Eating for Beginners Read online

  "Is this halibut ready, do you think?" I asked David, wiping my drenched face with a side towel.

  "What do you think?" he asked calmly, as though we were not surrounded by fire and sweat and there were no hungry people on the other side of the glass-paned door.

  "I don't know!" I shrieked. "I'm a writer!"

  As we both cracked up, I singed all the hair off my right arm reaching behind the halibut pan to a back burner for the pot of collard greens and bacon to go with the grouper I was about to take out of the oven.

  But the halibut did not burn (later that week, when I scorched a piece of bass, David whisked the skin off it in one quick motion, gave me a mischievous look, and said "They'll never know!"). In fact, nothing was burned but the hair on my arm and, into my brain, the phantom image of many, many pieces of cobia lined up on the grill long after the dinner rush was over.

  There was a fluke carpaccio appetizer, with brown butter croutons made to order and lemon parsley gremolata, that I never even attempted to make or plate. David was on fluke. There was also a thirty-minute period when I just slid away from the stove, leaving six pots and four frying pans going and begging for mercy while he took over with an easy, "I'll just get us through this next part." When I went back to the burners, he plated for me so I could catch my breath.

  By the end of the night I was mildly humiliated even though I knew perfectly well that no one expected me to be able to do anything. Walking the two blocks home, I felt as if everything I'd learned in the previous months added up to nothing when it came to actually cooking a meal.

  Then again, there were those irritating crab cakes, of which I made thirty that night. By the time I got to the final two I thought I had the hang of it—the mixing, the molding, the flipping—but at the last minute, watching them sizzle in the pan, I lost my nerve.

  "They're going to break," I half-screeched to David.

  "They do break," he said by way of encouragement, and it was true, I'd seen him break a few himself. But still, my pride was on the line.

  "Well," I said, "I'd rather you break them than I break them. It's your restaurant."

  He gave me a look. "Go ahead. Just do it."

  Exhausted, drenched with sweat, wielding a fish spatula ferociously, I flipped them—one, two. And the restaurant, just for those seconds, became, for the first time, a little bit mine, too. I couldn't handle fish on my own, but with David there I had done okay. I was only half a chef, but then again, that was half more than I'd been at six-thirty that night, back when that first ticket had rolled in.

  Easy Flip Raisin French Toast

  2 eggs

  ½ cup milk cinnamon to taste

  3 tablespoons butter

  4 slices raisin bread

  1. In a low dish, scramble the eggs, milk, and cinnamon.

  2. Heat the butter over medium heat in a heavy frying pan big enough to hold all the slices at once. When the butter is melted, tip the pan to make it cover the entire bottom.

  3. One by one, dip pieces of bread in the egg mixture, flipping each one to make sure it absorbs egg on both sides and all the way through. Place them in the buttered pan and leave them, untouched, for 2–3 minutes or until they have browned nicely.

  4. Flip each slice and fry the other side for an additional 2–3 minutes.

  5. Serve with maple syrup.

  Serves 2 hungry adults or 4 kids for breakfast.

  Not So Easy Flip Crab Cakes

  1 pound fresh crabmeat

  2 eggs

  3 shallots, minced

  ½ cup minced chives, plus any additional herbs you want to add (tarragon, chervil, and parsley are good ones)

  3 tablespoons canola oil

  1. Clean the crab meat thoroughly, sorting it piece by piece to remove any remaining cartilage or shell (even if you're buying it pre-cleaned, it's important to do this).

  2. In a metal bowl, combine the crabmeat, eggs, shallots, chives, and other herbs (by hand is best, though you can use a rubber spatula or a spoon).

  3. Heat the canola oil in a heavy pan over medium heat. When the oil is hot, take small handfuls of the crab mixture and form patties about 2^-3 inches across (any bigger and you'll never get them flipped).

  4. Place the patties in the oil—I recommend just 2 at a time so you have space to get the spatula into the pan—and let them cook for about 5 minutes.

  5. When they are golden brown on the first side, slide your spatula under each one and flip it in one swift motion. Go ahead. Just do it.

  6. Cook the patties on the second side for an additional 5 minutes or so, then remove to a plate and keep warm while you cook the rest of the mixture.

  Serves 4 as an appetizer.

  8. One Fish, Two Fish

  THE FIRST WEEKEND Noah and I spent together, he made pasta with puttanesca sauce—black olives, capers, garlic, anchovies, and a dash of hot red pepper. He also made tea for me one cold afternoon as the light was fading behind the snowy hills outside his house. What struck me was not so much the tea itself as the fact that he had a teapot, which I did not, and which, it seemed to me, meant that he was generous and knew how to gather people around him and take care of them. I didn't think consciously about any of this until much later, but the teapot stuck in my mind for many months, until I had spent enough time with him to see that my interpretation of it had been right. There are few activities Noah loves more than to feed people. He's an instinctive cook, one who never uses recipes and who can, if nothing else is available, whip up a plate of leftovers for dinner that turns a makeshift meal into a banquet. He swears by the principle that cracking an egg over just about anything you happen to have turns it into a delicious dish, which turns out to be true roughly ninety percent of the time. There are some things even an egg can't save.

