heartfelt thanks to Carol Schneider, my “Dear Reader,” who got every nuance and sent me back to the drawing board when she didn’t. No words are adequate to express my gratitude to Wendy Wolf—secret weapon, dearest friend. The keenness of her vorpal blade is matched only by the warmth of her heart, and it will take another lifetime to pay her back. I would also like to express my appreciation for Tony Adamucci, my knight in shining armor, who came to my rescue in a dark time, and for Peg Adamucci, an early reader, sounding board, and lifelong model of how it’s done!

  Thank you to Rosemarie Notoris—my m.i.w.—for telling me to take this road, and for loving me, always; to Bill Adamucci, for support in an awful hour; to Lisa Zeiderman, my Amazon warrior, who fought for me, stuck by me
, and forced me to grow up; to Pat Kennedy and Chris Johannet, for keeping me (relatively) sane; to Elena Lister, for being a true friend; to Jane Furse, for validation—now it’s your turn; to Terry Iacuzzo, who promised me I could, and then told me to get to work; to Ron Burns, for providing me with my own personal writer’s colony on the Upper West Side; and to Hugh Van Dusen, for lighting the path.

  My utmost admiration and appreciation go to my extraordinary agent, Sharon Bowers, living proof that being a great businesswoman and a wonderful human being are not mutually exclusive. From her initial response to the manuscript (understanding such as I’d only dreamed of) to her Herculean persistence in finding the right publisher for it, working with her has been an unmitigated pleasure. Thanks, too, to Chelsey Emmelhainz, who originally acquired and championed the book at Arcade, and to the impressive team there, especially Cal Barksdale, a true editor’s editor; copy editor Katherine Kiger, for her sharp eye and wonderful ear; production editor Jen Houle; and cover designer Erin Seaward-Hiatt.

  Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my son, Andrew—who makes life a joy.