  That puttanesca was my first lesson in the differences between us. The first meal I ever made for Noah was duck breasts (I bought them already butchered, obviously) with raspberry sauce from a recipe—a very long one—I had cut out of a magazine. I remember clearly every step of making it, from spending practically my entire weekly paycheck on the duck, a food I had never cooked before, to panicking my way through the recipe while Noah was out having drinks with a friend because I was too nervous to have him in the kitchen with me. In the end, it was satisfying in a complicated, showy way—everything Noah's pasta had not been. He wanted to feed me, and I wanted a challenge.

  This was pretty much how things remained in our relationship when it came to food. Along the way, we got married, I taught myself how to cook insanely elaborate Indian food out of a book, we had Jules, and Noah started inventing cocktails (sometimes out of necessity—the apex of his improvisational skills came when he served the wife of a colleague a cosmo made with a pale pink juice I didn't recognize and, after she proclaimed it delicious, told her it was fruit punch from one of Jules's juice boxes). Pasta, large pieces of meat, and salads were Noah's domain. I was in charge of smaller pieces of meat, whole chickens (or any chicken), plus fish and any other weird recipe I cut out of the newspaper or found in a cookbook and wanted to try. Which was how we ended up surmounting one of our toughest challenges to date with our friends David (not Shea, but one of the most appreciative eaters I've ever met) and Steve (one of the best cooks I've ever met).

  We had been introduced to Steve and David just before Jules came along, and the four of us started having dinner frequently, never out, always in. One night at their apartment, about six months after I'd started cooking at applewood, we got into a discussion of the minutiae of kitchen work. By the time it was over, Steve and I had decided we needed to plan a blow-out cooking event involving some over-the-top meal neither of us would have the guts to tackle on our own. Had I not made so many errors and enjoyed my few small triumphs at the restaurant, had I not become accustomed to doing idiotic things in front of people who could really cook, I'm not sure I would ever have agreed to this. But I had come some distance in the last months—if nothing else I had learned how to
fail and move on in the kitchen—and I was game.

  A date was set. A recipe was chosen. The four of us gathered at five P.M. to allow plenty of time for mishaps. Steve and I had chosen Lobster à l'Américaine, misleadingly described simply as "lobster simmered with wine, tomatoes, garlic, and herbs" in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

  I received my copy of this book from my mother on the occasion of my successful execution of Julia's Veal Prince Orloff, a recipe I took from her copy. Veal Prince Orloff involves (I'm just going on memory here) about a thousand different sauces and fillings, plus the roasting, slicing, reconstruction, saucing, and re-baking of a very large veal roast so that it looks as if you've never taken a knife to it. It's the kind of recipe, according to Julia, designed for "the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children's meals, the parent-chauffeur-den mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat."

  Lobster à l'Américaine was also this kind of recipe, so I felt lucky that we were not only servantless and all those other things, but also profoundly unconcerned with Jules's meal because he didn't really want one. Instead, he ate yogurt while Steve and I pondered the torturously long recipe and Noah and David mixed some drinks. We had to cut up the lobsters, clean out their innards, crack the claws, sauté all the meat in its shell, dice carrots, onions, shallots, and garlic, put the vegetables in the pan with the lobster, set the whole mixture on fire with some cognac (whoopee!), add numerous other ingredients, simmer it all, then put it in the oven, take it out, reduce it, add the innards and butter to the pan, simmer it some more, and on and on. Eventually, after all the prep and the cooking, we were supposed to arrange the pieces on a platter and serve them with rice, the making of which sounded mercifully easy, even in Julia's words.

  Where once I might have found just reading this recipe daunting, I now felt eager to start. I had learned to move swiftly through prep work and had seen the results of doing it well night after night at applewood. As for the lobsters themselves, I was emboldened by my night at the fish station. Steve and David had arrived with three live ones that were waiting in a paper bag in our refrigerator. Before we could do any of that cracking, sauteing, or simmering, we had to kill them. I had never done this any other way besides throwing them into a pot of boiling water, but now I looked to Madame Child, who suggested that we "plunge the point of a knife into the head between the eyes, or sever the spinal cord by making a small incision in the back of the shell at the juncture of the chest and the tail." Steve and I rolled up our sleeves and set to work.

  Except that once we had those lobsters out of the bag, neither of us could bear to stick a knife into their heads. (This was years before the movie Julie & Julia catapulted MtAoFC to the top of the bestseller list, but I'm guessing that about ninety-nine percent of the people who bought the book in an excited frenzy after seeing it, determined to cook like Julia, found themselves feeling the same way we did about adapting her lobster-killing method.) The doomed creatures scrabbled around on the kitchen counter as Jules watched curiously and Steve and I squealed and grabbed each other. We tried not to let Noah and David, lounging in the living room with their dry martinis, hear us, but eventually they wandered in to see what the problem was, at which point David immediately took himself off the list of possible lobster killers. He was far too gentle a soul for such considerations, he insisted, and none of us could disagree.

  That left Noah.

  About five years into our marriage, I had realized that one of the primary reasons to have dinner with friends is to learn things about your spouse that would never come up if the two of you were alone. Sometimes it's a political opinion, or a movie preference, or, as once happened to Noah, the discovery that your wife played the part of Rizzo in a summer-camp production of Grease. Sometimes it's the revelation that your husband is a practiced, cold-hearted murderer of crustaceans.

  Noah talks often about his childhood—the sun, the surf, the sand—and had mentioned a few times that he had done a lot of spearfishing. It turned out this had given him a way with thrashing sea life. Now he stepped in for, literally, the kill.

  Putting the three lobsters in our kitchen sink (thankfully deep enough to shield them from view), he picked up a butcher knife. I do not know what, exactly, happened next—though I suspect it was a little less elegant than Julia's method—because I was too busy jumping up and down and squealing with my hands over my ears to pay any attention. But moments later the lobsters were dead and Noah was telling me to stop making so much noise because I was going to scare Jules.

  From there on out, things went smoothly. Noah put Jules to bed—no doubt to dream of claws—while Steve and I sweated and slaved and generally enjoyed ourselves. Every once in a while, as we diced and cracked and got spattered by the contents of the frying pan on the stove, we turned to each other, wiping our brows with dish towels (I longed for some side towels from the restaurant), and asked "Are you okay?" Then we would tackle the next step. To me it was not unlike being at applewood—the heat, the camaraderie, the mutual support. By the time we set our lobster pieces on our platter of rice and carried it to the table, I felt as if we'd been in a foxhole together. The food was amazing, and as the four of us sat around the table chewing and emitting little moans of happiness, David, Steve, and I laughed about our cowardice and toasted Noah. When the evening was over, figuring that Lobster à l'Américaine is the kind of dish you make only once in your life, or at least only once a decade, I didn't give my inability to stab lobsters between the eyes another thought.

  That is, not until a crisp Thursday afternoon a few months later, when I arrived at applewood and Liza pointed to a box in the sink at the back of the room and casually uttered five words: "Want to kill some lobsters?"

  Clearly this was no place for squealing and jumping. And though I was feeling fairly comfortable in the kitchen by then, I was still insecure enough to want to appear much more at home than I felt, so there would be no passing the buck, either.

  "Just kill them by putting a knife in the head?" I asked, my voice squeaking as I tried to sound like a person not utterly reliant on my surfer husband to handle all crustacean emergencies.

  "I usually just rip them apart with my bare hands," Liza said. I studied her face for a few seconds to see if she was joking, but I didn't see even the faintest hint of a smile.

  I laughed anyway, probably because realizing she was serious made me nervous, and she gave me the odd look I deserved. Then I went to the back of the kitchen, looked at the dozen squirming lobsters in their wet box, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and tore them apart.

  First I ripped off their claws, then their tails. The tails thrashed after they were removed, flexing back and forth as the nerves shuddered to a stop. The antennae on the heads twitched. And I did nothing. I didn't jump, or squeal, or even feel bad. Instead, I set aside the bodies for later use and took the oblong stainless steel pan I had placed the tails and claws in (called a hotel pan for reasons I never did figure out) to Liza, who dumped them in a pot of boiling water on the stove.

  Something had happened to me while I wasn't paying attention. I had found peace and solace in chopping two crates of parsnips or shelling ten pounds of peas, tasks I would previously have considered tiresome, and now I had found a boldness (or maybe a viciousness) in the kitchen that surprised me. The learning curve, at least the first one, was flattening out.

  Which was why, when David asked me at five that afternoon if I wanted to work fish again, I said yes, and then kept saying yes. I had developed a moderate case of the kind of cockiness Bill Buford suffered from just before getting temporarily fired—demoted to "the salt-and-pepper guy," no less—from the line at Babbo for cooking two pieces of meat incorrectly.

  I spent the next few weeks at the fish station, which became my regular post, and while I was never threatened with firing—this being applewood, not Bab
bo, and David being David rather than Mario Batali, facts for which I was unendingly grateful—I felt as if I was going backwards. The more I thought I knew, the less I was actually able to do. No matter what I remembered from one night to the next, I always forgot something else: to add salt, to add stock instead of water, how many gnocchi were in an appetizer. One night I consistently had the flame too high under the fish pans; the next night I got that flame right but let numerous pots of sides go dry on the stove. I forgot to warm soup four times in one night, then batted a thousand on soup the next night while repeatedly forgetting to warm up the nage for a sea bass dish (same basic process, different liquid, so what was my problem?).

  After David showed me how to press down on pieces of fish with skin after putting them in the pan because otherwise the protein seized up and made the fish buckle, which prevented the skin from crisping, I remembered to do it with the bass but never the arctic char, the snapper, or anything else. I forgot things during dinner service and during prep, too. Once, after taking a few weeks off to write, I was making an ice bath in a big metal bowl for cooling blanched vegetables so they wouldn't lose their color, something we did almost every day. I went downstairs to the ice machine and filled the bowl with ice, then carried it back to the kitchen and stood looking at it idiotically, trying to remember what the second ingredient was, as moisture condensed on the outside of the bowl and dripped onto my apron. Seeing my blank expression, David took the bowl out of my hands and half-filled it with water at the sink.